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.