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Common Core Sample: Plumbing the Dark Mysteries of National Standards
February 16, 2012 | Gaetan PappalardoI'm cranky. Are you? I've just been a downright Scrooge, though I really don't mean to. And I didn't know why until today. You see, for the last three months I've been aligning and adding the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to all of my lesson plans. And, like drinking wine tainted with an undetectable, scentless, tasteless, and usually in powder form, poison, it's been secretly making me ill.
Maybe it's been the recent blogs and articles about the CCSS that opened my eyes or the recent workshop I attended on aligning the CCSS. Not sure. But I do know that I'm not usually cranky, except when I'm hungry.
Raising the Bar
I can feel there's a transformation going on within the kids in my classroom, and I have my suspicions that these standards are playing a not-so-insignificant part. Right now it's only a minor morph, but I feel it. They are growing up, maturing, thinking deeper and wider. In my eyes, they're more like eleven. But they don't know it. ("I'm eight, Mr. P." "No, you're eleven, darnit! Act like it. It's standard now.") CCSS has pushed me to push my students two, three, four levels above their heads. I'm all about pushing, getting the most out of my students. But right now I feel like I'm trying to push a slimy oyster into a slot machine. It's just not going to happen. And the CCSS is telling me that what I'm teaching is standard, middle of the road stuff. Like I said, cranky.
It's this constant tug-of-war between what's standard (Do we really have a standard student? A standard teacher? A standard learner?) and what eight-year-olds can physically and mentally do, what their physiology allows them to create, deduce, interpret and analyze.
Sure, I want my students to excel. I want them to be able to...
LA.3.RI.3.3 - [Grade Level Standard] - Describe the relationship between a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures in a text, using language that pertains to time, sequence, and cause/effect.
Absolutely! That would be awesome. And I want them to...
LA.3.RL.CCR.8 - [Anchor Standard] - Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
Eight-year-olds, dude.
Muddying the Waters
This is all in good intention, but maybe... I've got it! Maybe my pissy mood is rooted in the standards' utter lack of a clue regarding the machinations of the third grade mind. When a third grader delineates an argument, what does it look and sound like? And more importantly -- what will mastery look like?
Man, I don't know. And I can't find a thing about it. If we need to be UBD-ing it, we need to know the end point before we can make a plan to get there. Right? I wouldn't attempt to teach someone how to play the blues like Muddy Waters without making them listen to Muddy first. If the state and government want students to achieve on a higher level, teachers, students and parents probably should know what that level looks like. Right now, the end is muddy.
The standards look good on paper. They go deep on paper. But . . . 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. Kind of like a temporary tattoo. On paper, the CCSS embeds deeper ink, but 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. It's probably not a good time to start a new way to evaluate teachers, but so many states are in this accountability frenzy that is doesn't matter. How many teachers will lose their jobs because of students not cutting it with the new standards? That's a bit of a concern, especially when fifty percent of teacher evaluation is based on an assessment directly conceived from the CCSS.
A National Standard
All but five states have adopted the CCSS. This is the closest that the United States has ever been to a countrywide standardization. I've been thinking about this, and I'm not sure if it's good or bad. If the standards live up to the hype, then it's good? When I learned to play tennis, I had to break a few bad habits before I could thoroughly practice for perfection. If I hit a rotten forehand four hundred times it's still a rotten forehand (probably worse). Can't blame my effort. Hopefully the CCSS is not rotten. However, I don't think it matters because we've already jumped off the diving board. I just hope there's water in the pool. But seriously, if something is grand and standardized, is it no longer grand? When I visited the Nancie Atwell Center for Teaching and Learning, I saw all teachers teaching the same way, but it was marvelous and real and I would want my own children to experience such an education. The whole school ran on the same systems and believed in the same philosophy. It worked for them. I guess you can say it was standard, but it is an honest and real education. Thomas Newkirk, in his article The Text Itself brings up a very good point that we should all be aware of as we attempt to teach and live under the shadow of CCSS: "Bad things happen to good ideas when they become mandates."
Will national standards raise the United States out of the muck and grime? Will it save our souls from the nuclear fallout of NCLB? In the words of Butt-head, "Uh, no." It's too grand of a scheme to work, right? It's too vast and open for interpretation. What really matters is what's going on in the classroom day-to-day, hour-to-hour and minute-to-minute. The small stuff, brothers and sisters.
What experiences have you had with the CCSS?
Do you think it will lead to a national curriculum?
What pressures? Stress?
What successes?
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Comments (22)
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Why Does Fear and Loathing Prevail Among Educators?
Crankiness and other extreme emotions aside, standards and using them as the basis for lesson planning is actually a good thing. Why?
I've taught in both private and public schools. While neither are perfect, the latter has an advantage and the great thing is that pre-service teacher education at the post-secondary level in PA state universities have you write at least a hundred lesson plans until it's all said and done. The common core is standards or anchors. Proper lesson objectives descend from the standards. The lesson assessment must align with the lesson objective, otherwise, the lesson is ineffective.
With private schools, I've seen curricula invented out of thin air, based on an individual teacher's preferences or biases. In private schools, many teachers are uncertified, so they've never been trained to compose a lesson plan, to properly implement instruction, or to compose a proper assessment. They may be masters of content, but as many of you know who possess college degrees, many professors simply do not know how to teach. They can feed information and that's it.
That's not teaching. I once knew of a private school teacher who could not understand why she was fired for giving a failing grade to a student whose political views did not match hers, despite the student having evidently written a paper with above average form, grammatics, spelling, etc.
C'mon, Gae, I believe you are intelligent enough to understand that the language by which the standards are written are not meant to be read by third grade students. Any college grad should know the definition of "delineate."
As the other respondent mentioned, many creative ways can be implemented to meet the standards with some imagination. Your better texbook series offer loads of suggestions, especially those in language arts. Think of ways to make a lesson involve as many different standards across different subjects. It can be done. I've seen it work.
It takes imagination and some work, that's all, plus a little faith in the process.
I know of this animus toward NCLB because I've been hearing the chorus of complaints in faculty lounges for years. It's mostly from the older veteran teachers who don't want new challenges or extra work. They want to repeat the same basic lessons year in and year out and coast toward retirement and their pension.
You get what you give!
While I patiently wait for the Next Generation Science Standards (call 'em Common Core and face trademark infringement!) I feel the pain of the elementary teacher that must sift through standards for all subject areas. While well intentioned and idealistic, the standards will still only accomplish what the teacher and their administrators put in to them. Teaching during the last round of standards alignment, I saw twenty teachers take twenty different approaches and come up with twenty different ways to make their curriculum "meet" the standards. Some would bend the meaning and intent of the standards, simply to continue teaching the same material, or to show that they indeed have "covered" all of the standards.
We need networks of educators discussing the outward reflections you seek for each and every standard. Then, we need teachers who are willing to take the time to reflect on the impact of every learning experience on every student in their classrooms, then abandon, modify, or supplement as necessary to justify their accountability.
Be cranky...it's warranted.