I have not noticed much talk about standards in the middle school classroom. In many elementary schools I have been in the teachers have the standards written out and often objectives are on the board for students to see. This was not the case in the middle school I was observing. While observing in a social studies room I asked how planning around standards was handled. The teacher showed me the standards that he had to work on. He showed me that their district took the standards and blended them together to concentrate on just a few main groups. There were about 6 things that he needed to work on with each class. This was very different to the elementary classroom where there are multiple standards to work on for each subject. I really liked the idea of blending the standards to have only a few benchmarks to focus on. This seems like it would make instruction planning easier. You could also do a few weeks of addressing one benchmark and then spend the next few weeks working on another benchmark.
Standards
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I'm glad you asked about this. Often, you will still see objectives and benchmarks displayed in middle school classroom. This is actually an important aspect of Backwards Design, which I'm glad you were introduced to as well.
This sounds like a pretty cool way to teach using the standards. In my classroom, my teacher has written the objectives for the lesson on the board. They are often the same throughout the whole lesson, and she has one for vocab and the unit they are working on. I like this idea because then the students know what is expected of them.