Blog 15

Prompt 1: Common Core and You! After participating in the webinar about Common Core Standards, what are your concerns? What ah-ha did you have about CCS? What will you continue to do or do differently to ensure that you are teaching to the CCS?

My initial concerns about the Common Core mainly surround how standardized assessment data will be used. I'm all for the method of using alternative questioning techniques because this pushes educators to focus on deeper understandings on learning objectives. Still, the structures are not in place at our school for rigorous learning and remediation. Currently, I do not think that the results will be favorable. And in some ways, I almost think that policymakers and CCS designers are hoping for districts to fail just so they can provide some fodder for education reform. I fear that teachers will feel punished if this data is used for evaluative purposes, but what else is data used to do?

I do like that the movement is focusing more on less standards and more in-depth and rigorous learning. Certainly, the pacing is key to ensuring that teachers feel prepared to provide adequate learning experiences for all students. Structures need to be in place that support students needing remedial practice, and students in need of enrichment also need challenging and creative ways to apply what they have learned (sounds like a lot of SolutionTree-speak, I know). Perhaps all of this will just take time to develop. I certainly hope another reformational program or movement doesn't swoop in soon to wash over this.

Currently, our school uses Beyond Textbooks for its curriculum, which isn't very helpful as far as resources. I've been told that the curriculum is CCS-aligned, but our benchmark assessments don't even model the same type of questioning that our students are expected to tackle for PARCC. While I do use the BT formative assessments, I believe that I need to start incorporating more formative assessments that ask students to find multiple ways of arriving at solutions. For example, I could teach multiple ways to graph linear functions (using slope-intercept form, creating a function table and evaluating the function, etc.) or show students how to rearrange the same formula multiple times to solve for a certain variable. Whatever the case, our students just need more practice.