Content Standards and Benchmarks

Content standards are a guide or outline that tells a teacher what their children need to learn and master. There are areas that these children need to be able to master in such as language, math, history, and science. I know that in NC they strive for student excellence and want the children of our state to catch up to other states and countries. We have teams of professionals that link together to come up with end product for the children to complete accordingly.

Benchmarks help us to see which milestone our children have completed. In completing a standard, you must take it step by step. If you are wanting your children to add three digit numbers, you must see if they have mastered adding two digit numbers first.

To see if these standards and benchmarks have been met, teachers can do assessments in the classroom as well as test depending upon the age.

It is important that when teachers are planning their lessons they know what type of children they are dealing with. They need to figure out who are their hands on learners, visual learners and audio learners. i think knowing each child's strength and weakness as well as their interest are three of the most important things to learn about them. I say this because if you can play on strengths to improve their weaknesses by incorporating their interest that will make it easier for the child to grasp the concept that the teacher is wanting them to learn. In turn they will pass benchmarks and surpass the content standards.

People learn in very different ways. It is important that teachers know all of their students background information so they will know how to teach them. If your students have auditory problems or vision problems it can affect how they learn greatly. The process of learning is to receive information. You receive information by either seeing, feeling, or hearing it. After you  figure out the basis of the information that you are receiving you have to make a connection with it with something that you are already familiar with. If you are a student in class and your teacher is teaching three digit addition, you will have to connect your prior knowledge of using the same rules from the two digit addition. Then once you make the connection, you can apply it.

Adapting instruction is very important because you want to make sure all of your students are successful. So many children are overlooked because they may not pick up material as fast or they may have a disability but it is up to the teachers to do right by them. Adapting instruction is also important because it allows you to know what type of modifications need to be met for your student to continue to be successful.
        Three components of a good assessment are individual-referenced, norm-referenced, and criterion-referenced. Individual-referenced are assessments when a teacher compares their previous work to their own work to see what progress they have made. The norm-referenced assessment is standardized test. It is a test that is designed upon what a bunch of people feel each child should know. Lastly, there is a criterion-referenced assessment. The teach may come up with objectives for their lesson plan and then they see whether the child has mastered their objective.

One of the instruction cycles is labeled as, “Intended Instructional Outcomes”. This is the time that the teacher will discover what the standards are for a certain subject that needs to be taught. She will have it figured out about what they need to know and about how she wants to teach them. The second stage of “planning” the teacher should begin getting materials together for lesson plans that she wants to create. While she is in this stage of planning she also must know how she plans to assess these children on what she has just planned for them to learn. The third stage is the “assessment” stage. This is when the teacher will pick a type of assessment to see what the children have learned throughout this lesson.
        The curriculum is a guide of what the teacher will teach the children and how she is going to assess them will also guide her on how she will teach them. When a teacher is planning their lesson plan, she should give it a topic that comes from the curriculum. They will simply give it a name that helps children to have an inquiring mind. If you have to teach them about the solar system you could call it a “Journey to Outer Space”.