New Insights and Their Implications

South Dakota state standards have been the focus of so many of my methods courses here at the U. We, as students becoming teachers, are told that we have to follow the state standards in each content area because that is what our state's main high-stakes tests cover. Choosing state standards has been almost a kind of guessing game in many of my classes. You know the activity that you want to do and you go through the state standards and cherry-pick the ones that "sound good" or the ones that you think the activity touches on. It takes quite a while! It is hard to find standards sometimes because, as we talked about in class today, they are written in such vague terms. I was not there when the standards were written, so how do I know what exactly they mean?

Today we discussed the benefits of using national standards and curriculum focal points to help in the process of choosing certain standards that apply to an activity, or to find an activity that applies to the standards. Honestly, I very rarely have looked at the national standards for most content areas when making lesson plans for other courses. It astounded me how much easier it was to pick one or two of the state standards after looking at the NCTM document and at the curriculum focal points. It will be extremely helpful in the future to be able to look at all of these documents when choosing standards for lessons.