Teachers, what is the connection between unpacked common core standards and learner-centered teaching? How can learning how to unpack standards increase your effectiveness as a student-centered teacher? Read below to see how learning to unpack the standards radically empowered my inquiry-based classroom.
A quick story: before I learned to unpack standards
When I started teaching second grade 10 years ago, I’ll be honest with you: I was lost. There was a math curriculum to learn and a (to me!) complicated reading program to ingest. Beyond that, there was no curriculum for social studies, socio-emotional development, phonics/word study or science. The temptation was there: let’s just lean on what we have and ehhh squeak by on the other subjects with occasional projects.
The problem: I wholly disagreed with the reading program as a match for the students in front of me
The problem: I wholly disagreed with the reading program as a match for the students in front of me. At the time I worked at a school that is 99.6% Latino with a high percentage of families who were first and second generation immigrants. The curriculum had a unit about camping in the forest and featured mostly light-skinned children and it just didn’t connect to the southside of Chicago 8 and 9 year olds in my class.
My teaching after unpacked standards
Luckily for me, I had a teacher bestie who was generous enough to teach me the ins and outs of how to unpack standards. Better yet, she showed me how to use unpacked standards to plan and differentiate my teaching. It was like getting a second masters just by working alongside a brilliant mind (10/10 recommend.)
Pretty soon, I was drawing connections across subjects’ standards and creating cross-curricular curriculum that was customized to my students. Instead of reading about camping, we conducted research about local changemakers in our southside Chicago community. We connected their work to more well-known Latinx heroes like Cesar Chavez (our school’s namesake) and Dolores Huerta, to name a few.
Students were reading, analyzing texts and writing – all WHILE learning social studies and making personal connections to their personal and familial identities. Can we talk about classroom magic? Not only were my students more interested and engaged, I felt so much more empowered as their teacher.
“Not only were my students more interested and engaged, I felt so much more empowered as their teacher.“
Unpacked Standards: your key to cross-curricular learning
Here’s how the flow chart goes. With a scripted curriculum, someone else has taken the standards from one area: math, reading, phonics, etc and hopefully has distributed them throughout the year. In other words, they used the standards to create a scope and sequence for that one subject.
If you don’t follow that scope and sequence – if you “mess” with the curriculum – then you stand a chance of not getting to all the standards that year. That’s not good and it’s right to have some healthy “better not do that…” feelings about it.
Cross-curricular teaching benefits
Once you learn to unpack standards, you OWN them and can sequence and group them as you see fit. Because you know exactly what your students need to learn during the year, you can craft cross-curricular units of study that are laser-focused on the standards AND match your students’ identities and interests. No longer addressing just one standard at a time, you become an incredibly efficient and effective teacher who can target multiple goals from across subjects.
No longer addressing just one standard at a time, you become an incredibly efficient and effective teacher who can target multiple goals from across subjects.
How does this help you as an educator? The benefits of learning how to unpack standards are many, but here are some that I appreciate most:
- Increased flexibility: Are your students suddenly all talking about water conservation? Pivot your non-fiction writing and reading unit to focus on that! Has a student in your class recently broken a bone and the class is obsessed with their cast? You are a standards all-star and can easily craft a mini-inquiry into accessibility with a writing lesson on writing care notes/letters to a friend.
- Cross curricular teaching is brain-friendly: Your students don’t think in siloed subject matters. When it’s math time, they don’t suddenly stop thinking about the morning’s read-aloud. Teaching cross-curricularly works WITH their brains and encourages their natural ability to make links.
- You will feel and sound like more of an authority – because you will be. Nobody really wants an expert in a curriculum – they want an expert teacher. When you design your cross-curricular units from the ground up, you immediately feel more ownership. You can share about the students’ learning path.
- Cross-curricular teaching is just honestly more fun! OK, so this one is obviously my opinion, but hear me out. Teaching is a lot of work no matter how you slice it. I would rather invest my effort into creating units of inquiry that are fascinating to me and my students. I thrive on learning new things, and I believe kids can tell when I’m genuinely interested in what we’re learning.
Your unpacking standards next steps
Wondering how to unpack standards? Make sure to check out my other blog post, “5 Easy Steps to Unpacking Standards for ELA” for a simple deconstructing standards protocol that will work for all learning targets. It covers how to deconstruct standards in a way that will make unit planning a cinch the next time around.
Check out this blog post about how I used Amanda Gorman poems to create cross curricular mini units!
Read more from Lit by Learning!
Check out these other blog posts!
- See how I put unpacked standards into action with this peek into a 1st Grade Storytelling Unit!
- Read about Hexagonal Thinking: an ideal strategy for making cross-curricular connections!
- Read more about how to unpack standards here!
