Your Approach to Teaching Your Standards

Welcome to the All Star Planning Podcast! In our first episode, I’m talking about your approach to teaching your standards. Every teacher deals with their standards differently. I started out really stressed and overwhelmed by my standards. I felt like I didn’t know how to read my standards. Nobody ever taught me! All of the codes were confusing! Science standards, chemistry standards, interdisciplinary standards – I couldn’t keep up!

Because my student teaching experience was in a great school I simply copied what I learned when I had my own classroom. I was teaching in a school, essentially by myself. I was the only chemistry teacher there, so I couldn’t bounce ideas off of anybody. It eventually caught up with me. When I felt like I was drowning in my lesson plans I decided to go back to the basics and take a really hard look at how I was teaching my standards. In a moment of frustration, I took a scissor to my standards and chopped them up into what felt like a million pieces.

And that crazed moment gave me SO much clarity. I looked at my standards as a giant to do list. My standards became my goal, and in that my friends! I learned to love my standards once I rearranged them and made them my own.