Social Studies Middle School Guide

Canyons School District

Instructional Supports Department

Determine the relevance of the learning

Adapted from Fisher & Frey, Teacher Clarity Playbook, 2019

TEACHER CLARITY

Unpacking a Standard

What does it mean to Unpack a Standard?

Begin by looking at a grade level standard and take it apart to understand what skills and concepts students need in order to master the standard. Unpacking a standard is thinking through all of the concepts and all of the skills in order to design the learning progressions and learning intentions and success criteria. The process involves analyzing the language of the standard and extracting clues that describe what students need to know.

Concepts & Skills

The frst step in unpacking a standard is to identify the concepts and skills found in the standard, or the nouns and verbs found in the standard. Nouns (concepts): represent what it is the student needs to know. Verbs (skills): speak to the skills students must acquire in order to make the concepts, and content useful.

Example

Standard: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

Nouns:

Verbs:

● Textual Evidence ● Analysis of explicit text ● Analysis of inferences

● Cite ● Support ● Draw from

Learning Progressions

While studying standards and planning for instructional units, ask the question, “How might the concepts and skills in each standard be taught in a logical way?” Although standards represent the end knowledge that students gain through interaction with the content, learning progressions help teachers plan out a pathway to student profciency of each standard. Learning progressions are not individual, daily lessons; instead, they are the intermediate steps that students take to ensure they are learning the concepts and skills in a logical manner. “…Learning Progressions detail the