What Happened to Ebonics?

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Turmoil in 1980s Oakland Leads to Continued Definitive Conclusions about Language’s Impact on Education in the 2020s by Matthew Bamberg Photo by Kiana Bosman on Unsplash The Ebonics debate has often been misunderstood. It refers to the dialect of AAVE (African American Vernacular English). This type of language is prevalent in the Black community and has also spread into popular culture through lyrics in rap music and similar genres. I be workin’ Yes, I be workin’ on this article. This can be defined as: I’ve been working on this article for a while, although not necessarily at this very moment. I begin here because using AAVE helps readers understand the importance of training teachers to use it in our classrooms. Before getting into the meat and potatoes of the point, AAVE is an important dialect and, therefore, should be treated with the utmost respect, especially when dealing with it as a teacher. Slavery was Brutal The history of AAVE in the United States began in the 17th and 18t...
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Simplifying Standards, Learning Targets and Objectives for Common Core Part I--Creating Student-Centered Learning Targets

Common Core has brought us a change in education nomenclature so that it can often be confusing to parents, teachers and administrators if they aren't familiar with it.

Consider for a moment the translation of education terms you know into those of the Common Core in terms of student and teacher.

What you used to refer to as performance objectives are now called learning targets, more specifically, teacher learning targets.

New to common core is an extension of the old concept of performance standards so that they address students directly.  In order to do so involves a simple task that allows you to convert each standard from a teacher's point of view to a student's. By converting the third person point of view of the standard to the first person point of view for students allows you to directly address them when they are posted in the classroom.

For example, the RI4.1 (Reading Informational Text, Grade 4) standard for informational text (and a very similar one for literature) can be changed to the students' point of view in the following manner:

Third Person directed to teachers/parents/administrators for RL4/RI4.1: Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
Third Person directed to students for RL4/RI4.1: I can use details and examples to draw inference from a text.

So, there you have it, a conversion of a teacher directed standard to a student-friendly objective directed to students in first person.

Now you can move on to develop students' DOK (Depth of Knowledge) and method of output, the means to which students produce output/product.

Coming Soon: How to Write Learning Targets for Teachers from which to Develop Lesson Plans

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