As part of its new accountability measures for the public school system, the Legislature said it wants all students to leave Wyoming schools “career or college ready.” The state took a big step forward in meeting that challenge in Gillette last Friday when the Wyoming Board of Education voted 8-4 to adopt the nation’s Common Core State Standards.
Implementing these new standards will require principals to lead a culture change that impacts each and every classroom and in the school as a whole. Like an iceberg, school culture is comprised of what we can see above the surface and what we cannot see, but is below the surface—the visible and the invisible.
Tennessee students in elementary and middle school will have a greater stake in the scores they earn on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program tests that start this week.
by Mel Riddile via National High School Center Both the Mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) standards in the Common Core State Standards demonstrate a logical progression through the grades so that a fourth grade teacher will understand how the standard being taught on a particular day relates to the standard in grades five, six, and beyond. In fact, teachers will be able to understand how what they are doing each day leads to college and career-readiness.
The writing requirements are not as daunting as the numbers on the curriculum map make them seem; according to Susan Jacobs—the talking head in the webinars—we don’t have to grade them all. We can require that students maintain a notebook or writing portfolio, and that they keep up with their written work, but we don’t have to assess it all by a rubric, if at all.
The one big difference I see is that the Common Core will finally put to rest the mindless assessments that ask meaningless questions: no more will the color of a character’s shirt on page whatever matter—not that it ever did—unless the color is symbolic or relevant to some bigger purpose than to see if the students remember something insignificant.
“What” is of little importance, buy “why” and “how” are central to the Common Core and to our students. Furthermore, analysis and synthesis are central to the CCPS and to our students’ ability to function in an age of technology, media, and easy access to information.
Another major difference, and one I favor in theory, will require more full length nonfiction informational texts, two per year, but many schools don’t have these sitting in our bookrooms, so funding is one of my unanswered questions. Jacobs suggested that many texts are free online, and that is true, but all students don’t have access to electronic readers or media—even in affluent schools.
Professional learning that increases educator effectiveness and results for all students requires skillful leaders who develop capacity, advocate, and create support systems for professional learning.
At whatever level they work, leaders make learning one of their top priorities, and not just for students, but also for themselves and for all staff.
They also advocate for professional learning, and use their understanding of how change happens for systems to ensure support is in place.
Gene Wilhoit emphasizes the importance of the state leader in the shift to Common Core when he stresses that the state leader's role "is to articulate to educators, across your various projects and programs, that the state has a vision for how all of these seemingly disconnected initiatives work together to help them get their students to be college and career ready." He was speaking not only of Common Core, but also of teacher evaluation systems, and how all initiatives must interconnect.
Taken from a speech delivered on April 19 in Atlanta by Gene Wilhoit of the Council of Chief State School Officers
"Principal preparation needs particular attention, Wilhoit said, as states begin to examine the best ways to help educators ramp up their skills for the common core. Such programs have been "the ugly stepchild" of educator preparation and do not sufficiently prepare school leaders to walk through classrooms and recognize the kind of teaching that should be taking place to reflect the new standards, he said."
The Tennessee Department of Education is putting the work of the Common Core transition into the hands of those who know best — the state’s top teachers, according to a TDE news release.
As Tennessee gears up to implement the Common Core state standards in grades 3-8 math next school year, more than 200 teachers from across the state will spend their summer as Core Coaches, helping colleagues in their districts navigate the transition to the rigorous standards.
The second round of states—26 plus the District of Columbia—that applied to the U.S. Department of Education for wiggle room from the No Child Left Behind law got feedback on their requests in a round of letters sent April 17. (To recap, 11 states have already been approved. Check out the 27 pending applications here.)
Education Week examined 13 of the 27 letters, and found some common areas of concern:
•Almost every state needed to do a better job of explaining how they'll train teachers and principals to implement the new math and reading standards developed under the Common Core State Standards Initiative. (A tricky issue all around, as outlined in this great story by my colleague Steve Sawchuk.)
The Southeast Comprehensive Center (SECC), funded by the U.S. Department of Education, provides high-quality technical assistance in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.
All the revisions can't be captured here, but I wanted to note at least a few. I also chatted with Coleman about the changes, and wanted to share what he and his writing partner, Susan Pimentel, highlighted as changes in the most recent version. They:
• Removed sections of the criteria where they felt the document went "beyond the standards and intruded too much into instructional details." • "More explicitly emphasized the important role teacher judgment plays in choosing materials." • Made clearer that the standards require wide-ranging reading/research and reading of full novels, drama, and poems, as well as close reading of shorter texts. • "Worked closely with the [English-language-learner] community to ensure that the work on scaffolding responded to the needs of all students to gain access to high-quality complex text. • Made a point of stating that "high-quality questions are usually text specific as well as text-dependent; that is, that good questions are not typically generic for any text but address the specific text or texts being examined. • "Noted the vibrant role of conversation between students in developing literacy," in recognition of the speaking and listening standards. • Sought to "leave room for a wide range of instructional approaches, while setting some basic parameters based on the standards; for example, the standards require that scaffolds do not pre-empt or replace the need to read the text, but there are many ways open for teachers to engage students in reading." • "More clearly articulated the central importance of the foundational skills in K-2 and the need for systematic attention to the foundations of reading." • "Emphasized the central role of academic vocabulary—higher-level words that appear commonly in many different types of text—in reading, writing, listening, and speaking." • Clarified sections that people found confusing or idiosyncratic.
Anthony Cody spent 24 years working in Oakland schools, 18 of them as a science teacher at a high needs middle school. He is National Board certified, and now leads workshops with teachers focused on Project Based Learning.
The Common Core Standards demand that the building of knowledge through reading text plays a fundamental role in those disciplines.
In history and social studies, the analysis of primary and secondary documents is a core part of building knowledge.
In science, the analysis of reference materials, direct experimental result, debate obviously integrated with other data, but reading sufficiently complex text at the heart of it.
To give you a sense of how different this is from what happens today, we have evidence that in kindergarten through 5th grade kids read informational text 7% of the time.
The federal government told Virginia last week that if it wants to opt out of key parts of No Child Left Behind, it needs to make its own accountability plan more rigorous.
NYS Common Core Bilingual Standards: NYS is revising its ESL and Native Language Arts Standards to align with the ELA Shifts in the Common Core Standards: 1. Balancing Informational and Literary Text, 2. Building Knowledge in the Disciplines, 3. Staircase of Complexity, 4. Text-based Answers, 5. Writing from Sources 6. Academic Vocabulary
While the debate is on about what the CCSS do and don’t do, one thing is clear to me. The CCSS do not give teachers instructional strategies to help students meet these standards. From my point of view, this is the common ground that needs our continued focus.
Find common ground in our districts, schools, and classrooms by investing our time in becoming more expert at the instructional strategies we employ to help students achieve the kind of academic progress they need to be ready for the choices they will make for post-secondary education and work. In the words of John Wooden, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
Maintain our focus on choosing what matters for all learners in our care
Content literacy is the common ground in the CCSS. We now have a working document that will help us move forward in continuing professional conversations, developing instructional strategies, and choosing curriculum materials that demonstrate our understanding that literacy is everyone’s job.
From a speech by Gene Wilhoit of the Council of Chief State School Officers in Atlanta
April 19, 2012
States must recognize that they have some heavy-duty work to do before they can put the Common Core State Standards into practice. But they hold key powers that could prove pivotal in making the necessary changes: the authority to regulate teacher preparation and licensing and the ability to collect and publicize data that show how well those programs are doing.
"If we are honest with ourselves, we know we are not ready to deliver against this promise," he told teams from 27 states. "The vast majority of teachers don't have the skill set" needed to teach to the new expectations. They need support to improve both their pedagogical skills and their content knowledge, he said.
"States must take care not to impose pedagogical methods on teachers, but to find ways to empower them to attain the necessary mix of skills and content knowledge."
Gene Wilhoit, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, knows he can't rest on his laurels. Having worked with the National Governors Association to engineer the most rapid and thoroughgoing improvement of K12 standards in history, Wilhoit is now calling on the chiefs to overhaul teacher preparation. "The vast majority of teachers don't have the skill set" to teach to the Common Core, he bluntly told education representatives from 27 states yesterday.
This assertion isn't news. Well-regarded teacher educators, mathematicians, and even the recently elected chair of the CCSSO, Idaho's Tom Luna, have been saying much the same thing over the past year. What makes Wilhoit's speech notable is the fierce urgency of his demand of the chiefs — his current bosses and former peers (he previously served as Kentucky's chief) — to take on the politically tough work of holding teacher preparation programs accountable. Echoing one of our State Teacher Policy Yearbook goals, Wilhoit called on states to take program approval back from national accrediting agencies which "too often emphasize process over content." And regardless of the opposition they might face, Wilhoit said, state regulators should make sure that "no preparation program that is producing inferior teachers should continue to exist." Amen to that.
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