Reply to Why are people so upset about Common Core?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Why are people so upset about Common Core?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]The Common Core State Standards are a list of standards, with a few appendices which list things like titles to give a sense of reading levels. That's it. That's all they are. If you object to one or more of the standards, then name the standard you object to. If you object to the idea of children in California learning the same thing as children in DC, then explain why.

Otherwise, if you're objecting to the choices that states or local education authorities have made in how they choose to design their curriculum or assess student progress, then name the states and the choices and say you object to those. But understand that those things aren't Common Core State Standards.

If you object to aspects of NCLB or of RTTT then say that. But understand that neither of those things are Common Core State Standards. [/quote]

Do YOU understand that a standard is nothing without implementation? [/quote]

Do YOU understand that setting goals and planning how to meet them are two different steps in a process, and that you can question one without the other?

I'll give you a simplified example.

As a Kindergarten teacher, one of the things that I have always taught students to do is to associate letters with their most common sounds.  I've been teaching for enough years that there have been many iterations of this standard, which Common Core expresses as follows:

[quote=The actual Common Core State Standards]

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.A
Demonstrate basic knowledge of one-to-one letter-sound correspondences by producing the primary sound or many of the most frequent sounds for each consonant.

[/quote]

At the beginning of my career , I taught at a school that used a program with key words to attempt to teach this goal.  However, with this program we weren't achieving the results we hoped for.  Even towards the end of the year students were still mixing up letter names and letter sounds, or forgetting letter sounds, and they weren't carrying this problem over to their reading.

So, we investigated.  The first question needed to be:

Is this a standards problem (meaning that we're expecting something that's either too hard and unrealistic, or unnecessary)  OR is this a curriculum problem (meaning that goal is reasonable, but the curriculum isn't helping us reach that goal)?

We investigated and decided that it was the latter, that kids this age can absolutely learn letter sounds, but that our curriculum wasn't good.  We decided that it didn't contain enough direct instruction in phonemic awareness, and that the key word idea was too abstract.  We added in daily games and activities that targeted phonemic awareness, and changed our presentation of the information, so that kids learned hand motions to go along with the sounds.  And we got the results that we wanted.

This was an implementation problem, not a standards problem.

On the other hand, I once toured a preschool where the director told me that her 2 year old students were all able to recognize the shapes of the Great Lakes when drawn on flashcards.  She must have had great implementation, because that's certainly not an easy task, but her standards sucked.  Identifying Great Lakes on flashcards is simultaneously hard and useless.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics