Common Core via Ed week

I particularly liked the Ed Week articles! The one on the difficulties that English learners are having with Common Core was helpful. I saw that Andrew has made a scaffold for his students and I would add that there is also a nice math focused scaffold in “Supporting English Language Learners in Math Class”, by Rusty Bresser, et al. It is a great book and there is another more recent one by him on Science.

The Ed week article that I found most helpful immediately was the one on fractions. I learned a lot, and I HAD thought I was doing pretty well. It made the scope much more clear to me, and also clarified aspects of my own grade level(s) focus. Oh well, live and learn!

Something that bothered me was the comment about generalist teachers not having the training for teaching Common Core. Apparently there is some shock as to how much conceptual training was needed in the teacher corps. Considering that most teachers today have been taught by non-constructivist means, and in fact usually by the very methods we are now trying to improve upon, it should have been understood. It makes perfect sense to me that almost ALL of the teaching corps needs re-education. It is not that teachers are not smart enough but that their teachers often taught algorithms, not concepts, for the most part. In my experience teaching, if you learn a shortcut before you learn the concept, it is the shortcut that you remember. It is always important to present the opportunity to construct understanding first, and only much, much later step in with an algorithm. If in our education classes, a concept was presented, many people would still go back to the algorithm or mnemonic they remember. In my son’s words about algorithms when he first experienced them, “when you do it this way, you don’t have to think about it.” He had learned conceptually. However, most of us did not, and that goes a long, long way back.

The use of a number line as a better representation of fractions, of course in combination with other modeling tools, makes perfect sense to me. I used to teach middle school and often battled the disconnect that kids had when they had only seen circle models of fractions and then we moved to number lines and positive and negative numbers too. It is important to build that understanding of number sense up inclusively. Fractions are numbers. I think this is a very positive move of Common Core.

Like several of my classmates, I truly think that there are issues with some standards that are developmentally inappropriate. Also, there are huge issues with turning around and testing children as if they had the years of foundational information and process, all within a short change of public educational standards. It takes five or six years for a fifth grader to develop skills, which are built up from pre-K or K. The article about concerns with the Common Core standards in Texas is an example. Six weeks into a new way of educating a child, you are going to test them and hold them up to imposed new standards that should have been started with them years before? And send home a note that they are failing?

I think we are failing children by not paying more attention to the children’s developmental abilities and growth process. Education is a process. We cannot impose developmentally inappropriate material, and we cannot ask a generation to turn on a dime and ‘know’ the new standards. It is going to take time to change.