Clearly I have too much time on my hands to be thinking so much about the standards. But I have always wanted to clear up the soup on them that has always existed in my mind.
Also, it’s a rainy Sunday in India with heavy monsoon activity and I still have that feeling that I just want to stay inside and not venture out into the Delhi of the beast until I am more confident about where I am, even without all the rain.
Right now I am behind this door:
So I wanted to add one final post to this standards soup-a-thon. I will speak with my curriculum director, who oddly just happens to be from Denver – from the area around Steele Street/Merrill Middle School in Denver where Julie Soldner teaches. It’s a small world because I also have a colleague whose classroom is next to Linda’s which is across the hall and down a room from mine who taught for five years at Manual High School in DPS before coming here to India. So out of four classrooms at my school in one part of one hallway here in Delhi we have three teachers who have taught in DPS at Manual, North (Linda for a semester thanks to Diana when Linda had visa issues some years back) and me at East and Lincoln.
Anyway:
My curriculum director from Denver just emailed me and told me that the standards that I thought were in place here in my school had been scrapped last spring under the influence of Linda and Zach, our department chair. So I need not have worried. Linda told me that “we worked on them last year, during two vertical meetings. Then a sub group finished it.”
They are not based on the ACTFL standards and sub-standards discussed here earlier today. They are connected to the Three Modes, and they pretty much work, in the same way that the three highlighted in red main standards referred to in the previous post can work for us.
I didn’t know that a school could just base their standards docs on any part of the standards they wanted (the Three Modes is a part of the Communication standard) but they just did, certainly because Linda and Zach are the moving forces in the department here and both are full on with CI.
I will share them if anybody wants to see them, but later, if I am allowed.