(What does it say about me that I find school board elections to be sexy? Don't answer that question.)
It's just about something that, as Joe Biden might say, is a big f--king deal.
I've spent a decent chunk of my summer with my school's director of curriculum redoing my English I units in preparation for Tennessee's switch to Common Core standards.
If you want to know about things that will actually make a difference in student achievement, pay attention to the nuts and bolts: (hat tip: The Commercial Appeal)
In its simplest form, the Common Core is a list of must-have knowledge and skills students need to succeed in work or college. The movement to get states on board was spearheaded by the National Governors Association over the last five years; 46 states so far have signed on. Tennessee joined in 2010.
Common Core emphasizes fewer concepts, allowing teachers to drill down in core tenets, including exploring different ways they can be used to solve problems.
In third-grade math, for instance, the number of standards will decrease from 113 to 25. Assuming children master the concepts, teachers will not spend time reteaching concepts, such as how to multiply fractions.
This is not just another education fad. This isn't Whole Language or "new math." Common Core standards will change the landscape of education in America.
Here's a small example of how it will do so: I've taught English in grades 9 to 11, but I've focused on the 9th the past few years. I've had 83 discrete standards to teach, of which ~65 would appear on my students' End of Course (EOC) test, which (by law!) makes up 25 percent of their 2nd semester grade. (All Tennessee teachers who teach a class with an End of Course test must follow the same grading formula.)
Before I go further: this isn't an anti-testing, anti-accountability, or anti-standards rant. Having a standardized test at the end of a significant class like English I is logical. It's much better than what happened when I taught English I in Philadelphia, which had no EOC test. As a result, there were wide variances between the quality of the classes with no systemic way of finding out which teacher was teaching and which one showed movies all year.
My concern is that the test be meaningful for the subject. As it's currently done, we have too many standards that give equal weight to both critical skills like supporting a thesis with logic and facts and less important ones like being able to recognize a couple of foreign phrases (bon voyage, caveat emptor, and the like). I'm not knocking the latter, but it's just not as important as the former. Yet the current incarnation of the English I EOC treats them the same. This is holding our students to a ridiculously low standard. Is it any wonder surveys show that our students aren't being challenged enough in the classroom?
Common Core focuses much more on the enduring skills of a subject. The idea to go deeper with skills people actually use in higher education and the workplace. Students will be writing more, but the focus will be on producing work with higher rigor and quality rather than a lot of short-answer or multiple choice questions that don't force students to think deeply and carefully form their thoughts.
Not only that, but imagine the crowd-sourcing of lesson plans that will happen as teachers across the country can share best practices. Someone who has never taught A Midsummer Night's Dream will have access to great materials that are almost sure to be aligned to standards in his or her state. This, more than any amount of cheerleading by politicians, will develop the skills of new teachers and help them remain in the classroom, presenting high-quality lessons to students.
Common Core standards, of course, will be much harder to teach. (The dirty little secret of the "drill and kill" method of teaching -- aside from the fact that it doesn't work -- is that it's much easier on the teacher. Just print off the worksheets and give 'em to the kids.) But this more rigorous teaching is also going to be much more rewarding. Most of us get in the business because we wanted to push students to see the rewards of hard work, to diligently pursue knowledge until they had their own "Ah ha!" moment, to understand the feeling of accomplishment from developing expertise.
The EOC test isn't going away, and that's a good thing. All public school students should have a rigorous class, no matter where they go to school or which teacher they have. Having a standardized test at the end helps to ensure that.
What excites me is that my students will be pushing themselves towards something that will give them an idea of the level of rigor that will be expected of them at the next level of education.
They can't reach that higher bar until we as educators put it there.
Switching to more rigorous, in-depth standards isn't what a lot of people in the political sphere like to talk about because it's not about power games or winners and losers.
This is just a quiet revolution that helps all of our kids reach their potential.
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8:39 p.m. update -- added a link and made some clarifications
2 comments:
What do you think about the new emphasis on non-fiction? Of course, we must read non-fiction with our students! But something about the love of literature and the ideas, as well as controversies, and emotional connections it promotes may become lost.
Good point, though on a practical level, I've encountered the opposite problem. I've had a bunch of kids who only associated academic reading with fiction and viewed any nonfiction book as not counting as "reading a book." Obviously, there's going to be a careful balance, but given that in the adult world, reading nonfiction is a necessity, I think it's good the pendulum will shift the other way.
As I've worked with LEAD's curriculum guru, the idea has been to have a balanced selection of literature so we can hopefully touch on most every kid's preference at some point during the year. In years past, we've been tilted very heavily towards mid-20th century American fiction and Shakespeare. This year will see more book-length nonfiction.
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