In this Cc Guide for Teachers, we’ll talk about how to simplify your standards routine. With Cc, you can easily search and add standards to your daily lessons and units and then track them over time. Working with standards has never been so quick or easy.
In this guide, we’ll focus on how to:
- Search for the standards you need
- Add these standards to your daily lessons and units
- Track the usage of these standards over time
Pre-Work: This guide assumes that you have created an account and that you have set up your first planbook. If you haven’t done those things, check out our Cc for Teachers video on Planbook Set-Up to get started.
To get started, log into your planbook by clicking the planbook title from the home screen. Find the daily lesson into which you would like to attach standards.
Beneath the “Standards” card, you will see a magnifying glass icon that says “Search and Add Standards.”
Cc standards are categorized by State, Organization, and Schools and Districts.
Let’s imagine that we are working with Common Core standards for our Reading class. We’ll select “Organizations,” “Common Core State Standards,” “Common Core English/Language Arts.” And then we’ll select the grade level which we teach.
One important and helpful tip: let’s say that we want to compare standard sets from one grade to another. To do this, I can select “Side-by-Side View” and then find the other standard set I would like to compare. This will show both sets at once.
Once I have found the standard set I need, I can use the search query box at the top to quickly locate the standards for this lesson.
For this lesson on Inferences, I can type in “inferences” to narrow my search. Once I find the standard needed, I can click the “+” button on the left side.
Because many lessons often focus on multiple standards, I can add as many standards I need. Once I’m satisfied, I can click “Close and Return to Lesson” and now I can see those standards attached to my daily lesson plan.
If you’re already using Cc’s powerful unit planner to backwards plan, you can also add standards to your unit plans. To do this, the process is identical. Simply click “Unit Timeline” select the unit for which you would like to attach standards and click “Show Full Unit in Sidebar.” To add standards, we simply follow the same steps when adding standards to a daily lesson.
Equally important to adding standards, is tracking them over time. Cc standards tracker helps teachers to ensure they never leave out important standards. It can also provide insights on the standards that we teachers might be including more than are necessary.
To track standards, we can click on ‘Standards Tracker’ from the top menu.
We’ll select the class for which we would like to track standards, and then select the standard set we would like to track.
Once again, our standards document appears. This time, we can see data on which standards have been included or left out.
When we see something like, “0/1” this denotes that we have not created any lessons in the past or any upcoming lessons that include this standard. Conversely, when we see something like “1/1” this denotes that we have at least one lesson that includes this standard.
Even more helpful, Cc includes every past or future lesson we have created that uses this standard.
This is particularly helpful later in the year, when we want to see have we have previously taught a standard. For instance, let’s imagine it’s May and I want to see how I taught inferences back in September. I can click on the date and my lesson from September appears, showing my lesson and all the materials that I used.
And there you have it: with Cc, you’ll have access to every standard you need. Even better, you can add and track those standards faster than ever. The result is that every lesson will be purposeful—and you can rest assured that students will be prepared to meet their end of year goals.