Must Have Teacher Tool: Standards Checklists

*NEW* Florida B.E.S.T. Standards Checklists

Education is a world where things are always changing. This past year, Florida announced that they were going to change the standards, which threw many teachers into a panic. Luckily, the standards won't be officially used until the 2021-2022 school year. However, educators are typically the type of people who love to be prepared. My school is encouraging teachers to use the 2020-2021 school year for transition between standards. This means that our lesson plans are not only going to have the current, but also new B.E.S.T. standards cited. We are also moving towards a standards-based report card. During post-planning, my team realized that we needed a tool to track every standard for each student. That's where the light bulb turned on.

We needed a tool that was easy to manage, but yet explicit for data collection. It didn't make sense to create checklists for standards that we will use only one more year. We also wanted to make sure that by the time the state mandated the newly adopted standards, we were already fluent. I started with third grade for my team. Starting with math, I separated each domain by page and each cluster into a different table. This is going to make it simple for conferences and management. Each standard also needed to be recorded three times for progress monitoring. This process was repeated for ELA and math.

I went back to my team for some feedback and it turns out, they absolutely loved them! They encouraged me to make some for the rest of the school since this tool was going to be so helpful with the transition. B.E.S.T. Standards, I've got you!

TIP: When writing in the boxes for progress monitoring, include the date and score.

Are you a teacher in Florida trying to prepare for the standard transition? Click the links to find your grade level's new Florida B.E.S.T. Standards for ELA & Math.

Kindergarten - Grade 1 - Grade 2 - Grade 3 - Grade 4 - Grade 5