Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dragonwriter 3053 days ago
> The standards are difficult to turn into lesson plans

That people can say that with a straight face indicated to me that we have a real problem in teacher education [0]. The standards you link may be different than what is addressed in lesson plans that have been handed down with only incremental modification for decades, but nothing about them seems to difficult to develop a year-long lesson plan that incorporates then.

> They will never have extended reading time in class.

Which is hard to blame on the standard you post, since you almost certainly cannot properly assess CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.4.A without it.

[0] and, to be fair, also in allocating work time and pay for the one-time effort of initial curriculum development to support the new standards; the effort is clearly different than adapting existing lesson plans to incremental changes to legacy standards.

2 comments

It's not that hard to develop lessons that meet the standards. It is time consuming and typically not paid for, teachers are expected to do it on their own time.

My state adopted new social studies standards last year and will require that they be taught in all grade levels as of next year. They allowed time for phasing them in due in part to the knowledge that there is no money behind redoing the lessons that teachers will need to develop and also no money for curriculum purchases to support it. Last weekend my wife went to a training on the new standard which we paid for out of our own pocket as one example.

> That people can say that with a straight face indicated to me that we have a real problem in teacher education [0]. The standards you link may be different than what is addressed in lesson plans that have been handed down with only incremental modification for decades, but nothing about them seems to difficult to develop a year-long lesson plan that incorporates then.

The problem isn't translating a single standard into a single lesson or set of lessons, it's putting three sets of reading standards, a writing standard, a speaking & listening standard, and a language standard into a coherent, interesting curriculum. It's not impossible, but it's a lot to expect from, say, a small group of first grade teachers.