The Four Fundamentals - Part 1: Standards Alignment

What is Standards Alignment according to KSDE?

It refers to clearly defined student learning expectations aligned to Kansas State Standards and supported with evidence-based instruction and materials. Content, lessons, instruction, and materials should support the standards.

We align lessons, instruction, and materials to Kansas standards and clearly identify what students must know and be able to do. This includes interpersonal, intrapersonal, and cognitive skills in pre-K-12.

Access the Kansas World Language Standards here.

What do the standards define?

Knowing what's in the standards and what isn't is an important starting point to making sure that our instruction is aligned to them.

When we start to unpack the standards, we focus on the language functions that the standard indicates. For example, using Standard 1.1 Interpersonal - Learners interact with and negotiate meaning in spoken, signed, or written conversations to share information, reactions, feelings, and opinions.

The Kansas standards also go a bit further and elaborate for each proficiency level. At the Novice level, students express self in conversations on very familiar topics using a variety of words, phrases, simple sentences, and questions that have been highly practiced and memorized.

Using the language functions to help you write your daily instructional objectives will help you keep them aligned with the Kansas World Language Standards. Here's a great resource from Laura Terril and Donna Clemmenti that outlines not only the various language functions, but also shows what that looks like (task wise) as students move from Novice to Advanced proficiency.

You can see how the language function stays the same, but the tasks that students are able to do and the language they use to communicate gets progressively more complex.

Some examples of daily lesson objectives focusing on language functions could be:

Students will describe their favorite class.

Students will describe their favorite class and explain why.

Students will describe their favorite class and compare it with a classmate's preference.

Students will describe their favorite class, compare it with a classmate's preference, and explain why.

Students will describe their favorite class, give examples of things they do in the class, and explain why

it is their favorite class.

Backwards Design aligned to the standards

When you focus on language functions to write your daily objectives, you are set up for backwards design. The objectives are essentially your assessment tasks! This way you also keep your assessment aligned with the standards, too (more about this next month!). When you have your assessment tasks, you can start working backwards - finding your interpretive resources and creating your interpersonal and presentational tasks.