Standards Without Standardization

Since we homeschool year-round (for all the reasons I discussed in a previous post), today is the first day of second grade for my 7-year-old daughter. To prepare for this “new” year, I did something that a lot of the homeschooling parents I know would shudder over: I printed the second grade Common Core standards.

Why do I think so many people would shudder at this thought? Well, the Common Core standards aren’t particularly popular even with people in traditional school settings. This is for a mix of pragmatic and political reasons that I find fascinating but won’t delve into for this post. Suffice it to say that Common Core has been a (sometimes deserving) punching bag and taken a lot of criticism since its inception in 2009.

If even people in traditional school settings balk at Common Core, it would make sense that homeschoolers would be even leerier. After all, there are many, many reasons for people to homeschool, but being able to buck standardization and create a schooling environment for a kid that doesn’t fit the cookie-cutter mold links most of them.

The Value of Standards

Why, then, am I turning to Common Core as I begin my homeschooling academic year? It’s because, as an educator, I have found a lot of value in standards . . . just not in standardization.

I have taught college-level writing classes for more than a decade, and in that time, I have looked at a lot of standards. I’ve sat on curriculum design committees, re-written standards to align with new research and practices, created syllabi and lesson plans to map onto standards, trained new professors how to use the standards, and done oodles of (the official measurement of such things) professional development where you look at poorly laid out Microsoft Word documents with tables full of standards until your eyes sting.

All of that experience has taught me that standards are incredibly useful for giving shape to your teaching practice and providing you with the confidence that you’re covering what you need to cover.

I have always been an outside-of-the-box teacher. I sometimes worry that people walking by my college classrooms assume I have just left and the students have taken over because they are often full of loud activity and movement. I spent years lobbying for a rejection of standardized course textbooks, asking instead that teachers got to pick their own and suggesting that they pick non-fiction best sellers rather than standard academic textbooks. I don’t use canned curriculum, and I think that the move to create course-in-a-box online classes is a terrible idea that will destroy most of what’s good about higher education.

But I still like standards.

Destinations, Not Journeys

I like knowing where I need to end up. In my mind, standards simply give you a destination, but they don’t tell you anything about the journey.

If I told you that you needed to go to Paris, but I didn’t tell you when you needed to be there, how you needed to get there, or how many stops you could take along the way, I’m not really dictating your life so much as ensuring that you get to see something beautiful.

That’s what standards are to me. When I read on the Common Core list that my daughter needs to “Participate in shared research and writing projects (e.g., read a number of books on a single topic to produce a report; record science observations)” (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.2.7), I don’t feel boxed into an approach. I don’t feel pressure to get my daughter to that goal by a particular date (even by the end of the school year, if it’s a struggle for her). I simply feel inspired to come up with projects that meet that goal.

It’s like someone handing me a map with a bunch of circled locations. I’m still doing the packing, planning the route, and deciding how long we stay in each location. I can also add locations, veer off course, and decide to skip a place if I don’t think it will be very valuable to my family.

How Standards Help Me

I love being a creative teacher. I love designing projects and creating hands-on ways to learn. Standards help me do that.

I feel more emboldened. When I know that I am getting my students (be they a room full of college students, my own kids, or a co-op class), where they need to go, I feel free to get them there however works best, and it makes me feel more confident in my approach.
I get inspired. I know this makes me a nerd, but I’ve just embraced it. Reading standards makes me feel inspired to create curriculum. They’re like those little creative writing prompts that are supposed to get your novel flowing.
I do things I wouldn’t have done. I’m human, and as such, I do something I think a lot of humans do: I tend to lean toward my own strengths and tiptoe around things that will call upon my weaknesses. If I just created my own curriculum without any standards to guide me, I would probably still do a great job of designing materials that speak to my strengths, but I might miss a lot that isn’t in my wheelhouse.
I can be less standardized. Here’s the big one for me. If I follow the standards, I don’t feel the need to be standardized. I very seldom use workbooks or worksheets. We don’t really do standardized testing. I don’t feel pressured to buy a bunch of pricey all-in-one curriculum programs. Knowing that I have the standards in mind, I can create an eclectic and flexible plan to get us where we need to go.

Tips on Using Standards

If you are interested in using standards to un-standardize your homeschooling approach, here are some tips:

Remember they are for you, not the student(s). Whether I am teaching pre-schoolers or 50-year-olds, I have learned that people don’t like being reminded that they are in a classroom and ticking off boxes on a checklist. They like to learn when they feel excited about what they are learning. What this means in practice is that you use the standards to figure out the goal, but you don’t make the standards a big deal for the students. You let them enjoy the ride.
Set priorities. Looking at a list of standards can be positively overwhelming. I printed out about twenty pages of them for second grade. Don’t just start going down the list and designing a project for each one. You’ll burn out pretty quickly. Instead, get a few highlighters.
- In one color, highlight everything your learner has already mastered. Look at that, you’ve already accomplished things!
- In another color, highlight things that you think your learner is on the way to learning or will learn just with the natural progression of your homeschooling.
- In a third color, highlight the things that you think will require some intentional projects and new approaches on your part to reach. This third category is now your focus.
Take it bird by bird. This phrase comes from some fantastic advice by writer Anne Lamott. When her overwhelmed ten-year-old brother had procrastinated on a semester-long project and found himself having to do a report on dozens of birds in a single night, their father helpfully suggested that he just “take it bird by bird.” It’s very useful advice. If your third category gave you a lot of things, don’t let them overwhelm you. Just pick one and get started. When you’re done with that, pick another one. Then another one. You get the idea.
Have fun! Hands down, the part about homeschooling that surprised me the most is how fun it is. Standards are necessary, but standardization is not. The only reasons that standardization exists in traditional classrooms are pragmatic ones. Teachers have twenty (or more!) kids in a single classroom. They have limited time, many different learning preferences and emotional needs, and a bunch of administrative hoops to jump through. You don’t have those constraints, and therefore standardization doesn’t serve your needs. It’s just a holdover. You can make your projects as interactive, silly, hands-on, messy, and creative as you want them to be.