Yes, it’s time to talk about recurring standards. You know, those standards that come up again, and again… And again. How exactly should they be handled?
Well there’s two ways this happens. You have standards that put on different hats and are explicitly taught in multiple contexts. Or you have more broad standards that you have to distinguish and separate on your own. Either way, recurring standards are a pain to deal with.
Specific Standards that are Very Similar
The first is that the same concept comes up a bunch of times in your standards. For me in chemistry, that’s the concept of positive and negative attraction. It comes up a whopping nine times in my course! So I teach it, at minimum nine times (but usually a few more than that due to reteaching.)
Broad Standards that are Taught All Year
The second way is a super broad and vague standard that has to be broken down into multiple parts, or be progressively taught. This means, you’d teach the easy part of the standard and consistently upgrade the rigor as the school year goes on. You’d want this standard to be integrated into multiple units.
Recognizing Recurring Standards
This may not seem like news, but when you recognize that you have recurring standards (unlike me) you can have better tools to deal with them. When I teach my recurring charge attraction standard, I make sure to reference the other times that the kids have seen this standard. In my classroom, we code the lessons so they can easily be referred to. In recognizing recurring standards, I can direct my students to old lessons where they’ve seen the concept before.
To me, the most important thing is being aware of the recurring standards. When that happens you’re already 90% of the way there.
Get a copy of the free standard sorting pages and use them to pick out your recurring standards.
