No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)

On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law educational reform legislation known as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). NCLB seeks to ensure that all students receive the education they deserve, regardless of factors such as gender, race, age, or socioeconomic status. 

Based on what I have learned during my 16 years of teaching, they are several guiding principles that I feel would improve instructions in today’s classrooms.

 First, we should make sure that we know the curriculum standards that apply to my students.  

 Second, we would make sure to follow my state and district guidelines in teaching standards. We will make sure to familiarize ourself with the standardized tests my students will take.

 Then, we will have after school club in order to teach my students how to take standardized tests. We will teach them test-taking strategies, and we will provide them with plenty of opportunities to practice. The objective is to learn knowledge or skills to mastery and to automaticity in order to perform well on the tests. The instructional strategy called mastery learning will be helpful. 

The foundation of our lesson plans should be our state’s standards. We should plan all our lessons with mastery of the state standards. 

Furthermore, we should plan our lessons. First, we must create a course overview because it will give us an idea of the scope of the information my students need to master during the entire term. Then, we must create unit plans. We must divide the material we must teach into smaller units of information, then we need to plan how to teach each one. 

Ormrod said that “to promote mastery, break the subject matter into small, logically sequenced units, assess students’ mastery of each unit, and provide additional instruction and practice as needed”.

In addition, we need to create daily plans. A lesson plan includes the following: (1) the goals or objectives of the lesson; (2) the instructional materials and equipment required; (3) the instructional strategies to be used and the sequence in which they will be used; (4) assessment methods planned.

Instructional objectives must be explicit for the students because the students need to know what the result of a lesson will be. The students benefit from knowing the objectives of a lesson. The objectives for a lesson should be stated in specific terms and they must follow the standards knowledge and skills that students should gain. If the teachers have a clear idea about what students are expected to learn, they can more easily assess students’ achievement and how well students have learned. Because instructional objectives specify exactly what is supposed to be learned, they are indeed helpful to the teachers as well as the students throughout the learning process and are invaluable in the assessment process.