While taking classes in the Curriculum and Instruction program at California State University of Bakersfield, I have realized the fundamentals of our state standards. I have had the opportunity to locate, dissect, and apply the standards. This has helped me in my teaching career by allowing me to teach my grade level standards in an effective way. Although I feel pretty confident in my knowledge of the sixth grade ELA standards, I’d like to explore where students learned the various prerequisites to fully understand the specific standards at hand. This will help me backtrack and pick up where my students are lacking in their skills.
For the first part of my project, I will work with the sixth grade California Content Standard 2.3 for Reading Comprehension, “connect and clarify main ideas by identifying their relationships to other sources” and backwards map this standard to kindergarten. I plan on using the California Department of Education website to determine when the specific standard was introduced and how it was build on at each grade level. I will also include research on why backward mapping is essential in curriculum planning.
For my project I will be using a program called Edusoft. With this program I can track data for my students. I plan on tracking my five lowest achieving students in the above stated reading standard. With the use of Edusoft I will track how well my students have done on this standards over their school career. This will help me determine what type of re-teaching is necessary to get these students up to grade level on this standard. I will include lessons that will help these students reach competency in the standard.
The second part of my project will be to create assessments to show competency in the above stated reading standard. I will create a separate assessment for this reading standard at each grade level, kindergarten through sixth. I understand that this standard will be somewhat different in each grade level, but the foundation will be the same. While creating these assessments, I will address which level of Bloom’s taxonomy would be appropriate at each grade level. Since many of my students fall into the EL category, I will include strategies that will accommodate them in learning this standard.
These assessments will be examples of portfolio assignments that could follow the student from grade level to grade level to show growth in specific content areas. The assignments that I suggest be included in these portfolios will help teachers at each current grade level determine their students’ proficiency in the standard. They will also give the teachers in the next grade the advantage of having a physical work samples. These samples will help the teachers know where the students in the class are lacking knowledge and give a general consensus of where to start teaching.