I’m about to start my second semester of using a standards-based approach in Calculus II. One of the things I wanted to change was my list of standards. Last semester, I ended up with about sixteen standards. When thinking about improvements for this semester, I wanted to pull apart my standards in a different way and I wanted to have more of them. Also, another big goal I have is to offer a broader picture of what calculus is really about. I’ve decided to re-categorize my (now) thirty standards under some Big Questions. Here’s what I have so far:

• What background skills are important before we begin?
• What kinds of applied problems can we solve using integration?
• What techniques can we use to evaluate integrals?
• How can we add infinitely many things together?
• When and how can polynomials be used to approximate functions?
• How can we model phenomena if we know how they change over time?
• What can we say about the motion of objects moving in more than one dimension?*

Here’s a Dropbox link to my current standards list: m220-f2014-standards.pdf (Apologies if this link isn’t stable; this is a working document undergoing continual changes)

* Thanks to Joshua Bowman for help with this last one!