Thoughts on the Common Core for Teachers

What do the new standards of the Common Core mean for teachers? Again, we look at college and career as our starting point. In most careers, the professional must always be learning and growing in order to stay relevant and current in his or her field. This has been true for teachers, but now the need for professional growth and development is even more important. How do professionals and college students do their work? To make a broad generalization, the work often involves researching a problem and collaborating with others on a solution. Many of the projects and procedures in the business world require individuals to meet, email, or pick up a phone in order to secure resources and relevant data in order to be successful.

This will now trickle down to how students will learn. Of course students need an individual skill-set as a starting point, but the role of the teacher is shifting from an instructor of teacher-led instruction to a facilitator of student-led learning. Collaboration is more than just an educational buzz-word. It is the vehicle by which learning takes place.

This means that teachers must be growing and learning along with their students and must constantly hone and modify their craft. Teachers must filter everything they do, not through a formal set of standards, but through the filter of relevance and efficacy. They must change the way they present information and must be able give a rationale for what they impart to their students. This very well might strike terror into the heart of those dogmatic teachers that have a habit of dodging the question: "Why do I have to learn this?" because they are now expected to have an answer for that very inquiry!

Teaching this innovative way with these new standards shouldn't overwhelm or discourage us as educators, but rather energize and excite us as we now have the directive and the ability to encourage students to take ownership of their own learning. We are now in a position to create life-long learners who can think for themselves and yet are adept at working together to create synergy and find solutions.

Thoughts on the Common Core for Students

I am excited about the Common Core standards and what they brings to Alabama and most of the nation as a whole.  The idea behind the CC was to start with college and career standards and work backwards rather than the traditional way of building up from kindergarten/first grade.  The problem with the traditional way of progression was that many students were completing high school but finding themselves unprepared for college rigor and workplace expectations. 

By working backwards, gaps and holes that had been overlooked in traditional education are now being filled.  This has created standards that are much more rigorous and relevant to what our students will need when they leave the sanctuary of our halls for the challenge of the real world. 

"Shift" is a word that you will see over and over again in the transition into CC standards.  In math, the overall shift is one from basic math practice and repetition to real-world application and number theory.  Mathematics will focus more on depth and less on breadth with attention give to deep understanding and mastery of anchor concepts instead of the shotgun exposure approach that has been taught in the past. 

In reading, the shift to requiring textual support to justify answers and the return to working with complex text and vocabulary will challenge our students to become higher-level thinkers.  This will equip them with the skills to reason and communicate effectively.  No longer will a story or an informational text be given merit based simply on how a student "feels" about it but will be put through the student's academic critique of analysis and evaluation to determine the validity and relevance of the passage. 

These are just an overview of some of the shifts the CC bring, but they illustrate the difference in the CC standards versus our traditional Alabama course of study. 

Welcome to the Common Core Alabama blog

Our hope is that this blog will be a vehicle for sharing resources and ideas for implementing the Common Core standards in Alabama.  If you are reading this blog, you probably have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the Common Core standards and are most likely aware that Alabama is integrating the Common Core math standards into Alabama's course of study this year.  Next year will begin the integration of the language arts standards into our course of study.

In Madison County, we have been given the task of creating a plan to integrate both math and language arts Common Core standards into our current course of study.  We are researching how other states have gone through this process and we hope to be able to benefit from their pioneering of this implementation.

We see the process as requiring three steps:

1. To explain to our personnel the philosophy and shifts behind the Common Core standards through sharing information related to the standards.
2. To develop a roadmap and timeline for the district and our individual schools that will give step by step instruction for implementing the standards.
3. To equip our personnel with Common Core tools, strategies, and resources that will ensure the successful adoption of these new standards.

As this is new territory for all of us, we welcome professional questions, comments, suggestions, and feedback as we learn from each other.