Education is being pushed to become and more data driven, instead of a teacher’s hunch that something needs to be changed it needs to be data that makes the decisions now. One of the most important pieces of data a teacher can use is achievement data. Now I am not talking about high-stakes testing, but more about day to day lesson and assessments. Through the use of state or standardized data points we can build a much more meaningful data set. This data set can give a teacher a fair bit of insight into what is going with student learning. Most states and education bodies have already built standardized learning standards or targets which can be fairly easily utilized to be a solid data set of student learning and achievement.

The process begins by going through your lesson plan and determining the major concepts that you are trying to teach your students this should be concepts and/or skills. Your goal is determine what the outcome of the lessons should be done with the lesson. Since I am CTE teacher, I tend to focus on skills, but I also cover a large number of conceptual topics as well. So for a lesson I tend to mix these topics when looking for the standards to tie to. Next I go through my state standards. I look for the concepts and skills that tie most closely in both description and practicality. In this I mean those standards that can be tied directly to the lesson and also I order them based on how the concepts build upon each other since this builds in a scaffolding approach.

As you begin to tie standards to your lessons and assignments aspects of your student learning will become apparent as students work through coursework. In later parts of this short series, we will look at how to gather this data and use it to build a better understanding of student learning.