Flexing Our Common Core Muscles

“One, two, three, four, exercise your Common Core!”

There has been a lot of controversy lately over the Common Core Standards that have been implemented in many states across the nation.  I’ve read articles about businesses increasing their support of the Common Core, politicians decrying the Common Core as federal overreaching, and parents who are unclear about what exactly the Common Core is. When I served on a Common Core panel at a PTA conference a couple of weeks ago, the parents had great questions, but their questions showed that due to all the “eduspeak” and reform talk going on in North Carolina right now, many are confused by what the Common Core and Essential Standards are. 

A recent Gallop poll found that more than sixty percent of the public has no idea what the Common Core actually is.  For educators, this might seem almost impossible to imagine since we hear the standards discussed all the time.  Check out this video from Scholastic to see what people have to say when asked what the Common Core Standards are! 

 

Hilarious, terrifying, or a little bit of both?  My favorite response from those questioned were  those that thought it was an exercise plan, which got me thinking about the Common Core and the Race to the Top.

 

In many ways an exercise plan is a good analogy for the new state standards.  First of all, we need to make sure that everyone knows what the Common Core Standards are.  The Common Core Standards are clear, consistent standards for math and language arts education that indicate the skills that students should be able to master upon the completion of each grade level in order to be competitive in an increasingly global world.  What is exceptional about these new standards is that for the first time in our nation’s history they ideally will be the same in every state.  That is great news for our students who exist in a much more transient world than the generations before them!  With families moving away from their home communities more frequently than ever, we need to ensure that our students do not get lost in the shuffle from one school to the next.  We also want to match up more evenly with other countries—countries that for the most part have national standards to ensure success across their nations.  For a quick explanation of the purpose of the standards, check out this video from the Council of the Great City Schools:

 

In spite of the focus of the Common Core, it does not mean that there are not standards for the rest of the disciplines like social studies, science, the arts, foreign languages, or healthful living.  These disciplines can be found within the Essential Standards.  These new Essential Standards, like the Common Core Standards, are more rigorous and are working to push students towards higher levels of critical thinking, problem solving, and college and career readiness.  Like the Common Core, they are not a predetermined curriculum that designates what books and resources everyone should be using.  Instead, both sets of standards focus on the skills that students should be able to master.  They are the desired outcome.  The curriculum, or the lessons and materials that are used to achieve these standards, are created by individual school districts, schools, and teachers.  In many ways, by focusing on these specific skills, which include project-based learning and technology integration, teachers have the opportunity to create more innovative lessons than ever before.  Additionally, because these teachers are in the classroom with their students, they have a great deal of flexibility in selecting the resources and the strategies that are most appropriate to help their individual group of students achieve ultimate success in their academic fitness levels.

Think back to the exercise analogy: when you exercise, in order to help all your other muscles stay strong and to prevent injury, you must develop your core muscles along your abdomen.  In order to be fully healthy and developed, you still must exercise the other body parts, paying attention to cardio and strength training, but the core muscles help the rest of the body move.  The same is true for the Common Core Standards.  By strengthening our Common Core muscles, all of the other disciplines that are part of the Essential Standards will become much stronger.  Math and language arts help the other subjects “move.”  Math facilitates understanding lab results in the sciences, examining the economy, calculating data in vocational and engineering classes, and even counting calories in health classes.  Language arts skills help students read important content in all classes and establish the grammatical foundation that they need in order to learn a second or third language.  Math and language arts are also important in the arts: knowing scale for a work of art, learning art history, reading music, and producing a play all depend on both math skills and language arts skills.  Don’t think of the Common Core as eliminating the other very important aspects of a well-rounded educational  workout; think of the Common Core as creating the common ground and skills that the other subjects need to grow stronger. 

The Common Core Standards also “up the ante” in terms of the education that our students receive.  As mentioned before, the standards are much more rigorous than the previous standards.  Take for example, calculating the area of a rectangle in a math class.  (Now, bear with me as I attempt to leave my English teacher ways and enter the frightening realm of math!)  When you learned how to calculate area, you were told, “Just multiply width times height.”  You knew to perform this mathematical function because you were told that it was what you needed to do.  You simply memorized the formula.  Now, look at the standard for third grade math from the Common Core:

Students recognize area as an attribute of two-dimensional regions. They measure the area of a shape by finding the total number of same size units of area required to cover the shape without gaps or overlaps, a square with sides of unit length being the standard unit for measuring area. Students understand that rectangular arrays can be decomposed into identical rows or into identical columns. By decomposing rectangles into rectangular arrays of squares, students connect area to multiplication, and justify using multiplication to determine the area of a rectangle.

That’s a huge difference, right!?  It might sound a little confusing upon first read, but all it states is that students should understand (through hands-on manipulatives, illustrations, or visualization) that the total of the individual unit squares make up the total area, thus mutliplication will give you the total number of unit squares.  The shift in this basic mathematical procedure, like the shift throughout the Common Core, is that it does not just focus on teaching content, but instead it focuses on teaching skills.  No longer is the student answer, “I calculate this or write this because my teacher told me to” a valid academic response.  Now when asked why they perform a certain calculation or use a specific rhetorical device in an essay, students have to have a much more precise answer for why they do something.  As someone who always asked my math teachers, “Why?”, I love this new way of thinking about learning.  It would have helped a very inquisitive, analytical young me develop a much stronger appreciation for mathematics!  I’m sure there are many other former students who feel the same way.  Instead of letting our students reach an academic fitness plateau by focusing on rote memorization, by teaching them how and why, we are able to empower them to take the skills they learn and use them in a world much larger than the classroom.  We are teaching them how to be the next generation of innovators and problem solvers, and that will open up doors of economic and personal opportunity for our students.

                Finally, there is one more area that must be addressed as it relates to the Common Core—accountability. When you ask teachers how they feel about the Common Core, almost all agree that the new standards have the potential to make a strong impact in the quality of learning for their students.  What the teachers do not like is the continued expansion of high-stakes testing.  I’m not going to state all my opinions on testing and grading, as I’ve already done that in a previous blog post (which you can read here), but I want to make one thing clear: The Common Core Standards do not necessarily mean that we have to have more standardized testing.  We do need to measure the gains of our students, but we do not need to do this every time through a high-stakes test.  There are so many opportunities for other forms of assessment within the Common Core that are more directly relevant to college and career readiness: projects, portfolios, presentations, etc.  We need to examine some alternative forms of assessment before relying too much on primarily multiple choice tests.  If you look at the twenty-first century education model, it includes “multiple measures of mastery” as part of its assessment requirements.  We need to think seriously about how we can assess our students in more than just one way to see if they are academically fit.  You wouldn’t expect a sprinter and a long distance runner to beat each other in their respective sports, but it doesn’t mean that one is less “fit” than the other.  We need to look to how we can fully assess our students’ learning, and that does not always come in a one-size-fits-all race.  The overall skills (standards) needed for success can be the same, but the ways that success is demonstrated (assessments) may be different.

                While the Common Core and Essential Standards are a significant moment of change in North Carolina and are still a work in progress in terms of their implementation, there is much about them that should be applauded.  Personally, I love the new standards and saw exponential (another math term!) growth in both my high-achieving students and my more struggling students last year.  I hope that I was able to clarify some misconceptions about the new standards here.  I would hate to see us give up the race altogether because we aren’t yet in the best shape to win, especially when the victory involves our students’ success.  Instead, we need to examine where we need to improve, create a conditioning plan that starts with the core but gives a full workout, and keep flexing our Common Core muscles until our public schools are stronger and faster in the global race than they ever were before.