INTRODUCTION
Since the publication of Geography For Life: National Geography Standards 1994 in October 1994, geographic educators across the nation have focused their attention on ways to implement the standards. The Geography Education National Implementation Project (GENIP) has drafted a Strategic Plan for the Implementation of the Standards for Geography Education that includes public awareness, teacher education, and materials development. Suggested activities in teacher education include the identification and training of mentor teachers, and the development of programs designed to provide in service activities for teachers who then create networks in the school districts of their states and train fellow teachers to incorporate the standards into their instruction. Under materials development, geography organizations and the alliances are encouraged to create instructional materials that reflect the national standards.
Teachers and curriculum developers perceive Geography for Life as a valuable resource that can guide their creation of curriculum and instruction in geography. In an effort to implement the standards at the grass roots level, geographic educators in alliance institutes and workshops around the nation have focused their energies on helping teachers understand the standards and learn to link their instruction to them. Many other educators and publishers of educational materials also are attempting the link new and existing lessons, units, and published works to the standards. In addition, many departments of education are using them to guide their development of state geography standards.
Few, if any, of these efforts have utilized a systematic classification process that specifically links a lesson to one or two of the standards at the Knowledge Statement level, to a specific Skill Set and Skill, or to one of the Five Themes of Geography. Instead, many authors claim that a single lesson addresses seven, eight, or more of the standards, several geographic skills, and many different themes because they "see" connections between their lesson topic and different portions of Geography for Life. Such broad scale classifications are not very useful for analyzing existing geography instruction or for making decisions about new instructional needs. In other words, most efforts to classify instruction to the standards, skills, and themes to date have questionable curriculum and instructional value primarily because of cursory classification efforts and too much reliance on subjective judgement.
Most of the problems associated with linking geography instruction to Geography for Life and the Five Themes can be avoided by using the "Geography Standards Classification Matrix" to classify specific instructional objectives in a lesson plan to the Essential Elements, Geography Standards, Knowledge Statements, Skill Sets and Skills, and Themes (See sample matrices included with lessons in this book). To be classifiable, lesson objectives must specify a process, such as analysis, that students are expected to perform and identify the geography content to be learned. Both the process and content must be appropriate for a specific learning context i.e., they should be appropriate for a particular group of students in a specific setting for a specified amount of time.
Because knowledge of a particular learning context is crucial to the classification task, teachers should be involved in classifying the lessons they write. This requires the teachers to have a good understanding of the process and content they want to teach, the structure of a good lesson plan (e.g., format and internal consistency between objectives, learning activities, and assessment), and a thorough knowledge of Geography for Life and the Five Themes. Armed with such knowledge teachers can use the "Geography Standards Classification Matrix" to classify existing or newly developed lessons. The relationship of units of instruction to the standards can be determined by classifying the individual lesson that make up the unit. New lessons and units of instruction can be created mining the Knowledge and Activity Statements contained in particular standards for idea on which to develop appropriate lesson objectives.
During summer, 1995 the Illinois Geographic Alliance conducted an advanced institute for a cadre of our most active teacher consultants. Our goal was to thoroughly acquaint them with Geography for Life and the "Geography Standards Classification martin," then involve them in the creation of a collection of prototype geography lessons classified to standards that could be used in future workshops, institutes, and professional presentations to illustrate to fellow teachers an approach to developing standards linked instructional materials. Each participant was required to bring two frequently taught geography lessons to the institute. Following review by their grade level group, each teacher consultant selected one of their lessons for analysis, revision, and classification to the standards. New lessons were developed by each grade level group following a field study of the historic city of Nauvoo, Illinois. These new lessons are tied to Standard 17--"How to Apply Geography to Interpret the Past." All lessons use the same lesson plan format.
These revised and newly-created geography lessons are included in this ring binder. Each lesson contains an Objective Classification Outline in the body of the lesson and an attached "geography Standards Classification Matrix," which connects each objective to Geography for Life at the Knowledge Statement level of specificity, and identifies the appropiate Skill Set and Skill, as well as the Geographic Theme that applies. The teachers revised lesson and the new Nauvoo lessons appear in separate sections of the binder, but both sets are grouped under K-4, 5-8, and 9-12 grade level headings to facilitate teacher use.
These prototype lessons were created for use by Illinois Geographic Alliance teacher consultants in workshops and institutes that focus on the creation of geography instruction tied to Geography for Life. Using these examples, teacher consultants can demonstrate for fellow teachers a process that not only allows the to "take inventory" of the geography they currently teach in their curriculum, but also shows them a method for developing new geography instruction. Teacher ability to use such a process is important and necessary since the state standards for Social Science Goal Number 4 (Geography) in Illinois mirror those set down in Geography for Life. As local district and state assessment systems are revised to measure student achievement of the state geography standards, increasingly teachers will have to create instructional units and lessons that are tied to the standards. The classification system used with this collection of prototype lessons is meant to facilitate this process for the teachers of Illinois.
Illinois Geographic Alliance
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