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The Common Core State Standards state what students should master, but they are not a curriculum.
Jumping from the standards to create lesson plans misses a crucial middle step of developing a coherent curriculum. The absence of this more complex work of creating a local curricular framework for the district, which informs the sequence and breadth of instruction (usually referred to as “scope and sequence”), will result in weak implementation of Common Core. For example, one of the math standards for seventh grade is to use proportional thinking and percentage to solve problems such as: “If $50 is 20 percent of your total funds, how much do you have?” That standard doesn’t answer the question of how much instructional time should be invested in helping students master this standard (actually quite a lot), what strategies will be effective, what should be the progression of learning and how does instruction correlate with previous units.
A similar point is made in the English Language Arts standards. They stress the need for a coherent curriculum and a systematic build-up of knowledge both through literature broadly defined and the disciplines. They state: “By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.”
Unfortunately, many districts have not undertaken this crucial work. In a Common Core survey conducted last October by the Consortium for the Implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the County Offices of Education, which covered 818 districts representing 83 percent of California’s public school enrollment, only about one-third of school districts have created a scope and sequence for the the Common Core standards in either English Language Arts or mathematics for at least some grades. More than one-third of school districts report that this work is planned for the future and about one-quarter report that they are not planning to engage in this work at all. Alternatively, only about half the districts are creating units or lessons, or aligning existing units or lessons to the Common Core standards.
Although many districts and professionals are understandably feeling the pressure of the impending Smarter Balanced assessments and will be tempted to rely exclusively on the scope and sequence of the textbooks they adopt, this strategy may be less than ideal in the long run. A single textbook is no substitute for a district plan that encourages the use of a combination of resources and provides teachers guidance on the order in which standards should be taught, how much time should be spent on them and how they fit in the larger context of the grade-to-grade buildup of knowledge. Teachers need this context to maximize the effect of adopted materials. Thus, many effective districts are developing their own curricular frameworks to support the more complex instruction envisioned by standards.
For example, Long Beach’s scope and sequence documents provide a comprehensive “blueprint” for strategically sequencing and operationalizing the grade-level/course standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics. The critical attributes of each document are:
There are also other very useful resources available to help in developing a coherent curriculum to implement the Common Core standards.
I hope this piece will be useful in supporting our collective efforts to improve educational performance. By placing instruction and a coherent curriculum based on Common Core standards at the center of a five- to 10-year improvement effort and by building school, district, state and organizational capacity to continuously support that implementation, we should be well on our way to a successful launch of these potentially transformative standards.
•••
Bill Honig is chairman of the Instructional Quality Commission and former California State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
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Jennifer 10 years ago10 years ago
I'm glad Common Core looks good in Sacramento. From the driver's seat in a carpool in Long Beach, where all the passengers have the same high school math teacher, it does not. That teacher won't answer student questions because he says Common Core doesn't allow that. Many students hire private tutors so there's the opposite of anything common going on. In addition, my daughter and her friends spend hours on FaceTime trying to decode the … Read More
I’m glad Common Core looks good in Sacramento. From the driver’s seat in a carpool in Long Beach, where all the passengers have the same high school math teacher, it does not. That teacher won’t answer student questions because he says Common Core doesn’t allow that. Many students hire private tutors so there’s the opposite of anything common going on. In addition, my daughter and her friends spend hours on FaceTime trying to decode the few clues they have from the “teacher.” I think they did figure out the teacher was blowing thousands of dollars in poker from Twitter, but geometry under common core remains an enigma. I have been unable to get any help from the teacher, the principal, every school administrator, the school district and the school board member who “represents” the school. Common Core is the rationale that taxpayers don’t matter. The situation has made my daughter hate school and reconsider careers in medicine. At this point, she does not even care if she graduates high school. If that was the plan in Long Beach, I guess your soldiers did their job.
Don 10 years ago10 years ago
Thanks for providing that youtube link. However, I didn't take Gates's comment the way you did - a capitalist looking to make a buck or a billion. Call me naïve, but instructional materials are big business whether they are state or federal standards. What Gates was referring to was the opportunity that businesses have to employ economies of scale in developing great educational products in the digital age. They aren't going to do it for … Read More
Thanks for providing that youtube link. However, I didn’t take Gates’s comment the way you did – a capitalist looking to make a buck or a billion. Call me naïve, but instructional materials are big business whether they are state or federal standards. What Gates was referring to was the opportunity that businesses have to employ economies of scale in developing great educational products in the digital age. They aren’t going to do it for free and we’re likely to get better more innovative learning tools when standards are aligned. If you get to the end of that video clip he talks about making learning fun. If content providers have more incentive to develop better products, what’s wrong with that?
Down with envy.
Mary Walsh 10 years ago10 years ago
Everything that Richard Moore said…
From Bill Gates’s 2009 speech on CC$$ and Captive Education Markets:
“And it [Common Core State Standards] will unleash a POWERFUL MARKET of people providing services for teaching. For the first time there
will be a LARGE UNIFORM BASE OF CUSTOMERS LOOKING AT USING PRODUCTS
that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtTK_6VKpf4
Michael Metcalf 10 years ago10 years ago
Interesting to me Mr. Honig, you place so much confidence and reliance on a "District Plan". Who is the district about which you speak? Those working in administrative positions within the bureaucracy of most districts are far removed from the realities of the everyday happenings within the classroom, even when the "district" refers to and relies upon their "so-called" experts. I find it quite ludicrous, if not foolhardy to place the "scope and … Read More
Interesting to me Mr. Honig, you place so much confidence and reliance on a “District Plan”. Who is the district about which you speak? Those working in administrative positions within the bureaucracy of most districts are far removed from the realities of the everyday happenings within the classroom, even when the “district” refers to and relies upon their “so-called” experts. I find it quite ludicrous, if not foolhardy to place the “scope and sequence” of learning in the hands of anyone other than the expert i.e. the teacher. In the hands of the teacher the process of learning is honored for what it truly is, a journey of investigation and discovery. Time frames need to be flexible. No stakes formative assessments need to be used thus honoring the learning process for each individual. We are no longer “testing” students. We are assessing and evaluating their critical thinking. If one wants to label a student’s level of achievement, maybe we should consider using the number of standard deviations one’s performance is from the mean. Common Core Standards speak to this paradigm shift within education. Decisions regarding student learning need to be made by educators, the infantry men and women who wage the good fight not the generals atop the hill with spyglass in hand.
Richard Moore 10 years ago10 years ago
Why on earth would it matter what the CC$$ contains? Its purpose has nothing to do with education. It is a plan devised by Broad and Pearson to make money through massive new testing and sales of technology. Now the felon is pimping for his bosses. Where is the news?
David Patterson 10 years ago10 years ago
The key point Bill Honig makes is that standards are not a curriculum. He raises the alarm that we in California are missing the key connection between standards – what students need to know and be able to do, and the day-to-day lesson plans teachers create. What Mr. Honig says is lacking is a local curricular scope and sequence. I totally agree that a high quality curricular scope and sequence that guides lesson planning is critical. … Read More
The key point Bill Honig makes is that standards are not a curriculum. He raises the alarm that we in California are missing the key connection between standards – what students need to know and be able to do, and the day-to-day lesson plans teachers create. What Mr. Honig says is lacking is a local curricular scope and sequence.
I totally agree that a high quality curricular scope and sequence that guides lesson planning is critical. However, I don’t think the best course is for 1,000+ school districts and charter schools across California to do the very hard and difficult work of creating a high quality curricular scope and sequence that is coherent and sequenced. The good news is they don’t have to. A number of California schools are already using the nationally recognized Core Knowledge Curriculum Sequence, which is coherent, cumulative and content-specific (www.coreknowledge.org). It is well developed, has rich resources for teachers and embraced by hundreds of schools and thousands of teachers and families throughout the country.
A quick overview of how the Core Knowledge Curriculum Sequence can be the powerful bridge between California standards and the day-to-day lesson plans that guide learning in classrooms for millions of California student is summarized in this excerpt from American Educator. http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter1011/CommonCore.pdf
David Patterson
Member, Placer County Board of Education