If you’ve spent your career in the trades, you know your craft inside and out. You’ve taught the same skills hundreds of times on the job, but teaching in a classroom requires new skills. You have to learn how to manage a classroom, keep students engaged, and ensure your curriculum is aligned with state standards. Aligning with state standards is easy enough when you are already a subject matter expert. You just need a structured, systematic approach for mapping out that knowledge to create a teaching plan for the semester or year.
Let’s walk through the steps you can take to find and review your state CTE standards and how to align your courses to them.
What Are Curriculum Standards and Why Do They Matter?
Curriculum standards are agreed-upon learning goals that state what a student should know and be able to do by the end of a course or program.
Standards are important to ensure that students receive a similar, high-quality educational experience no matter which school they attend or which instructor they have. For construction trades programs, standards are a blueprint of the most important learning outcomes a student should achieve for success in their future career.
How to Find Your State’s Standards
In the United States, most states set their own standards. Nine states have adopted Common Career Technical Core Standards (CCTCS), a national standard for trades programs built around 16 Career Clusters. All other states have their own sets of standards. Some align very closely with the CCTCS, while others differ.
In most states, the State Board of Education (SBE) is responsible for revising and publishing their standards. Start with your SBE’s website or check this interactive map or Advance CTE’s list of state authorizers to find yours.
How to Align Your Course to State Standards
Aligning your course to standards doesn’t mean rewriting your lesson plans. In most cases, it means familiarizing yourself with your local standards and mapping parts of your coursework to each one. If you discover a gap, you can add a lesson to fill it, but most of the time that isn’t necessary. By the end, you’ll have documentation for your program director showing how your course meets state standards. Here’s how to get started.
1. Review and Analyze Your CTE Standards
Access your state’s CTE curriculum frameworks or standards documents, typically available through your local SBE website. CTE standards are usually written on two different levels.
Level 1: Overarching and Pathway Standards
The CCTSC and most states break their programs into career cluster pathways such as agriculture, health and human services, or other specific trades. Many states list standards that all graduates of that pathway should master by the end of their program. Those standards tend to range from technical knowledge to general career skills.
For instance, the Kansas standards for the construction and design pathway include the following:
- Demonstrate an understanding of industry standards for personal safety including the safe use of tools, equipment, and hazardous materials.
- Demonstrate time management skills.
- Demonstrate job seeking and interviewing skills.
Most trades programs fall under clusters like construction or energy and natural resources. If your state does not publish pathway-level standards, they may publish overarching standards for all CTE programs.
2. Course-level standards
Each state also publishes course-level standards that instructors should meet. These are very important to read and understand for every course you teach. Course-level standards will tell you more specifically what skills your students should have at the end of our course. For example, in a pipe-fitting course, you may see a standard such as “Identify and install pipe-hanging systems and supports”.
2. Develop Learning Goals
Next, adapt the standards into learning goals for your construction trades course. A learning goal is a clear, measurable objective that directly addresses the selected standards. You can take the standards exactly as written or tweak and combine them as needed—select 10 to 12 learning goals in total for each course. Try to address all of the course-level standards and a handful of pathway standards in your learning objectives. Coordinate with your program director and other instructors for which pathway standards to target. For example, introductory objectives may focus on safety basics and more advanced objectives may focus on specific technical knowledge, such as how to measure, cut, and join piping (as seen below).
Learning Objectives Examples for Pipefitting Technology
- Demonstrate proper safety procedures using materials in the pipefitting trade.
- Learn to use pipefitting hand and power tools safely.
- Use mathematics to correctly measure, cut, and join piping.
- Complete a pipefitting skills assessment in a set timeframe.
Your area may also have standards published by industry groups with target learning objectives for graduates starting their careers. Whenever possible, incorporate these goals as well.
3. Plan Instructional Strategies
Next, choose the teaching methods and activities that will help students achieve the learning objectives and meet the standards. Here’s where you can draw from your existing lesson plans and expertise and match them to each standard. Instructional strategies to list may include:
- Academic content: Incorporate relevant academic skills (math, literacy, science) as outlined in the CTE standards.
- Career readiness skills: Embed opportunities for students to develop employability skills like communication and problem-solving.
- Experiential learning: List simulations or lab work that will contribute to the learning goals and
- Assessments: List knowledge checks, assessments, or capstone projects that allow students to demonstrate their knowledge. Design formative and summative assessments to measure student mastery of the standards-aligned objectives.
Instructional Strategies Example
Learn to use pipefitting hand and power tools safely.
Instructional Strategies
- Hand tools for plumbing work video module
- Hand tools for plumbing work knowledge check
- Instructor pipe-cutting demonstration
- Pipe-cutting lab with peer and instructor feedback
- Final assessment
4. Align Your Documentation
Once you’ve mapped your instructional strategies, do the inverse and map the standards to your lesson plans. List your learning objectives in your syllabus so students can see what they will achieve through the course. Then, clearly indicate in your lesson plans which standard or learning objective each activity or assessment addresses.
5. Create a Regular Review Cycle
Last, establish a cycle of curriculum reviews to keep your course materials relevant and up-to-date. State standards and industry practices change over time. While some states only review standards every three to five years, others update theirs as often as once a year. Take the lead from your CTE Director and state review cycles to find timing that keeps your coursework up-to-date without creating extra administrative work.
Enhance Your Curriculum With a Standards-Aligned Platform
Consider enhancing your curriculum with a platform that is already designed to meet industry-recognized standards.
Interplay Learning’s platform offers expert-created content with videos, interactive simulations, and built-in assessments. To make it easier for teachers to build out their curriculum, Interplay’s team of educational consultants can map our content to whatever standards your program is using.
Not only does Interplay Learning’s content align to nationally-recognized standards, such as NCCER, and industry-recognized certifications, such as EPA 608, but hundreds of employers across the country recognize the value of Interplay Learning’s training as they use our content to upskill and onboard their current employees.
Reach out today to see how Interplay Learning can help you prepare more students to be job-ready with engaging, immersive content.
