Action Overview: Grade Level Standards and Benchmarks

Action: Examine the knowledge, skills, and rigor within standards and benchmarks within grade levels.

In order to provide coherent learning experiences for students, educators need to have collaborative opportunities to help align their thinking about the content ideas in the standards and benchmarks. Likewise for improvement efforts—without a shared understanding of the desired student outcomes, the rigor can vary greatly from teacher to teacher. This can make it difficult to analze and respond to student outcome data across the system.

This Action is designed to help educators examine grade level standards and benchmarks in order to develop a shared understanding. The understanding of grade level standards and benchmarks necessarily requires a shared understanding of learning progressions across grades as well. This shared understanding is essential for improving curriculum and instruction and should be revisited over time as part of continuous improvement efforts.

While investigating the grade level standards and benchmarks, specific attention is paid to a process for recording specific concepts and skills that are called for in the standards and benchmarks, the big ideas they fit within, possible misconceptions, how the ideas fit within the learning progressions, and considerations for assessment, performance tasks, and diverse learners.

Suggested Activity

Shared Understanding of Grade Level Standards and Benchmarks. The portal provides an activity called Shared Understanding of Grade Level Standards and Benchmarks to help educator teams build deeper understanding of grade level standards and benchmarks.