College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

Joellen Killion
Senior Advisor, Learning Forward

Early efforts inadequate to support implementation!

A flurry of professional learning is occurring in states that are working to implement the Common Core State Standards. Most of these states have decided to begin at what seems like a logical point: unpacking the standards.

In these unpacking sessions, teachers and principals study the new standards, reach an understanding of the cognitive demand embedded in them, and prepare for the work required to transform their teaching to implement the standards.

While these early efforts may lay the foundation for understanding the new standards, they are inadequate to support implementation.

States Need to Shift Gears

...to begin real work of implementation.

Quality Professional Learning

enriches content knowledge

enhances pedagogy

pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) -- knowing how students learn various disciplines and the major concepts within those disciplines.

More than PLCs

"professional learning community model rarely embeds deep learning about content, pedagogy, and PCK"

Needed: Mindset and Change Leadership

• "comprehensive plan grounded in a theory of change and fundamental beliefs."
• Without a comprehensive plan that intentionally enacts the vision of learning and teaching, driven by a common vision and theory of change, professional learning will likely duplicate past efforts that have been inadequate, unfocused, and incoherent.
• develop learning progressions for educators based on the defined theory of change and beliefs, and must differentiate and sustain professional learning as a natural part of educators' daily experience so that they achieve high levels of expertise.

Applying Standards not Unpacking Them

Rather than spending months or even a year unpacking the standards, teachers must engage in applying the standards in their classrooms and schools.

• Teachers and principals collaborate within teams of peers that have skillful facilitation to employ constructivist, inquiry-based practices, close guidance and support from content and content-specific pedagogical experts, and coaching that provides a steady steam of evidence-based feedback. 
• School, district, and state leaders provide the necessary support, time, technology, and other resources essential for teams to succeed. 
• School leaders create a culture in which all staff members share collective responsibility, peer accountability, and commitment to continuous improvement to achieve student success.

With a clear focus on implementation, a fully developed theory of change and fundamental beliefs to guide a comprehensive plan for professional learning, adequate expert support, and the necessary conditions for success, professional learning will become a significant lever in producing the transformation in classroom practice and student success embedded in the new standards.

Next fall, students in the Trumann School District will be using new technology every day in school.

TRUMANN, AR (KAIT) – Next fall, students in the Trumann School District will be using new technology every day in class. According to Superintendent Myra Graham, who is in her first full year at Trumann, the district will lease-purchase approximately 1,700 MacBook Pro and Air computers and iPads for teachers and students. Graham said iPads will go to children in grades K-2. Students in grades 3-12 will be given laptop computers. Later grades will be able to take their devices home.

Graham said her aim is to get students ready to take the Common Core benchmark test in 2014. Arkansas is one of 43 states to join the Common Core State Standards Initiative. The CCSSI is an attempt to "level the playing field" among standards for students nationwide.

Studies highlight some fairly consistent weaknesses in instruction and raise big question marks for teacher and leadership preparation—especially since the common-core state standards call for teachers to help students master precisely these kinds of higher-order reasoning and analytical skills.

Most educators in our field would agree that teachers should enter the classroom with a good repertoire of pedagogical techniques. Equally important, principals should know how to get appropriate assistance for a teacher who isn't quite up to snuff.

by Thom Markham

The Whole Child Blog

February 21, 2012

Essential Question #1: What will the Common Core Standards look like?

"The answer is: Very different."

The internationally benchmarked standards will emphasize:

• creativity
• collaboration
• critical thinking
• presentation and demonstration
• problem solving
• research and inquiry
• career readiness

Essential Question #2: How will we teach these new standards?

1.  greater focus on depth rather than coverage
2. thinking rather than memorizing or listing
3. demonstrating and performing rather than ‘hand it in and grade it

The Bottom Line

"Teachers will have to teach differently."

We will need "transformative professional preparation" to meet the challenge of teaching the new standards.

"The Common Core Standards will challenge our professional capability as educators."

Six Shifts in Teaching

1. Moving from instruction to inquiry
2. Balancing knowledge and skills
3. Going deep
4. Teaching teamwork and collaboration
5. Creating a "culture of inquiry"
6. Balancing coaching with teaching

Response to Brooking Study by Tom Loveless

• of course Common Core standards by themselves won’t improve achievement.
• There are a whole host of elements that matter, too, from the assessments to attention to professional development and human capital.
• standards alone don’t drive performance.
• the biggest, overlooked benefit of Common Core is that we have a national education problem but it’s hard to have a national strategy for addressing it, a real market for greater innovation
• scalable strategies to support teachers absent substantially greater commonality than we have today.

It's the Implementation!

The devil is not in the details. Rather, it’s in the implementation – which is no small detail. 

ELA teachers continue to debate the merits of "close reading."

Because the Common Core standards in math and the soon-to-be-released science standards emphasis depth over breadth, educators must look to new methods, aided by technology delivery, to turn skim-the-surface students into deep conceptual learners.

"With an emphasis on depth over breadth, the standards are causing math and science educators to rethink current practices by which many students learn only enough to get by on the next test or state assessment."

“While it’s clear that deep conceptual learning is a desired outcome of the Common Core standards, just asking students to learn deeply isn’t enough.”

In a white paper released by Arizona State University'sTechnology Based Learning and Research Center, co-authors Peter Rillero, Ph.D., and Helen Padgett, Ph.D. suggest systems like Adaptive Curriculum's web-based concept mastery solution will help educators quickly and effectively shift gears to address the new standards.

Teacher leaders will be critical to the successful implementation of Common Core Standards (CCS).

Teacher leaders are most often the missing piece of education reform.

"Neither students nor teachers are served by a structure that treats some teachers like interchangeable cogs in a machine.

As states begin to blend CCS with their own standards, district administration may be ready to move ahead without teacher input. They realize teachers have no choice in whether to implement.

How not What

But the choice isn't to implement or not to implement; the choice is in how to implement.

With a strong base of teacher leaders in place and leading the effort, other teachers will find inspiration and success.

Time and again, top-down implementation stalls as teachers fail to hear workable plans that reflect the realities of their classrooms. 

With the implementation of CSS, educators and administrators have a chance to find a better model for rolling out widespread change.

Teachers Trust Other Teachers

According to the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, more than 90 percent of teachers believe that other teachers contribute to their success.

Teacher leaders can help build a climate that draws on their colleagues' expertise and wisdom to improve the CSS implementation.

Teacher-designed and teacher-defined professional development is the other critical element in aligning CCS.

"Accountability Demands Involvement"

Critical to a successful launch of CSS in schools is establishing credibility for that change.

Teachers are often wary of anything they had no part in creating. This attitude is even more pronounced toward CSS, since the standards come from a political movement started by governors to "fix" education.

There is no force that is more adaptable, nimble, or capable of calling to action every one of the 3.2 million classroom teachers than genuine teacher leaders. These are leaders who work in classrooms every day. They have lived through NCLB and can apply the best and worst of that initiative. They have the respect of their peers, and can therefore call into action the legions of teachers who simply want to make tomorrow better for their 49.4 million students.

Patrick Ledesma is a National Board-certified teacher and School Based Technology Specialist in Fairfax, Virginia, where he focuses on instructional-technology integration and special education at the middle school level.

A series of six bi-weekly webinars emphasizing the important role of principals and school leaders as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are implemented.

The Common Core State Standards will employ technology-based assessments that will test students' research skills.

In the same way that cross-content literacy will become a norm, so too, will the use of technology throughout the curriculum.

The Common Core Standards will demand that students understand net safety and use proper web etiquette.

Schools across the USA are adding coursework focused on Internet privacy, cyberbullying and electronic plagiarism.

Kentucky educators on Monday ( February 20, 2012) heard more details about the state’s new common core standards from Education Commissioner Terry Holiday.

Highlights:

• The goal is for every student to be prepared for college or a career by the time he or she graduates high school.
• Just 38 percent of 2011 graduates were ready to enter college without taking any remediation courses, he said. “We want to eliminate that issue in Kentucky,” he said.
• The new test results cannot be compared to the old test results because the new ones are based on getting students ready for college and careers, Holliday said.
• While 70 to 80 percent of students were at least at a proficient level under the old system, officials are expecting that rate to drop 15 to 20 percent.
• New support tool for teachers to implement the common core standards into the classroom, called CIITS, or Continuous Instructional Improvement Technology System. CIITS is an online tool that lists the new standards, gives sample test questions for the new assessments and provides resources to help teach the standards in class.
• Grades 3-8: Students in grades three through eight will take Kentucky-Performance Rating for Educational Progress, which replaces KCCT, Sims said. K-PREP will cover reading, math, science, social studies and writing.
• High schoolers: will take end-of-course assessment for four subjects: U.S. history, biology, algebra II and English II, Sims said. The tests are created by the same company that makes the ACT.
• End-of-course: They will be given whenever students complete the course,

by Kathleen PorterMagee

Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute ignores a significant element of the research on Common Core State Standards.

It's the Implementation

• Whitehurst “concluded that the effects of curriculum on student achievement are larger, more certain, and less expensive than the effects of popular reforms such as common standards…”
• His point is that setting standards alone does very little, but that a thoughtfully and faithfully implemented rigorous curricula can move the achievement needle, sometimes dramatically.
• Whitehurst himself acknowledges. In 2009, he argued that “high quality common standards” can affect student achievement, but only
• “in a system in which there are also aligned assessments, and aligned curriculum, and accountability for educators, and accountability for students, and aligned professional development, and managerial autonomy for school leaders, and teachers who drawn from the best and brightest, and so on.”

Standards are a 1st Step

That said, Loveless is certainly right that standards—no matter how clear or how rigorous—are not a panacea that will transform our education system. But, setting clear and rigorous standards, as many states did by adopting the Common Core, is a critical first step towards driving achievement. Now it’s up to the states to commit themselves to properly implementing them.

Gaetan Pappalardo teaches third grade in West Deptford, NJ and is a regular blogger for Edutopia. His first children's book, Louie Licks and the Wicked Snakes, was released in Fall 2011.

For the last three months I've been aligning and adding the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to all of my lesson plans

"CCSS has pushed me to push my students two, three, four levels above their heads."

"Teachers have been teaching for a long time in a NCLB mind-set -- shallow, watery skills and memorized facts to pass a test at the end of the year."

"Time is needed to turn the ship away from the iceberg. And it's a big ship, my friends."

"Millions of students need to be rewired. Time, time, time. Time is needed for deconstruction and reconstruction of the student and the teacher.

...one of the main points of emphasis with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for mathematics is the requirement to show real-world applications of the material being taught.

This objective, if fully embraced, will result in a significantly altered the approach to teaching math, especially at the elementary level.

In order to create the connections necessary to clarify for students the power, potential, and prevalence of the curriculum they are being taught, the teacher must have a solid mathematical background and experiences which will allow him or her to dramatically illustrate the place of mathematics in a student’s environment.

Cris Tovani is the author of So...What Do They Really Know?

1. All Readers Deserve to Get Better. People who read well, read often.
2. Carve out reading time during class in all content areas.
3. Model how to construct meaning. (Think Aloud)
4. Provide some choice. "Choice drives engagement."

The new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) currently being rolled out in 46 states give little specific acknowledgement of the challenges for English language learners (ELLs).

The introduction to the CCSS states that identifying the supports needed to help ELLs (or any other population of students) is “beyond the scope of the Standards” (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010b, p. 6).

An ancillary document, available on the CCSS website (www.corestandards.org), gives some general guidelines for applying the standards to ELLs. Schools are recommended to provide:

Education reform efforts that focus on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) may have seized the attention of the experts, but principals need to call the shots so that they can lead their schools to higher standards and increased rigor. It’s time for principals to assume the important role of curriculum leader.

Today’s reform landscape transcends instructional leadership and data-based decisionmaking skills. This is not to say that those behaviors aren’t essential to a principal’s success, but they no longer suffice. Principals don’t need to be curriculum experts, but they do need to lead their schools with full knowledge of the CCSS, the new assessments tied to those standards, and the rigor embedded in both.

Presenter: Mel Riddile, NASSP Associate Director for High School Services

Materials: Common Core Powerpoint

Schools are struggling to meet the challenge of state assessments-helping every student reach "proficient." In the not-too-distant future, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) will significantly increase the rigor of current assessments, assess students in a skill that is rarely practiced, and force schoolwide changes in classroom instruction. This webinar will discuss why schools must begin preparations now, as well as what schools must do to meet the CCSS challenge.