Common Core

I enjoyed getting a picture of the people who created the Math aspects of Common Core. I found it interesting and actually a bit shocking to hear what has happened to what they thought they were creating. I do generally think Common Core is a move in the right direction. We certainly need to have deeper understanding in our population in order to sustain a democracy and make the important decisions that stand in our environmental future and otherwise. However, I disagree with several of my cohort about curriculum being the issue. I think it is much bigger than a curriculum issue. As several of my classmates said, we cannot simply hand out a new text to meet the new standards. This is a much larger change!

We recognize that we have several generations both in and out of school, parents, teachers and  the general public taxpayers, people who have been brought through an education system that focused on fact regurgitation, and gradually less and less on real life application. Recent generations can attest that educational pursuit has almost obliterated any real life experiences where knowledge can be practiced in the context of school, such as music, art, home ec or shop classes. It is yet to be seen if the population at large, with our thus limited education ourselves, has the where-with-all and willpower to truly implement the intense changes being prescribed.

I recently did a parent education at my school on Common Core and how parents can help their children. It was basically three points: It is hard, let it be hard, and encourage deep thinking. Share your own thinking and rationale with your children and explore reasons why people do things differently, the children are being asked to explain 'why' in all subject areas. Common Core places more of an emphasis on real life application and integration across disciplines.

I do not think the issue is getting the right curriculum. In my opinion, teachers create the curriculum to meet their classes out of themselves, out of connecting the students to their environment, by digging deeply into a FEW questions. Certainly if we show students HOW to learn about things, they will delve in.

I speak from my experience as a constructivist elementary teacher in a private school. This is how we taught. Our studies came from research we teachers did, pushed along by the children and teaching in the context of the inquiry, we taught, incorporated the skill mastery we were aiming at. Largely all inquiry was driven by student interest. The result was that we had second and sixth graders who asked questions, and sought after answers, who were passionate about digging in.

I do not think the answer lies in someone creating a new curriculum for us. I think we need to address the kindergarten first, to cultivate inquiry in the kindergarten teachers, and then light that fire in the children and create change that way. Grow a new way of teaching, rather than throw something on like a cloak of a different color. In the private school, this is how they 'grew' the school, kindergarten up, and that is how we should implement Common Core, with the most focus on the youngest, and let it grow from there, and let teachers share their experiences and explorations, rather than have imposed 'experts' who do not teach in a real live 24/7 classroom.

In the constructivist school where I taught, everything that is included in Common Core was there, long before Common Core got implemented upon the public. Collaboration, real life problem solving, multiple solutions, and sharing your evidence are all part of a constructivist way of teaching. We are not reinventing the wheel, or a new curriculum, but changing educational pedagogies.

One area where I have issue with the overall intent of Common Core is in its developmental inappropriateness, particularly for the younger children. Once again, children are looked at like grades 1-12 are steps of the same value and the subject is divided up, almost in one dimension, and I think learning is more like something logarithmic in its function.

In the reading, it was quite interesting that the developers of the Math Common Core standards did not intend for the new standards to change the way we are teaching! I for one, would certainly say that the new standards dictate a totally new way of teaching. How can I justify my understanding and what the writers thought they were doing??? I think this is a question that I am going to have to ponder.

Then again: Testing, which is not REALLY Common Core, but corporate, is another issue. The tests should be more closely aligned with the classroom, not from a corporation. The other bigger issue for me is, IMO, you cannot both test and teach. Testing totally changes the focus of the students attention, to being for others approval, rather than for their own growth. I can attest to this in my experience in two different educational settings, within two different educational philosophies where testing was not really practiced in the elementary years.

That fits with this quote from Zimba, one of the original writers of the Math part of Common Core. "The influence of the tests on the curriculum, is negative" he says. and then he goes on to talk about teachers responses to Common Core: "I feel like a teacher again!" and discusses how teachers really relish teaching and now do not want to give that away.

In conclusion, the successful implementation of Common Core is a much larger step than we probably thought we were undertaking. To keep up with other nations, to run our own nation, we are going to have to change, and that change is going to take considerable effort and even some faith in teachers ability to grow and teach. That is asking a lot of a population that was educated largely by rote.