Standards and Disciplines

"This collection of blog posts highlights lesson plans, ideas, and other useful resources to help you bring Common Core-aligned lessons into your classroom. We're actively building this repository of ideas every week, so make sure to bookmark this page. You can also follow #CCSS or #CCSSChat on Twitter for the latest updates."

"Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of dense, conflicting information out there about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)? You're not alone. Connecting with other educators is often a great way to uncover useful CCSS information, tools, and resources. Consider sharing your voice in online communities: on Twitter (#CCSS or #CommonCore), on Pinterest (Edutopia's Common Core pinboard is one place to start), or in Edutopia's community discussions about the Common Core. If you'd like even more help making sense of the initiative, here's Edutopia's guide to other organizations that offer valuable resources."

"So it's been a few years since the Common Core, and wow, has it been a wild ride! Some states have dropped the CCSS altogether and replaced them with similar standards. Some still have the CCSS, but have opted out of the tests related to them. Parents are also choosing to have their students opt out from these high-stakes tests. Some teachers are reporting the rigorous learning happening in their classrooms, while others are concerned about the appropriate level of the rigor. Textbook companies have been called out on their true lack of aligned materials, and great teachers have been creating their own lessons and units to meet their students' needs."

"This post continues a series begun in 2014 on implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The first installment introduced an analytical scheme investigating CCSS implementation along four dimensions: curriculum, instruction, assessment, and accountability. Three posts focused on curriculum. This post turns to instruction. Although the impact of CCSS on how teachers teach is discussed, the post is also concerned with the inverse relationship, how decisions that teachers make about instruction shape the implementation of CCSS."

"Reading a picture book aloud from her armchair, 20 children gathered on the rug at her feet, kindergarten teacher Jamie Landahl is carrying on a practice that's been a cornerstone of early-literacy instruction for decades. But if you listen closely, you'll see that this is not the read-aloud of your childhood. Something new and very different is going on here."

"A professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education has launched a new free math curriculum designed to help engage students more deeply in math. Dubbed the "Week of Inspirational Math," the program is aimed at students in grades 5-9 and includes five lessons, one for each day in a week, featuring math problems designed to be fun and engaging along with videos with positive messages about math. Teachers using the curriculum will also be able to join a network offering additional support and resources throughout the school year. "We want to give kids inspirational math tasks that help them see math as a lovely subject of beautiful patterns and deep inquiry," said Jo Boaler, the program's designer, in a prepared statement. "And we want teachers to see what happens when kids are really engaged in math." Boaler said she hopes teachers will use the program at the beginning of the school year to give students a positive experience right off the bat and set the tone for the rest of the year, but the program can be used at any point. "The lessons address five key areas of math: geometry, algebra, numbers, patterns and connections," according to a news release. "The problems are so-called 'low floor, high ceiling' tasks that are accessible to all students but can be solved in different ways to challenge those just being introduced to the topics as well as high achievers. They also emphasize different messages: Mistakes help you grow, for example, and it's not how fast you complete a task that's important but how deeply you understand it." The Common Core-aligned program is the latest offering from YouCubed at Stanford, a program Boaler helped launch that aims to make new research into math learning accessible to teachers and parents. "We're researching and using new brain science to find out how best people learn," said Boaler, in a prepared statement. "Then, we're giving teachers things they can actually do in their classroom based on this research." The program

"How disturbing is the following quote, from this New York Times story titled "English Class in Common Core Era: 'Tom Sawyer' and Court Opinions?""

"Last spring, Susan Sluyter quit teaching kindergarten in the Cambridge Public Schools. She'd spent nearly two decades in the classroom, and her departure wasn't a happy one. In a resignation letter, Sluyter railed against a "disturbing era of testing and data" that had trickled down from the upper grades and was now assaulting kindergartners with a barrage of new academic demands that "smack of 1st or 2nd grade." The school district did not respond to a request for comment."

"For example, ask questions to clarify if the student is asserting a fact, a feeling or an argument. How do we know it is a fact? A fact is a specific detail based on an objective truth. A feeling or an opinion is a value judgement that can neither be proven nor disproven. An argument is a way to utilize facts to validate your opinions, it can be considered a fact-filled opinion. Again, using these concepts as scaffolds and requiring the identification of the building blocks of successful argumentation will keep the peace when the blood is boiling."

"The Common Core State Standards that most states have adopted have triggered plenty of political debate. But have they transformed how teachers are teaching - and what students are learning? Not nearly enough, according to Education Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to closing achievement gaps. "

"Most educators I know who teach propaganda stick with examples related to America's involvement in WWI and WWII. These teachers present propaganda as something that occurred in the past. They might even teach with the many propaganda posters that were present at that time and introduce the common "techniques of persuasion." (New Mexico Media Literacy Project, 2007)"

"his month, we're covering Common Core: Where are we now? In this blog post, education leader Fred Ende suggests two facts he says cannot be ignored about the Common Core State Standards: they create a common language and support "true rigor." When the Common Core State Standards were released in June 2010, it set off a storm of activity. Many states chose to adopt and implement; some did not, and still others chose to create their own standards that were, in some ways, almost a "Common Core Lite" version. Regardless of the politics and personal viewpoints many have shared since then, two facts can't be ignored:"

"3. Know and Align the Standards or Outcomes There may come a time when learning will be so open that students will be able to learn whatever they want. However, in this day and age, we are accountable to learning standards and outcomes. This doesn't mean that we can't be flexible in how we help students reach these learning objectives. And personalized PBL can help us find that flexibility. As students generate their questions, project ideas, and products for learning, teachers must align their work to standards and outcomes, which means that teachers need to know their standards deeply in order to serve as translators of students' personalized projects to the standards. Teachers can create checklists of the standards, sub-standards, and outcomes to work through the "weeds" of hitting the standards through personalized projects, and they can use these checklists with students to co-create project ideas and assessments. See Edutopia's Building Rigorous Projects That Are Core to Learning for ideas."

"When I first started teaching writing in history class a number of years ago, I was totally focused on the students just getting their ideas out and being able to write on historical themes."

"Political cartoons deliver a punch. They take jabs at powerful politicians, reveal official hypocrisies and incompetence and can even help to change the course of history. But political cartoons are not just the stuff of the past. Cartoonists are commenting on the world's current events all the time, and in the process, making people laugh and think. At their best, they challenge our perceptions and attitudes."

"Gene Wilhoit served as chief state school officer in Arkansas and in Kentucky before the Council of Chief State School Officers asked him to assume the leadership of their association. Two decades earlier, Wilhoit had served as an active member of the board of an organization, the New Standards Project, that I had put together to develop new, internationally benchmarked student performance standards for the American states, along with a set of assessments set to those standards. After he took the helm as Executive Director of the CCSSO, Wilhoit led the successful joint effort of the country's chief state school officers and its governors to create the Common Core State Standards. In this multi-part interview, I talk with Wilhoit about why he thought it so important to create the standards and what he thinks will be needed to fully implement them. "

"Showroom Models - Roadmaps - Navigate text complexity with a text roadmap, a tool that brings together the quantitative measures, qualitative measures, and reader and task considerations of a text in one format."

"Schools are presented with lists of Academic Standards for their courses which represent things students should know and be able to do by the end of the course. These standards documents are long and detailed. And overwhelming. A school that plans a 180 day calendar (a typical number of school days per year) will have a difficult time trying to find enough time to give equal attention to all standards."

"Until the release of the Common Core State Standards, many educators didn't realize that writing skills need to develop incrementally, with the work that students do at one grade level standing on the shoulders of prior learning. It would be hard to achieve this high level of craft and knowledge if students weren't moving steadily along a spiralling curriculum, practicing and extending skills in each type of writing each year. After all, in math, teachers agree on content and ensure that students move up the grade levels with the essential skills that teachers agreed upon. That same focus on writing as content, as a set of skills, will move grade levels of students forward, rather than individuals who happened to get this teacher or that. Writing will needto be given its due, starting in kindergarten and continuing throughout the grades."-LUCY CALKINS

"For some, the Common Core State Standards seemed to come from nowhere, and appeared to be a sneaky attack on states' rights to control local education. But for those involved in writing the standards, it was nothing short of an exhaustive and collaborative years-long effort aimed at raising the achievement levels of students across the country. "