Consult a curriculum map. Check school calendar to account for professional development days, holidays, early-releases, late-starts, or standardized testing days and determine when to teach each standard. Be sure to leave extra time to reteach particularly difficult standards.  Research standards and create perfectly aligned classwork and homework. Give aligned exit slips and grade them — if you are on top of your game, daily, otherwise hope for once or twice a week. Next, analyze exit slip data and determine student performance. Create new lessons and homework based on this data, and if you’re really feeling good create 3-4 versions of the classwork and homework for different groups of students. Give assessment. Repeat.

If standards-based teaching sounds like a lot of work, it is. There is so much juggle and not enough time to create, implement, and respond to everything that goes into effective standards-based lessons. Because it is so time consuming, many teachers are turning to edtech platforms for this kind of practice. Pre-made, aligned content, instant grading, and access to dashboards that easily show student data saves hours of work for teachers. However, once teachers have access to great content, it can still be hard to figure out how to teach it. Research shows that for standards-based teaching, it is important to incorporate both isolated and mixed practice to maximize student outcomes.

Isolated practice…

• focuses on a single skill at a time
• is best for learning new material, especially if previous knowledge is low (Ayres, 2013)
• is repetitious, allowing students to correct errors immediately, which builds a solid foundation
• shows immediate gains (Dunlosky, 2013), which can boost student morale.

Mixed practice….

• includes multiple skills, concepts, or approaches within a problem set  
• requires students to apply higher-order thinking skills and sort through previous knowledge
• more closely mimics test formats, a great study strategy (Dunlosky, 2013; Willingham, 2014)
• strengthens retention of knowledge when applied over time.

If you’re using edtech platforms to teach standards, be sure that you can incorporate both kinds of practice into your assignments. Many platforms only successfully incorporate one or the other into their product.

For example, you might find products that offer hundreds questions that are organized by skill which are great for isolated practice. Or you might find products that have exceptionally curated content and only offer mixed practice. Good teaching definitely requires both, so it is important not to rely on one strategy or another to ensure students achieve mastery.

At Albert, we allow teachers the flexibility to assign isolated or mixed practice sets through our different assignment features. The courses are already organized by skill or topic, so the “Quick Assign” feature makes it simple to give isolated practice. Additionally, you can make custom “Templates” and hand-select which questions you’d like in an assignment. This is great for mixed practice or end-of-unit quizzes and exams.

The good news is, there are so many different edtech platforms that have great standards-aligned content. Teachers are no longer restricted to just the questions at the end of the chapter of a textbook.  However, with access to so much, it’s still important to remember that different approaches work for students at different levels of mastery. There is no one-size-fits all approach to standards-based teaching, but knowing that a combination of isolated and mixed practice is the most effective can be helpful when you’re planning out your lessons.