Standards Walls
Earlier this spring, a co-worker loaned me a new book called
Learning in the Fast Lane by Suzy Pepper Rollins (ASCD). It has a lot of good ideas for helping
all students succeed. One of the
suggestions was to create a standards wall. At our school, we’ve been encouraged to post learning
targets, which I dutifully did, but they’re in small font and there are so many
of them, that they were basically meaningless for both me and the students.
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Rollins suggests posting the standards and learning targets
as a concept map up on the wall. As you move through the learning targets, an
arrow tracks your progress. Instead of standards written and posted where
nobody can see them, now everyone – both students and teachers – can see
exactly what you are learning, and where you’ve been, and where you still need
to go.
I decided to try this with our last social studies unit on
the West, and also for our narrative writing unit. I found it was very helpful
for social studies, because it really helped me tell the kids each day what our
learning target was, and then I could point out what we had already done and
where we were going. The narrative chart was helpful, but I found that in
teaching writing, there are often many things going on at once that kids need
to be aware of, and moving the arrow was less helpful. However, just having the
“I can” statements that go with the learning targets posted on a readable
poster was very helpful.
Rollins also suggests posting examples of student work by
the learning targets, and I did post my own examples of what we were working on
for the narrative unit. I liked being able to show kids who were absent what
the rest of the class had worked on, and showing examples always helps. I will
try to post more student work next year.
I’m definitely going to do this for social studies next
year, because those units change, but I’m thinking that I may be able to do one
concept map for reading and one for writing, since those subjects have a
different structure than social studies does. At any rate, having a big,
readable poster really helped me to chart our learning progress. And luckily, I
have all summer to try and plot out the standards walls for the fall.
