College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

part 2 Background on Common Core

Presented by Keith Courville, Director of Professional Development and University Programs for the Associated Professional Educators of Louisiana.

Published on Sep 27, 2012 by apeleducators

Welcome to this introductory presentation on the Common Core State Standards and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exams. These changes will be fully functional during the 2014-2015 school year and it is imperative that teachers in Louisiana and other states become aware of these national changes impacting their classroom. Learn the information you need to be successful with the new changes coming from this national curriculum and assessment series.

By Nora Fleming

October 2, 2012 2:28 PM

U.S. students' literacy skills are not up to snuff to meet the growing demands of jobs in the 21st-century workforce, and a new federal grant competition may be necessary to give incentives to states to do something about it, said panelists at a Brookings Institution event today here.

"The standards alone will not be nearly enough to ensure students are prepared to compete with international students and be college- and career-ready."

To improve students' literacy on the national scale, the brief's authors proposed the following:

1. states need to develop and adopt assessments linked to the new standards (currently underway)
2. improve the system for reporting school performance
3. improve the curriculum taught in schools to meet the new standards
4. provide better professional development to ensure teachers are prepared to help their students to meet these new benchmarks.

One of the tasks that we gave our students at the end of our unit on Rigid Motions came from Illustrative Mathematics: 

This short, five-minute video begins with the end in mind by discussing the PARCC assessments.

It then describes the next two sections,

1. Guided Lessons
2. Independent Tasks

...and how each supports students' preparation and engagement in the assessments.

Toward this end, the Independent Tasks support the same learning goals as the PARCC assessments, and the Guided Lessons assist students toward successful independent work on the Independent Tasks. In this structure, then, teachers will use Guided Lessons to prepare students for the Independent Tasks and the PARCC assessments.

In this post we explore three common strategies for introducing text before reading and the ways they do (or don't) align with the Common Core. These strategies have been challenged by the authors of the CCSS and we address this criticism.

"The Common Core only tells us what to teach, but doesn’t tell us how to teach."

Three traditional practices in literacy education:

1) presenting background information,

2) pre-reading strategies, such as predicting, and

3) articulating a summary of the text.

David Coleman Quotes

• We lavish so much attention on these strategies in the place of reading, I would urge us to instead read.
• the first escape from the text is to summarize it in advance
• asking you to just read. To think of dispensing for a moment with all the apparatus we have built up before reading and plunging into reading the text. And let it be our guide into its own challenges.
• Nothing could be more lethal to paying attention to the text in front of you than such a hunt and seek mission

Idaho State Department of Education

Staff
Christine Avila
Mathematics Coordinator
(208) 332-6932
cavila@sde.idaho.gov

These standards aren't a move towards reforming mathematics education; these standards are a move towards transforming mathematics education. Significant changes will occur in instruction, curriculum, and assessment. Quality implementation is key.