supporting instruction in the common core - famu

Education WEEK Spotlight on MAth inStruction n edweek.org

Editor’s Note: Teachers are preparing for a variety of instructional shifts with the introduction of the Common Core State Standards. This Spotlight explores some of the ways educators are getting ready for the standards, including using virtual professional development, forming educator cadres to prepare for common assessments, producing e-textbooks, and building capacity for new instructional approaches.

TablE of CoNTENTS:

1 Common Core Raises Profile of Virtual PD

4 Math Common Core Spurs Utah Educators to Compose E-Texts

6 Educator Cadres Formed to

Support Common Tests

7 Many Teachers Not Ready for the Common Core

CommENTary:10 Give the Standards Back

to Teachers

11 Solving the Textbook-Common Core Conundrum

13 How Online Communities Can Ease the Common-Core Transition

rESourCES: 15 Resources on Supporting

Instruction in the Common Core

2012

Published October 17, 2012, in Education Week Digital Directions

Common Core Raises Profile of Virtual PD

On Supporting Instruction in the Common Core

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By Katie Ash

T eachers at Highlands Middle School in Kentucky’s Fort Thomas school district recently did something they’d never

done before: They took professional-de-velopment classes online.

Spurred by a need to provide high-quality, comprehensive professional development to help teachers make the transition to the Common Core State Standards, Highlands Middle School Principal Mark Goetz discovered online courses from ASCD—a nonprofit mem-

bership-based professional-development group based in Alexandria, Va.—that addressed those very topics.

“There was no one I could bring in cost-effectively to do professional devel-opment in this specific area for what I thought we could get off the PD online,” says Goetz, although he is quick to point out that while saving money was a bonus, it cannot outweigh the need for high-quality PD for his 660-student school. “[The courses] really pinpointed laser-like focus on what we were trying to get done.”

Goetz is not the only administrator

2Education WEEK Spotlight on Supporting inStruction in the common core n edweek.org

turning to the Internet for professional development for his staff members. Ongoing and effective professional development is critical to implementing the common standards, experts say, and technology holds the key to providing deep learning experiences for teachers that can be scaled across state borders.

“[Teachers] have been teaching a certain way and under certain kinds of standards and objectives for a long time,” says Barbara Treacy, the director of EdTech Leaders Online at the Newton, Mass.-based Education Development Center. “To change, we’re not going to be able to snap our fingers. They need support, and we cannot short-shrift the PD that teachers need.”

Organizations providing professional-development resources, such as the EDC and ASCD, have been inundated with requests from schools for guidance on implementing common standards, officials from those organizations report.

“Everywhere we turn, we’re asked to help people with studying the common core,” says Treacy. “This has to start going on yesterday if students are really going to be able to show what they know on these tests [tied to the standards].”

As a result, those organizations are building robust online resources that can be used in all of the states that have adopted the common standards. All but four states have signed on to the initiative, as has the District of Columbia.

The EDC has about 40 online professional-development courses aligned to the common standards, says Treacy, and is in the process of creating two courses that will provide overviews of the standards—one for math and one for English/language arts.

“We’re working with teachers in a learning-community model,” she says. “It’s facilitated, and it’s delivered over time, and it’s got some kind of accountability. … It provides an opportunity for deep reflection that teachers are going to need.”

PD Demand Doubles

And by providing the courses online, not only can teachers all over the country participate, but teachers also can become familiar with the technology tools needed to implement the standards, Treacy points out.

“Media and technology is integral throughout the common core in both the math and English/language arts standards,” she says. “If you’re getting the professional development online, and using those tools and incorporating those tools into the way that the professional development is delivered, that’s going to help teachers.”

ASCD also provides numerous resources for

teachers to help ensure a smooth transition to the common standards.

The organization has been creating online courses for teachers—requiring from 10 to 15 hours of work per course—around various aspects of putting the common core in place, says Ed Milliken, ASCD’s managing director of professional development.

The group plans to create at least six more courses in the next four months to keep up with the demand for high-quality online professional development.

“The utilization of [common-core-related courses] has more than doubled in the past month,” Milliken says.

In addition, the organization has a subscription-based online channel that houses videos and other resources for various aspects of professional development called PD in Focus, which includes a specific channel dedicated to common standards.

ASCD has also hosted a series of webinars about the common core that is archived on its website for educators to access.

The group’s latest offering is called EduCore. Part of a three-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, EduCore is a website that pulls together professional-development resources on common standards and allows teachers to search and bookmark lessons. (The Gates Foundation also helps fund Education Week’s coverage of the education industry and K-12 innovation.)

EduCore has incorporated math resources from the Shell Centre, based in Nottingham, England, as well as modules created by the Literacy Design Collaborative, a loosely knit group of consultants working with the Gates Foundation.

But the website, which is free for anyone to use, is not just an aggregator of content, says Milliken. It divides each lesson into what the teacher needs to know before, during, and after the lesson, and it also allows teachers to save and print lessons as PDFs.

“What we have done is taken the information and made it very accessible,” Milliken says. The group is also working to incorporate social networking into the website to allow teachers to share best practices.

State Guidance

Schools and districts are also turning to their states for guidance to help find online professional-development resources for teachers that address the common core.

“Not all districts have the capacity to support this new vision,” says Greta Bornemann, the mathematics director for teaching and learning for the Washington office of superintendent of public instruction. Consequently, the state has pulled together resources online to help bridge the gap

between large districts with more resources and smaller districts that may not have the manpower to come up with those tools alone.

The state offers an alignment analysis that compares the previous state standards with the common core in English/language arts and math, as well as an implementation timeline, a three-year transition plan, and webinars about the common standards.

The state also offers free face-to-face training sessions for teacher leaders to attend with the expectation that those leaders will return to their schools and share their knowledge with other teachers.

The ability to borrow materials and resources from other states to help teachers move to the common standards is key, says Bornemann.

“We don’t have the resources and capacity at the state level to produce large quantities of things, so taking advantage of what other states have created is really important,” she says. “This idea of states working together and collaborating is still something that is relatively new. … We’re clearly in a bigger sandbox now, and we’re certainly watching what other people are building.”

building flexible options

Similarly, in Maine, Patsy Dunton, a specialist in English/language arts for the state department of education, and Lee Anne Larsen, a literacy specialist for the department, are pulling together resources for educators in that state. They hosted a three-day institute in August that convened teams of teachers from across the state to take part in professional development around the common standards.

“We’ve been trying to focus partly on those shifts that need to happen and partly on

“ What we have done is taken the information and made it very accessible. The group is also working to incorporate social networking into the website to allow teachers to share best practices.” ED MIllIkENManaging Director of Professional Development, ASCD


the standards themselves and what the content is,” says Larsen.

In addition to the institute, the state has hosted numerous webinars on common-core subject areas as well as smaller face-to-face seminars around the state.

Dunton and Larsen also put out a monthly electronic newsletter that covers an aspect of common standards; the news-letters are then archived on the Maine de-partment of education website for future reference.

“One of the things we’ve tried to do is pro-vide lots of different ways for educators to enter into the information,” Larsen says.

And in South Dakota, teachers go through blended professional-development workshops, where they meet in face-to-face seminars but bring laptops with them to complete activities during the face-to-face session, says Becky Nelson, the team leader in the office of learning and instruction in the state department of education.

South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard, a Republican, has set aside $8.4 million for teacher training in various areas, includ-ing the common core, allowing teachers to receive money for attending PD events. Some districts have submitted professional-development plans in hopes of receiving PD vouchers from the fund to host their own events for teachers.

“We want to keep the options flexible for the districts because every district need is not the same,” says Nelson. “We have very large and very small districts, and we wanted to make sure they could design a plan that would work for them.”

In addition to the blended learning op-portunities available, the state has worked with the Rapid City, S.D.-based profes-sional-development organization TIE, which stands for technology and innovation in education, to provide access to MyOER, a website that houses open educational resources aligned to the common core for teachers. (See Education Week Digital Di-rections, October 17, 2012.)

Carrie Heath Phillips, the senior pro-gram associate for the Common Core State Standards for the Washington-based Coun-cil of Chief State School Officers, one of the groups that led the standards initiative, says that “it’s all about making sure that high-quality professional development is able to reach teachers and principals and school leaders, and technology is obviously a very powerful way to do that.”

online Pd destinations

EduCore created by: ASCD For: Teachers, administrators, educators Registration: Not required, but it allows special access to certain features Features: Aggregates professional-development resources, lesson plans, and learning modules to help educators implement the common standards in their classrooms. Created and maintained by the Alexandria, Va.-based ASCD with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the website is divided into three categories: general common core, math tools, and literacy tools. Teachers will find videos, PDFs, websites, and other resources to help them prepare for the transition to the common standards. Those who register can bookmark items that will then appear in the “My Resources” tab. Registered participants will also be allowed to create journal entries, where they can jot down notes about the resources they find. Although the site does not have social-networking capabilities yet, allowing teachers to interact on the site and share ideas and best practices is a goal, according to ASCD.

MyGroupGenius created by: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation For: Teachers Registration: Invitation only (for now) Features: Aims to provide an online space where teachers can exchange ideas and best practices about integrating the common standards into their curricula. The website is currently being piloted with a small group of teachers but it will be rolled out to all teachers in the future. MyGroupGenius will host resources and tools created by the Literacy Design Collective and the Math Design Collective, both of which are also funded by the Gates Foundation. Both collaboratives are in the process of creating instructional tools, professional-development learning modules, and support services to help teachers implement the common standards.

Illustrative Mathematics created by: Institute of Mathematics and Education, University of Arizona For: Teachers and other educators Registration: Not required, but it allows special access to certain features Features: Creates tasks for each common-core math standard that illustrate the central meaning of the standard and its connection

to other standards, clarifies what is new about the standard, and provides instructional tools and lesson plans related to the standard. The tasks are written by teachers, mathematicians, and other educators and reviewed by both a math expert and a classroom expert before they are posted to the website. The standards are divided between the K-8 and high school levels, and are then broken down by grade. Registered users can comment on and rate tasks as well as submit tasks for review. The leaders of Illustrative Mathematics say they hope to increase the social-networking capabilities of the site, such as adding a feature that will automatically notify a user if a comment he or she posted has drawn a response. The project, which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has about 500 tasks so far and aims to reach at least 2,000.

LearnZillion created by: LearnZillion For: Teachers Registration: Required Features: Hosts video lessons and assessments related to the common standards in math and literacy for grades 3-9. The website was created with content from teachers at the E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington, as well as teachers around the country, and is funded by the Next Generation Learning Challenge, the NewSchools Venture Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Achievement Network, among others. Eric Westendorf, a former principal at E.L. Haynes, and Alix Guerrier, an education consultant, founded the company. The site currently hosts about 2,000 online lessons available to teachers for free, and teachers can create playlists of lessons, contributed from a variety of different teachers. Lessons include screencasts, videos, guided practice, commentary from the content creator, and PowerPoint slides. Creators of LearnZillion hope to add more functionality to the site that will allow users to contribute lessons and post resources as well as provide feedback on the already-posted lessons.

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C oncerned about what they see as a dearth of instructional materi-als aligned with the Common Core State Standards in math, several

educators in Utah, with support from the state office of education, are taking matters into their own hands. They’re in the early stages of developing a set of e-textbooks for high school math that will be freely available.

In fact, two-thirds of the first e-book, for 9th graders, is already online for schools to use, with the rest expected later this fall.

“There was not a textbook out there that we felt reflected the common core,” said Janet M. Sutorius, a math teacher at Juab High School in Nephi, Utah, who is a co-author. “We felt like the textbook companies were just reorga-nizing the chapters of their old books.”

She added: “We wanted to teach our stu-dents in a different way, to make sense of the mathematics and make connections.”

Finding strong materials has been es-pecially challenging, those developing the e-textbooks say, because Utah has adopted a statewide policy of using an “integrated” model of high school math under the common core, dispensing with the traditional Algebra 1-Geometry-Algebra 2 pathway in favor of blending math subjects in each course.

So, Utah public schools are grappling not only with new standards, but also a recon-figured set of courses the state calls Second-ary Mathematics I, II, and III. (In some Utah districts, 9th grade is taught in junior high school.)

a Task-based approach

Ms. Sutorius is joined on the writing team by another classroom teacher, two academic officials in the Salt Lake City district, and a professor of math education at Brigham Young University.

The authors describe the enterprise, dubbed the Mathematics Vision Project, as embrac-ing a “task-based” approach to fostering math proficiency that is closely aligned with the common-core standards.

Diana Suddreth, the STEM director for Utah’s state education agency, said she sees great promise in the project, which the au-thors began before the state stepped in to offer financial and other assistance.

The need is urgent, she said, given that Utah is now implementing the math stan-dards.

“To leave teachers without any resources is something we can’t do,” Ms. Suddreth said. “[They’re] writing what we hope to be a coher-ent and rigorous and focused set of textbooks.”

It’s up to districts to decide whether or not they want to use the materials. Ms. Suddreth

notes that about one-quarter of Utah’s 41 school systems have reported using the first e-textbook so far.

The math project is part of a broader push in Utah to promote greater use of on-line, “open source” materials that meet the needs of Utah educators and help districts save money. In January, the state education agency announced plans to help produce and support open textbooks in several areas, in-cluding high school math, English/language arts, and science, expanding on an earlier pilot project. The state office will encourage districts and schools statewide to consider

Math Common Core Spurs Utah Educators to Compose E-Texts

By Erik W. Robelen

Published September 26, 2012, in Education Week

classroom tasks

AT THE BEGININNING

AT oNE MINUTE AT TWo MINUTES

AT THREE MINUTES AT FoUR MINUTES

A set of mathematics e-textbooks being developed to align with the Common Core State Standards for high school bring a task-based approach, as seen in this example from a unit on arithmetic and geometric sequences.

1. Describe and annotate the pattern of change you see in the above sequence of figures.

2. Assuming the sequence continues in the same way, how many dots are there at 5 minutes?

3. Write a recursive formula to describe how many dots there will be after t minutes.

4. Write an explicit formula to describe how many dots there will be after t minutes.

SoURCE: Mathematics Vision Project


using the textbooks.A separate, state-supported effort with the

University of Utah, meanwhile, is crafting e-textbooks for middle school math.

With Utah now pursuing an integrated ap-proach to high school math under the com-mon core, Ms. Suddreth said it’s been difficult to find appropriate materials.

“The publishers were giving us what I call these crazy-quilt textbooks,” she said.

Jay Diskey, the executive director of the Association of American Publishers’ schools division, said the industry is working hard to deliver aligned materials.

“Publishers large and small are doing every-thing they can to meet the market need that the common core presents,” he said. “In some cases, that means creating whole new things, in others it may mean looking at what they have and making significant adjustments.”

He added: “If a group of Utah educators says, ‘We didn’t see the sort of things that we need,’ I certainly take them at their word, but perhaps they didn’t look as far and wide as they should have.”

Although the common-core math standards are organized by grade level in grades K-8, at high school, they are organized by conceptual categories, such as algebra and geometry. An appendix added later to the standards docu-ments outlines four model pathways for states to consider, including a “traditional” approach consisting of two algebra courses and geom-etry (with some data, probability, and statis-tics included in each). Another approach sug-gested, and common in other countries, is an “integrated” sequence of math courses, each of which blends material across math-content areas.

Integrated math

Utah and West Virginia appear to be the only states that have adopted as statewide policy the integrated approach, state officials and experts say, though in many places there is no state policy so districts may use an inte-grated model.

A statewide task force in Utah decided on the integrated approach after examining the issue carefully, Ms. Suddreth said.

“When you think about mathematics and how people use it, we use it in an integrated way,” she said. “We don’t think, ‘Now I’m going to do some algebra, or now I’m going to do some geometry.’ ”

Ms. Suddreth concedes that the e-textbooks being designed by the Mathematics Vision Project may be seen as unorthodox.

“Everybody kind of has a picture in their mind of what a textbook is: some explanatory text, some problems, and homework,” Ms. Suddreth said. “We’ve replaced the explana-tory text with math tasks. ... The book is re-

ally a guide to help teachers take students through learning experiences.”

The teacher’s edition does include explana-tory text for each task, helping teachers un-derstand the task’s goal and the particular standards addressed, and suggesting whole-class and small-group activities. The student edition has homework assignments for each task.

The authors say there’s plenty of places stu-dents may go online for explanations of par-ticular concepts.

In an introduction, the authors explain their approach, saying it is “neither purely constructivist nor purely traditional.” The materials aim to get students engaged in problem-solving, guided by teachers, to pro-mote math proficiency. Each unit, they write, has been designed and sequenced with “rich” tasks that develop concepts in the standards, with careful attention to the way math knowl-edge emerges.

Also, there will be regular and “honors” ver-sions of each book.

“We wanted materials that were task-based so that students were ... engaged in the prac-tices and making sense of the mathematics for themselves,” said Barbara B. Kuehl, a co-author and the director of academic services for the 24,000-student Salt Lake City district.

Ms. Sutorius from Juab High School said one challenge has been to generate the ma-terials rapidly.

“We’re just running barely faster than [dis-tricts] are,” she said. “We work full time, so we’re working evenings and weekends, but there was just such a desperate need for the textbook.”

an Impressive list

William G. McCallum, a math professor at the University of Arizona who was a lead au-thor of the common math standards, said he was not prepared to comment on the content of the e-textbooks being developed, but that he’s encouraged to hear of such projects.

“Anything that is trying a different way of writing textbooks is a good idea,” he said, so long as the materials are well-designed and adhere to the standards. He said he was es-pecially encouraged that the effort appears aimed at tailoring materials to the state’s needs.

“There is a temptation to recycle old mate-rial and arrange it in different ways,” he said.

Mr. Diskey from the publishers’ group said he has no objection to educators creating their own e-textbooks, but he cautioned that it’s not easy work.

“Developing a core instructional program, particularly one that meets the needs of all types of learners, is a very difficult task,” he said. “There is scope and sequence, standards

alignment, research, editorial development. All of these things come into play.”

Ms. Sutorius acknowledged that the e-text-books may not have universal appeal: “Not everyone is going to like it.”

She added: “There are lessons I’ve struggled through, and they need to be improved.” But as an e-book, she notes, it’s easy to revise.

Brigham Young University plans to conduct research on the project, tackling such ques-tions as whether the tasks are accessible to students and spark the intended student dis-course. Later research will try to gauge the effect of the curriculum on student achieve-ment.

Travis L. Lemon, another co-author and a math teacher at American Fork Junior High School, in North American Fork, Utah, said he’s pleased with his classroom experience using the material so far.

“The students have a lot of opportunity to problem-solve, make sense of problems, listen to other students’ reasoning, and refine their own thinking,” he said, “and we solidify those understandings.”

But student reaction varies.“Some students respond much better than

others,” he said. “If they’ve been encouraged in the past to persist and dig in and make sense of things, they’re more willing and apt to do that now. The ones that aren’t, it’s a little more challenging.”

The first e-textbook is being used by 9th graders in the 7,300-student Uintah district in Vernal, Utah, said Keith D. McMullin, a math instructional coach for the system

“It’s been very positive,” he said of the dis-trict’s experience so far with the material, es-pecially after teachers attended a workshop with two of the authors. “I was excited, and all the teachers that were there were excited.”

He commended the teacher’s edition for its thoroughness in guiding instruction, and said that, overall, the emphasis on tasks in the e-textbook brings the math to life for students and covers a lot of concepts.

“If you look at the tasks that are in there and really list all the things you can teach, ... it’s a very impressive list,” he said. “You’re always building on what students learn the day before.”

Coverage of the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the common assessments is supported in part by a grant from the GE Foundation, at www.ge.com/foundation.


O ne of the groups designing tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards has launched a major effort to help state teams of

educators understand—and be able to trans-late for their peers—what the new assess-ments will entail for classroom instruction.

The Educator Leader Cadres, as the ini-tiative is known, is effectively a nod by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers to respond to the con-cerns of scholars and practitioners. They say that teachers’ practices are unlikely to change without widespread understanding of the standards’ new academic demands, as well as how those demands will be measured.

“Teachers are the first and probably the most important group to reach, but building principals are second—they are the keepers of the change,” said Doug C. Sovde, the director of instructional support and educator engage-ment for Achieve, the Washington-based non-profit that serves as the project-management partner for PARCC.

The meeting, held here Aug. 21-23, focused on helping the teams gain a deep understand-ing of PARCC’s analysis of the standards and its newly released sample assessment items.

Supported by a $16 million supplemental grant under the federal Race to the Top as-sessment program, the cadres are envisioned as “ambassadors” for PARCC as it finalizes its assessments and releases tools and guidelines for teachers and the public to use.

The other federally funded group, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, also is convening state-based teams of teachers, who will help write that consortium’s assessment items, among other things. Teachers from PARCC states will serve as item reviewers.

The PARCC cadres will have three more face-to-face trainings, in addition to five vir-tual meetings, before the assessments are launched in the 2014-15 school year. (The first cohort of state cadres held its initial meeting earlier this summer.)

Each state participating in PARCC selected

24 educators for its cadre, 12 each for English/language arts and mathematics. The selection process was left up to each state; some used a formal application process, while others des-ignated volunteers. About a third to a half of the cadre members are classroom teachers, PARCC officials said.

Composition varies by state, but, in general, the teams included a mix of K-12 teachers and administrators; higher education officials; lead teachers and coaches; and community representatives, from such groups as local chapters of the National Urban League.

Despite those variations, the goal is the same.

“Common core is causing serious angst in your states, your districts, and your schools,” David Saba, the chief executive officer of Lay-ing the Foundation, a teacher-training wing of the National Math and Science Initiative and a partner on the educator-leader cadres for PARCC, told the 300 cadre members. “You’re here to relieve the pain.”

up to Speed

Among the tasks of the day: a crash course on PARCC’s existing tools.

In a math session, cadre members spent an afternoon picking apart the eight mathemati-cal practices that underpin those standards, as well as the consortium’s model content framework in that subject. The framework serves as a bridge between the standards and how the assessments are designed.

They took turns matching the prompts that will help guide the group’s test-item develop-ers to the eight mathematical practices, and trying to envision how a teacher would have to model the practice of “reasoning abstractly and quantitatively,” for instance.

Much attention at the meeting also focused on PARCC’s sample test items.

They won mostly high marks from attend-ees, with a majority of questions focusing on matters of state technical capacity and online bandwidth to deliver the exams, which will be given on computers in most grades.

In meetings with their state colleagues, participants discussed ways of introducing

teachers, parents, and others to the key shifts outlined in the standards and assessments, without scaring or alienating them.

The PARCC materials show “the transfor-mative power of this system, but it’s also a little overwhelming,” said Margo Roen, a Ten-nessee cadre member and the director of new schools for the Achievement School District, a state-run district in Tennessee.

Some cadre members said they wanted more assistance in developing tools that would make the complex materials under-standable to those educators just beginning to familiarize themselves with the standards and with PARCC’s vision for reaching them.

In addition to the model content frame-works, PARCC materials analyze and group the standards into different “claims,” “critical areas,” “domains,” and “clusters,” noted Clark Maxon, the director of assessment for Acad-emy School District 20, in Colorado Springs, Colo.

“It will be incredibly important for PARCC to bring more simplicity and clarity to these lenses,” Mr. Maxon said. “We don’t want teach-ers to see this as just one more thing.”

roles undetermined

Each state also determines the role that its cadre members will play in the transition to the common standards.

That’s one challenge of the project, its lead-ers note: In some places, the cadres will be

Educator Cadres formed to Support Common Tests

By Stephen SawchukChicago

Published August 29, 2012, in Education Week

“ It will really change how they need to teach. It will be outside their comfort zone.”JoLEE GARISElementary Math Coach, Washington Township District, Indianapolis


many Teachers Not ready for the Common Core

Published April 25, 2012, in Education Weekproviding direct professional develop-ment; in other instances, they will act primarily as messengers or informal ad-visers helping to direct others to PARCC tools and resources.

“There’s a fine line between providing all 600 [cadre members] with common messages and tools, and making sure that they fit in the context of each state,” Achieve’s Mr. Sovde said.

He expects the most advanced teams to go beyond that role, possibly reviewing or even crafting model instructional materi-als aligned to the standards and PARCC assessments by the time the cadres’ train-ing ends.

In the meantime, many of the states began discussions about how best to use their time and what they want to accom-plish.

“We’re messengers; we’ll be starting with our own districts,” said Jolee Garis, an elementary math coach for the Wash-ington Township district, in Indianapo-lis. She believes the eight mathematical practices will be the biggest hurdle for her teachers.

“It will really change how they need to teach,” she said. “It will be outside their comfort zone.”

Coverage of the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the common assessments is supported in part by a grant from the GE Foundation, at www.ge.com/foundation.

By Stephen Sawchuk

A quiet, sub-rosa fear is brewing among supporters of the Common Core State Standards Initiative: that the standards will die the

slow death of poor implementation in K-12 classrooms.

“I predict the common-core standards will fail, unless we can do massive professional de-velopment for teachers,” said Hung-Hsi Wu, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written extensively about the common-core math standards. “There’s no fast track to this.”

It’s a Herculean task, given the size of the public school teaching force and the difficulty educators face in creating the sustained, in-tensive training that research indicates is necessary to change teachers’ practices. (See Education Week, November 10, 2010.)

“It is a capacity-building process, without question,” said Jim Rollins, the superinten-dent of the Springdale, Ark., school district. “We’re not at square one, but we’re not at the end of the path, either. And we don’t want to just bring superficial understanding of these standards, but to deepen the understanding, so we have an opportunity to deliver instruc-tion in a way we haven’t before.”

In Springdale, which is fully implement-ing the literacy and math standards for grades K-2 this year, kindergartners in the 20,000-student district are studying fairy tales and learning about those stories’ coun-tries of origin. Their teachers have scrambled to find nonfiction texts that introduce stu-dents to the scientific method. They’ve dis-carded some of their old teaching practices, like focusing on the calendar to build initial numeracy skills.

The Durand, Mich., district is another early adopter. Gretchen Highfield, a 3rd grade teacher, has knit together core aspects of the standards—less rote learning, more vocabu-lary-building—to create an experience that

continually builds pupils’ knowledge. A story on pigs becomes an opportunity, later in the day, to introduce the vocabulary word “corral,” which becomes an opportunity, still later in the day, for students to work on a math prob-lem involving four corrals of five pigs.

“I’m always thinking about how what we talked about in social studies can be empha-sized in reading,” Ms. Highfield said. “And it’s like that throughout the week. I’m looking across the board where I can tie in this, and this, and this.”

Such pioneers of the standards can probably be found the country over. But data show that there is still much more work to be done, espe-cially in those districts that have yet to tackle the professional-development challenge. A na-tionally representative survey of school dis-tricts issued last fall by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy found that fewer than half of districts had planned professional development aligned to the standards this school year.

Cognitive Demand

By any accounting, the challenge of getting the nation’s 3.2 million K-12 public school teachers ready to teach to the standards is enormous.

With new assessments aligned to the stan-dards rapidly coming online by 2014-15, the implementation timeline is compressed. Teachers are wrestling with an absence of truly aligned curricula and lessons. Added to those factors are concerns that the standards are pitched at a level that may require teach-ers themselves to function on a higher cogni-tive plane.

When standards are more challenging for the students, “then you also raise the pos-sibility that the content is more challenging for the teacher,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University


of Virginia, in Charlottesville. “Of course, it’s going to interact with what support teachers receive.”

Anecdotal evidence from a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation study suggests that teach-ers already struggle to help students engage in the higher-order, cognitively demanding tasks emphasized by the standards, such as the ability to synthesize, analyze, and apply information. (The Gates Foundation also pro-vides support for coverage of K-12 business and innovation in Education Week.)

As part of the foundation’s Measures of Ef-fective Teaching project, trained observers scored lessons taught by some 3,000 teachers against a variety of teaching frameworks. No matter which framework was used, teachers received relatively low scores on their ability to engage students in “analysis and problem-solving,” to use “investigation/problem-based approaches,” to create “relevance to history, current events,” or to foster “student partici-pation in making meaning and reasoning,” according to a report from the foundation.

Supporters of the common standards say the standards encourage a focus on only the most important topics at each grade level and subject, thus allowing teachers to build those skills.

“It could make things simpler and allow teachers and schools to focus on teaching fewer, coherent things very well. That’s the best hope for teachers to build in-depth con-tent knowledge,” said David Coleman, one of the writers of the English/language arts standards and a founder of the New York City-based Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit working to support implementation of the standards.

“That said, the standards are necessary but not sufficient for improving professional de-velopment,” he added.

Each of the two content areas in the stan-dards poses a unique set of challenges for teacher training.

Mr. Wu, the UC-Berkeley professor, con-tends that current math teachers and curri-cula focus almost exclusively on procedures and algorithms, an approach he refers to as “textbook mathematics.”

But the common core emphasizes under-standing of the logical, structural concepts underpinning mathematics—the idea being that understanding how and why algorithms work is as important as crunching numbers.

Many teachers, Mr. Wu contends, will them-selves need more mathematics-content prepa-ration. But training focused at least initially on content could be especially difficult for classroom veterans to accept, he concedes.

“After 26 years of doing things only one way, the common core comes along and says, ‘Let’s try to do a little bit better at this,’ “ Mr. Wu said. “Well, suppose you’ve been smoking for

that long, and someone says, ‘Just stop raising a cigarette to your mouth.’ It’s difficult—it’s 26 years of habit.”

Some teacher educators believe that con-versation will need to begin at the preservice level, especially for elementary teachers, who tend to enter with a weaker initial grasp of mathematics, said Jonathan N. Thomas, an assistant professor of mathematics education at Northern Kentucky University, in High-land Heights, Ky.

“It’s a great opportunity to say, ‘Let’s just take some time to think about the mathemat-ics and set the teaching strategies aside for a moment,’ “ Mr. Thomas said. “It’s imperative we don’t send people out the door with just strategies, tips, and tricks to teach fractions. We have to make sure they understand frac-tions deeply.”

Teacher Gaps

Meanwhile, the English/language arts stan-dards demand a focus on the “close reading” of texts, a literary-analysis skill that has been thus far mainly reserved for college English classes. And they call for expansion of nonfic-tion materials into even the earliest grades.

“We haven’t worked deeply or strategically with informational text, and as the teachers are learning about the standards, they are finding their own instructional gaps there,” said Sydnee Dixon, the director of teaching and learning for Utah’s state office of educa-tion. “That’s a huge area for us.”

In the Springdale Ark., district, instruc-tional coach Kaci L. Phipps said those changes are also requiring teachers to pay more atten-tion to teaching the varied purposes behind writing—something not as emphasized when most reading materials are fictional and stu-dents are asked merely for their responses.

“We keep having to say to these kids, ‘Re-member, it’s not what you think, it’s what’s in the text,’ “ she said. “’What is the author doing? What is his or her purpose in writing? How can you support that conclusion with de-tails from the text?’ “

Pedagogical Shifts

Pedagogical challenges lurk, too, because teachers need updated skills to teach in ways that emphasize the standards’ focus on problem-solving, according to professional-development scholars.

“Teachers will teach as they were taught, and if they are going to incorporate these ideas in their teaching, they need to expe-rience them as students,” said Thomas R. Guskey, a professor of educational psychol-ogy at the University of Kentucky’s college of education, in Lexington. “The PD will have to model very clearly the kinds of activities

we want teachers to carry forward and use in their classrooms.”

Moreover, Mr. Guskey warned, many teachers won’t be inclined to actually change what they are doing until they become fa-miliar with the assessments aligned to the new standards.

Some districts don’t want to wait that long, and have found other ways to help teachers begin working with the practices outlined in the standards. In the 1,700-student Durand district, Superintendent Cindy Weber has used a state-required overhaul of teacher evaluations as a springboard.

The Michigan district’s new professional growth and evaluation system, which is being implemented this spring, draws key indicators of teacher practice directly from the common core—in essence closing the often-wide gap between expectations for student and teachers.

Principals observing teachers are trained to look, for example, at whether a teacher “uses multiple sources of information” when teaching new content, and “challenges stu-dents to present and defend ideas” in the strand on applying learning.

To gauge changes in student growth across the year, as part of the new evaluation sys-tem, the district has settled on growth in ac-ademic vocabulary as an indicator. In every grade and content area, teams of teachers have come up with those words and related concepts all students must master by the end of the year.

Ms. Weber’s reasoning is that teachers will

“We haven’t worked deeply or strategically with informational text, and as the teachers are learning about the standards, they are finding their own instructional gaps there. That’s a huge area for us.”SyDNEE DIxoNDirector of Teaching and Learning, Utah State office of Education


feel new standards really matter if instruct-ing to them is part of their professional ex-pectations.

“You look back over the course of educa-tion, and there are so many things tried, yet somehow many classrooms still look the same across the country,” Ms. Weber said. “I felt that with our evaluation process, we needed to look at teacher commitment to this model and type of delivery—or teachers may give us lip service and go back to doing what they’ve done in the past.”

State role

States, the first stop on the professional-development train, are themselves having to change their delivery systems in preparation for the standards.

“Many states are moving away from the ‘train the trainer’ model and trying to have more direct communications with teachers, because the message either gets diluted or changed otherwise,” said Carrie Heath Phil-lips, the program director for the Council of Chief State School Officers’ common-stan-dards efforts.

Delaware has reached every teacher in the state directly through online lessons that lay out the core shifts in the standards from the state’s previous content expectations—a process it tracked through its education data system.

Now, state officials are hard at work build-ing an infrastructure for deeper, more inten-sive work.

The state has organized two separate “cad-res” of specialists, one in reading and one in math, who are fleshing out the core expecta-tions at each grade level, outlining how each standard is “vertically linked” to what will be taught in the next grade, and crafting model lessons in those subjects. They’re also each constructing five professional-devel-opment “modules” for high-demand topics, such as text complexity.

“We’ve had other standards, but different interpretations of what they meant,” said Marian Wolak, the director of curriculum, in-struction, and professional development for the state. “We want this to be very clear and distinct about how the standard applies at that grade level and what the expectations are for that standard.”

Based on the cadres’ work, every district will have a clearinghouse of resources for professional development and be able to tap a local specialist for additional training, Ms. Wolak said.

Utah doesn’t have the benefits of Dela-ware’s limited geography. Its strategy has been building the capacity of a critical mass of trained educators in each district, and then gradually shifting professional-devel-

opment responsibilities to the local level.In summer 2011, the state trained about

120 facilitators—teachers nominated from the field with a track record of high student achievement in their subject—in pedagogi-cal content knowledge and adult-learning theory. Then, those teachers facilitated “academies” in ELA and in 6th and 9th grade math for their colleagues, which were given at 14 locations in the state, according to Ms. Dixon, the state’s director of teaching and learning.

All teachers attending the sessions come voluntarily and are expected to have read the standards beforehand. Afterwards, “the expectation is that both the facilitators and the attendees are back in their classrooms, using the standards, working with the stan-dards, sharing student work, and studying it in [staff meetings], so their colleagues are getting second-hand experience,” Ms. Dixon said.

Additional academies are now being set up; the state estimates about 20 percent of its teachers have attended one so far.

District Pioneers

For districts, the professional-development challenge is in finding the place to begin. Those districts apparently the furthest along in the process are integrating the training with successful efforts already in place.

In Springdale, the district has focused on providing teachers with enough time to sort through the standards and observe some of them in practice. It’s given teachers up to four days off to develop units aligned to the common core and encouraged teams to dis-cuss student work samples, or “anchors,” to help inform their understanding of expecta-tions aligned to the standards.

This year, the district is working to train teachers in grades 3-8 in math. It has spent five years using a problem-solving approach to mathematics known as Cognitively Guided Instruction that district officials say aligns well with the common standards’ math expectations. With a handful of teach-ers now well-versed in the curriculum, it’s creating opportunities for teachers new to the district to observe those “demonstration classrooms” at work.

The Durand district’s new teacher-evalu-ation system has helped to make the com-mon standards real, said Ms. Highfield. And while teachers are understandably a bit ner-vous about the system, it’s also causing them to rethink long-standing practices.

“How do I show [an evaluator] that stu-dents are thinking and analyzing without a project or experiment? It’s a big chal-lenge, and I think it will take a little time to get there,” she said. “Before, with the rote

learning, you could create a handout, put it in your file and just use it again next year. You can’t do that when you’re looking at stu-dents to apply these skills.”

Nevertheless, Ms. Highfield said, she’s starting to see the benefits for her students.

“Durand is a fairly poor district; a lot of students don’t have a lot of experiences,” she said. “We ask them, ‘What do you want to do in your life, with your learning? Can you imagine it? How would you get there?’

“I’ve seen a change in my students, and I think that is a good thing.”

Coverage of policy efforts to improve the teaching profession is supported by a grant from the Joyce Foundation, at www.joycefdn.org/Programs/ Education.

“ You look back over the course of education, and there are so many things tried, yet somehow many classrooms still look the same across the country.”CINDy WEBER Superintendent,Durand Area Schools, Durand, Mich.

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Universal Design for Learning is a scientifically valid framework for guiding educational practice that (a) provides flexibility in the ways information is presented, in the ways students respond or demonstrate knowledge and skills, and in the ways students are engaged; and (b) reduces barriers in instruction, provides appropriate accommodations, supports, and challenges and maintains high achievement expectations for all students, including students with disabilities and students who are limited English proficient (PL 110-135).

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Standards acknowledge that the goal of education should not simply the mastery of content knowledge, but also the mastery of the learning process by which novice learners develop into expert learners with the desire to learn and the capacity to learn strategically, and who, in their own highly individual and flexible ways, are well prepared for a lifetime of learning. UDL aligns to the overarching goal of the Common Core State Standards initiative by providing educators with a framework for understanding how to create curricula that meets the needs of all learners. How Pearson’s Digital Programs Reflect the Principles and Guidelines of Universal Design Much like the UDL framework, Pearson understands that there is no truly “average” learner—individual learner variability is the reality of every classroom and, like the UDL framework, we believe that technology offers an invaluable tool for delivering curricula that meets the needs of every learner. Flexibility, responsiveness, and sensitivity to the individual are hallmarks of Pearson’s technology-based programs which serve as powerful adaptive tools that enable educators to individualize instruction to meet a wide diversity of student needs.

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Published August 2, 2012 in Education Week

W hen the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers commissioned a small body

of scholars to create national standards for mathematics in spring 2009, it seemed astounding that anyone paid attention. We have been inundated with standards for more than 20 years. A Google search for the phrase “mathematics standards” produces about 300,000 results, many referring to the various NCTM standards; to multiple guides created by individual states, often in conflicting versions; to publishers and software companies; and so forth. Here was one more set of standards, and it was likely irrelevant, people could be forgiven for thinking. But when nearly all the states (at last count, 45 of them, plus the District of Columbia) agreed to adopt both the math and English/language arts standards, peo-ple paid attention. This gave those states, if not a common K-12 curriculum, a common foundation for a national curriculum. It was an unexpected opportunity.

Or was it? After two decades of standards, we still wring our hands about student declines, unfocused curricula, and dread-ful textbooks. There is little evidence that previous standards substantially improved education, and the fact that we continually replace old standards with new does not suggest success.

Why have previous standards failed? I think the answer is simple and evident: Standards failed because everybody owns them—politicians, administrators, teacher-educators (not to mention policy experts,

publishers, and others)—everybody except the people who actually have to implement them, who have to use them as guides for the real work of instruction, and who have to determine whether the standards re-ally are “statements about what is valued.” Teachers have never owned standards.

Politicians take ownership of standards before any other group. They play on the confusion of language. They use the phrase “high standards” in speeches and boast about “raising standards in every class-room.” Political reporters, mainly through ignorance, equate standards with the notion of quality. Politicians have an agenda: They want to show they are improving education, and touting higher standards is an inexpen-sive way to give the illusion of change.

Like politicians, administrators (princi-pals, superintendents, state schools chiefs) embrace standards, but tie them to ac-countability. Rather than a framework of educational values on which teachers can construct a curriculum, standards become a way to shift accountability. Teachers need to “measure up” to the new standards. Stan-dards are used to commodify instruction, to make it more efficient, to create a checklist by which not only students but teachers, too, can be judged.

And university faculty members—math-ematicians and teacher-educators—are also fond of standards. With the best of inten-tions, they promote standards as a crutch to help teachers who do not know enough con-tent to navigate the curriculum themselves. Simply put, standards fix broken teachers. As evidence, since the release of the com-mon-core math standards, university math-ematicians and educators have been every-where, creating tools, running workshops, and looking for ways to aid teachers who are “challenged” (the most frequent modifier of “teacher” in articles about the standards).

The fact that standards are owned by politicians, administrators, and university faculty, but not by teachers, guarantees that standards are viewed as top-down reform. It redefines their purpose, not as a tool used

by teachers to improve education, but as a tool used by everyone else to improve “the system”—to give the illusion of progress, to enforce accountability, and to fix broken teachers. So, is it surprising, then, that stan-dards haven’t worked to improve education itself?

The ownership of the new standards is currently being established, as the com-mon-core standards are overtaken by the common-core assessments. The assessments will be accountability on steroids. They will produce vast amounts of data generated from a nationwide system, used to compare students, teachers, schools, districts, states, ethnic groups ... every imaginable aspect of K-12 education. Before long, everyone’s focus will move from standards to assess-ments, and for those who believe in data-driven education, the shift in focus will be a bonanza. Every governor, every superinten-dent, every principal, and every teacher will concentrate on “student achievement”—that is, performance on the assessments. The as-sessments, not the standards, will be the measure of success; the standards them-selves will become unimportant.

This fits perfectly with the goals of poli-ticians, administrators, and teacher-educa-tors (not to mention education researchers). It does not fit well with the goal of teach-ers—to know what ought to be valued in education.

Unless teachers are the owners, these new standards will fail like all those before. But to make them owners, we must do more than invite a few token teachers to the next standards workshop. Teachers themselves must become the leaders when implement-ing the standards. Those who have mas-tered the ideas and content must mentor their peers. Those who are challenged must work with their colleagues; those who are indifferent must become engaged; those who are cynical must be won over. Teachers must shape both the standards and their assess-ments as educational tools rather than data-gathering instruments.

Communities of teachers, spanning grades

By John Ewing

commEntaRy

Give the Standards back to TeachersA standard is a statement that can be used to judge the quality of a mathematics curriculum or methods of evaluation. Thus, standards are statements about what is valued.

—From 1989 standards released by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics


Published August 8, 2012, in Education Week

A merican educators have a love-hate relationship with textbooks. For some, textbooks provide a comprehensive curriculum in

which content requirements are developed in a systematic and organized way. Text-books can give teachers ideas for sequenc-ing, presenting, and assessing content, skills, and concepts. New teachers often depend on textbooks. For others, textbooks represent scripted, uninspired lessons that turn teachers into slaves and strip them of their creativity with a one-solution-fits-all approach. For this group, even intelligent, published education researchers lose their credibility when they become affiliated with a commercial textbook publisher.

Most states have committed to imple-menting the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and mathematics, but whether textbook publishers will help, hinder, or neutralize this effort is an open question.

The release and adoption of the common standards have inspired two major initia-tives. The first is to educate teachers about the expectations of the new standards and how schools will have to change to meet the standards. States, school districts, professional-development companies, and educational organizations provide webi-nars, in-service sessions, and courses on implementing the common core. But most of these don’t include any discussion about curriculum. Instead, they focus on educat-ing the 3.2 million teachers as if they were individually responsible for revising their curriculum.

The second initiative is the incorporation of the new standards into educational ma-terials. In the interest of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, textbook publishers, who have invested tens of millions of dollars in their textbook series, are doing the minimum

necessary to address the new standards. While they have added labels, paragraphs, activities, lessons, or chapters to reflect the standards, it is unrealistic to expect that they will re-envision their materials if they don’t have to.

Having teachers individually rewrite their own curriculum is a recipe for class-room chaos. The idea that even two teachers at the same school will interpret a standard in the same way is unrealistic. Without comprehensive and coordinated curriculum efforts, this tree-by-tree approach can easily result in poor student achievement.

By the same token, if textbook publish-ers simply relabel their existing content without considering the intention of the standards, they will perpetuate the status quo and will not support the educational improvements the standards promise.

Adoption of the common core should re-sult in improvements in student achieve-ment. If educators do not change, student achievement will not change. But change for the sake of change is not the answer. What is required of educators is the careful, intelligent, well-considered selection of con-tent necessary to meet the standards; les-sons that are sequenced to support student-learning trajectories; and teaching methods that are based on evidence of effectiveness.

Educational publishers have the re-sources to provide a wide variety of new materials that could facilitate these neces-sary changes. They have editorial depart-ments that keep up to date on education research. They can make connections with education researchers so they can work with teams of writers and editors to de-velop materials. The publishers can have researchers spend months organizing and testing sequences of lessons to find out what best supports student learning. They have design and production departments to produce the materials in an appealing and accessible format for wide use. They can

By Beverlee Jobrack

commEntaRy

Solving the Textbook-Common Core Conundrum

and locales, can study, discuss, and create materials for standards implementation. A consortium of mathematics and educa-tion organizations, the Ad Hoc Committee on Teachers as Professionals, has fostered this idea by bringing together outstand-ing teachers from across the country to create toolkits for daylong workshops. These will be workshops run by teach-ers for teachers, and they give a sense of what standards can accomplish when teachers have a genuine stake in their success, that is, when teachers own them.

A change in ownership will not only make successful implementation more likely, but also demonstrate teaching at its best—as a thoughtful, forward-looking profession that leads reform rather than resists it.

Will we succeed in transferring own-ership? Most likely not. All those other groups would have to relinquish their claims, and the people who view stan-dards as a way to assemble vast new sources of data have strong motivation to protect their position. Also, turning over leadership to the teachers requires trust, and politicians, administrators, and even university faculty have spent decades convincing themselves (and the public) that teachers can’t be trusted. Teachers themselves have become unused to lead-ing.

But if the core of the standards morphs into assessments alone—if they are ad-ministered from above, seen mainly as a way to compare things (students, teach-ers, and schools), and used largely to identify and weed out “failure”—then the new standards will become one more re-form that arrives with great fanfare and gradually dissipates with little lasting effect.

If we really want the Common Core State Standards to succeed, give them back to the people who will use them as a measure of what is valued in education. Give them back to the teachers.

John Ewing is the president of Math for America, a New York City-based organization focused on training outstanding secondary school math teachers. He was the executive director of the American Mathematical Society from 1995 to 2008.


“ Textbooks and educational materials could play an essential role in the implementation of the common core and the promotion of a new era of improved student achievement. Or not.”

build professional development into these new materials, which could be a foundation for teaching educators about the common core. But publishers won’t do any of this if they don’t have to.

Instead of a well-considered evaluation of available materials, schools tend to adopt and purchase educational materials for su-perficial reasons, either because they don’t have time for a thorough evaluation or they have little faith in textbooks. But if text-books are sold based on design or inconse-quential elements, publishers will prioritize visual design and superficial features. This would represent an unfortunate cycle of rep-etition and promote the status quo.

On the other hand, educational publishers would bend over backwards to make effec-tiveness their top priority if the top-selling textbooks were those with the best sequence of lessons to develop each standard in depth, the most effective teaching methods, and the richest content. They would do the work that schools so desperately need. But to identify materials with effective character-istics, customers have to know what those characteristics are.

Contrary to what many think, some text-books are superior to others and do, in fact, meet some of the standards with fidelity. If the most effective materials for a particular population of students, such as higher- or lower-achieving students, were available to teachers, they could use them and focus their energies on meeting the needs of their students. Instead, many must devote time and energy to writing curriculum, although few have any experience in this demanding work. Teachers need to know and under-stand the new standards, but they should also be able to distinguish materials that faithfully reflect the standards from those that do not.

Schools have it in their power to improve student achievement. They can take the se-lection of educational materials more seri-ously, selecting the most effective resources available, allowing the free market to pro-mote continual improvement as it does in other industries.

How can schools identify the most effec-tive materials?

• Establish an adoption team to analyze potential materials. If possible, this team should be given a sabbatical for a month or more, or other compensation, to emphasize the seriousness of its efforts. The team’s first job should be to develop expertise in the common standards research that supports effective teaching methods and student-learning trajectories. The members should also study the curriculum their school has used, identifying the strengths and weak-nesses.

• Next, the adoption team should estab-lish evaluation criteria for curricula and then employ those criteria to analyze in-structional materials. The criteria should evaluate: teaching methods that are based on research and evidence; student-learning trajectories that are the basis for the devel-opment of lessons and concepts; content that is accurate and comprehensive and that meets the common standards; and effective-ness that can be verified.

• Finally, the team should confirm that instructional materials in use share spe-cific characteristics: The development of each required standard at a grade level is comprehensive, with a clear introduction, development, practice, and assessment. Content, readability, and skill expecta-tions are appropriate for the population of students. Organization promotes natural learning progressions and logical develop-ment of skills and concepts. Lessons include an engaging and appropriate mix of learn-ing activities and experiences that develop the critical concepts as identified by the standards. Teaching methods reflect effec-tive practices as identified by research and experience. Materials support a change in teaching practices and are different from materials currently in use.

Textbooks and educational materials could play an essential role in the implementation of the common core and the promotion of a new era of improved student achievement. Or not.

Educational publishers have the resources to create comprehensive and effective mate-rials that could significantly support teach-ers’ efforts to realize the promise of the new standards. Empowering well-informed adop-tion teams to make intelligent selections of effective instructional materials and then having teachers use them in the classroom are key steps in making the necessary changes to implement the new standards with fidelity.

Beverlee Jobrack worked for more than 25 years in educational publishing, beginning with Merrill Publishing and ending as editorial director at SRA/McGraw-Hill. She previously taught preschool and middle school English and literature. She is the author of Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes How Educational Materials Undermine Reforms (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).


Published September 12, 2012, in Education Week

I t’s an understatement to say the “next big thing” in K-12 education is the Com-mon Core State Standards, the result of a state-led initiative to establish com-

mon educational standards in mathematics and English/language arts across the United States. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have adopted the common-core standards and have begun or will shortly begin to transition into using them in class-rooms this school year.

A key feature of the common core is the building of conceptual understanding and procedures from kindergarten through 12th grade, meaning teacher collaboration within and between grade levels will be a necessity. Beyond prescribing professional develop-ment within districts and states, the adop-tion of the common-core standards provides an unprecedented opportunity for teachers to meaningfully collaborate with their peers around the nation. As schools move their students toward the same educational goals, it makes sense for teachers to share ideas, instructional strategies, and reflections in real time. Engagement in meaningful con-versation with fellow educators will provide teachers with support to understand and implement the standards.

Common-core implementation can be de-fined as the steps taken by states, counties, and districts to raise awareness, build re-sources, develop and establish professional learning opportunities and collaborations, and align curriculum, instruction, and as-sessments, as well as strategies and prac-tices developed and reflected upon by teach-ers.

Online learning communities can provide a space for teachers nationwide to come to-gether as peers to navigate standards imple-mentation.

Teacher learning communities are noth-ing new, but, in the context of the common

core, they will open new doors and provide greater opportunity for interaction between educators who previously did not have a purpose or means for collaboration. With the common core new to everyone, discuss-ing and establishing new practices will be crucial to student success, and the ideal platform for this national discussion is the online learning community.

Instant messaging, message boards, blogs, wikis, and social-networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook all have a place in the national common-core discussion. Addition-ally, learning-management systems, such as Blackboard and Moodle, give a defined space for all of these tools to come together. The possibilities for collaboration and conversa-tion are endless, but here are some ideas to get started with online teacher learning communities focusing on the common core:

Synchronous collaboration. Synchronous tools such as instant messaging, chat rooms, videoconferencing, and Skype give teachers a chance to converse and collaborate in real time about standards and implementation. From chance encounters after a hard day in the classroom to arranged meetings with a group of peers in a common grade level or content area, synchronous collaboration provides the immediacy of a face-to-face conversation without the need for members to be in the same geographic location. Both formal and informal conversations will be meaningful for community members as the standards are implemented.

message boards and online forums. Mes-sage boards and forums provide both ongo-ing and archived conversations for commu-nity members to contribute to and access at their convenience. Among other approaches, common-core message boards could be orga-nized by content area, grade level, key fea-tures of the standards, or classroom strate-gies.

Blogs. Helping teachers share their experi-ences will be crucial to building a collective understanding of what common core looks like in the classroom. From administrators and legislators to teachers and parents, no one can predict the frustrations and suc-cesses that will accompany implementation. In sharing their attitudes and emotions about the process through blogging, teach-ers can guide a larger policy-and-practice conversation and ensure that no educator is left feeling isolated in uncharted waters.

Wikis. As definitions of common-core jar-gon are developed and clarified and new buzzwords pop up, wikis can provide a working space for stakeholders to share knowledge. Wikis are open online websites that allow their users to work as simultane-ous co-authors and editors. Wiki pages usu-ally read like encyclopedia entries, with the bonus of hyperlinks connecting to other rel-evant information. Wikis can be updated by anyone with an interest in the topic at hand.

Social networking. Type CCSS or Common

commEntaRy

How Online Communities Can Ease the Common-Core Transition

“ The success of our students depends on our ability to facilitate the standards-implementation conversation. What better place to start than in online learning communities?”

By Christine Newell


Copyright ©2012 by Editorial Projects in Education, Inc. all rights reserved. No part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.

readers may make up to 5 print copies of this publication at no cost for personal, non-commercial use, provided that each includes a full citation of the source. Visit www.edweek.org/go/copies for information about additional print photocopies.

Published by Editorial Projects in Education, Inc.6935 arlington road, Suite 100bethesda, mD, 20814Phone: (301) 280-3100www.edweek.org

Core State Standards into Twitter’s search field, and you’ll see just what a hot topic this is. From elementary teachers and college professors to organizations and publications, the common core has everyone tweeting. Even if a teacher is not ready to tweet about the standards, he or she can follow what oth-ers have to say to stay current on common-core news. And, they can retweet those up-dates they find particularly interesting.

collaboration apps. Common-core imple-mentation means the evolution of the grade-level collaboration meeting. Thanks to a variety of Web-based applications, even less tech-savvy educators can easily invite oth-ers into their common-core conversations. Tools such as Google Docs, Sync.in, and Zoho allow members to manage group collabora-tion more privately than with a wiki.

Learning-management systems. An LMS is the software that stores and enables on-line courses and training sessions. As profes-sional-development modules are developed to support teachers in implementing the common core, these systems will play a part in their facilitation. There is an enormous need for timely, accessible professional learn-ing related to the common core, and online courses—whether offered for credit or just personal growth—will allow teachers across the country to collaborate meaningfully. Chunking the common-core standards into manageable pieces that can be explored in online courses will be another way for online teacher learning communities to expand the conversation.

Through all these avenues and many more, online teacher learning communities can launch, support, and promote collaboration on the common core and more. The success of our students depends on our ability to fa-cilitate the standards-implementation con-versation. What better place to start than in online learning communities?

Christine Newell teaches 5th grade at Lloyd G. Cunningham Elementary School in Turlock, Calif. She will blog about common-core implementation at Adventures in Common Core


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Resources on Supporting Instruction in the Common Core NOW FEATURING INTERACTIVE HyPERlINkS. Just click and go.

Common Core State Standards Initiativehttp://www.corestandards.org/

Common Core State Standards: Progress and Challenges in School Districts’ Implementationhttp://www.cep-dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=374Nancy Kober, Diane Stark RentnerCenter on Education Policy, September 2011

Educator Leader Cadreshttp://www.parcconline.org/educator-cadres

Mathematics Vision Projecthttp://www.mathematicsvisionproject.org/

Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortiumhttp://www.smarterbalanced.org/

Working with Teachers to Develop Fair and Reliable Measures of Effective Teaching (MET)http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Pages/2010-reliable-measures-effective-teaching.aspxBill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2010

http://www.corestandards.org/

http://www.cep-dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=374

http://www.parcconline.org/educator-cadres

http://www.mathematicsvisionproject.org/

http://www.smarterbalanced.org/

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Pages/2010-reliable-measures-effective-teaching.aspx

The Achievement Gap l Algebra l Assessment l Autism l Bullying l Charter School Leadership l

Classroom Management l Common Standards l Differentiated Instruction l Dropout Prevention l

E-Learning l ELL Assessment and Teaching l ELLs in the Classroom l Flu and Schools l Getting The Most From

Your IT Budget l Gifted Education l Homework l Implementing Online Learning l Inclusion and

Assistive Technology l Math Instruction l Middle and High School Literacy l Motivation l No Child Left

Behind l Pay for Performance l Personalized Learning l Principals l Parental Involvement l Race

to the Top l Reading Instruction l Reinventing Professional Development l Response to Intervention l

School Uniforms and Dress Codes l STEM in Schools l Teacher Evaluation l Teacher Tips for the New

Year l Technology in the Classroom l Tips for New Teachers

www.edweek.org/go/spotlightsView the complete collection of education week SpotlightS

get the information and perspective you need on the education issues you care about most with education week Spotlights

2012

On Implementing Online Learning

Editor’s Note: Online and

blended learning models have

reshaped how students learn.

Remote learning can assist

students with a variety of

needs, but there are also

accountability challenges

associated with virtual

education. This Spotlight offers

tips on how to best use and

apply online learning, inside

and outside the classroom.

InteractIve cOntentS:

1 Blended Learning Mixes it Up

4 Spotlight on Accountability

5 Districts Team Up on Virtual Ed.

8 Schools ‘Flip’ for Lesson Model

Promoted by Khan Academy

10 Virtual Ed. Faces Sharp

Criticism 12 Virtual Education Targets

Rise of Autism

14 New Vistas Online for Gifted

Students 16 ‘At-Risk Students’ Virtual

Challenges

cOmmentary:

18 The School-Internet

‘Relationship’ and Its Impact

on Online Learning

reSOurceS:

20 Resources on Implementing

Online Learning

Published March 15, 2012, in Education Week Technology Counts

www

Blended Learning

mixes it upBy Katie Ash

A s blended learning models, which mix face-

to-face and online instruction, become

more common in schools, classroom educa-

tors and administrators alike are navigat-

ing the changing role of teachers—and how schools

can best support them in that new role.

“This is a whole new world for education,”

says Royce Conner, the acting head of school

for the 178-student San Francisco Flex

Academy, a public charter school.

In the grades 9-12 school, students spend

about half the day working on “the floor”—

a large open room of study carrels where

students hunker down with their laptops

to work with online curricula provided by

K12 Inc.—and the other half of the day

in pullout groups with teachers. Which

students are in pullout groups, when the

groups meet, and how often they meet de-

pend on the progress each student is mak-

ing in his or her online classes, says Conner.

Having a passion for using data is one of

the skills that Conner looks for in his teachers,

he says, since it becomes such an integral part of

their planning process each week.

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2012

Published March 17, 2011, in Education Weekis

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On Personalized Learning

A Vermont initiative to improve learning in middle schools is working through the challenges of using the latest digital tools and different teaching approaches

Navigating the Path to Personalized Ed

By Kevin Bushweller

Editor’s Note: Laptops, tablets, and other technologies can engage students and allow them to work at an individual pace. But, for teachers, administrators, and policymakers, there are questions about the implementation and effectiveness of tailored instruction. This Spotlight examines how educators can make “intelligent” assessments of their students and integrate technology to deliver personalized learning experiences.

INtEractIvE cONtENtS: 1 Navigating the Path to Personalized Education

4 The Personal Approach 6 Moving Beyond One-Size-Fits-All 7 Policies Seen to Slow Personalized Learning

9 Researchers Tackle Personalized Learning 10 ‘Hybrid’ Charter Schools on the Move

11 Credit-Recovery Classes Take a Personal ApproachINtErvIEw: 13 Passion-Based Learning for the 21st CenturycOmmENtary: 15 High Stakes of Standards-Based Accountability

rESOurcES: 18 Resources on Personalized Learning

I n a classroom on the third floor of a 110-year-old faded beige-brick building, 20 middle school-ers of varying sizes and attitudes flip open their black HP laptops for an inter-active lesson on the Declaration of Indepen-dence.The students at Edmunds Middle School are craft-

ing and revising poems about how they would have felt the day after the declaration was signed, but with a personal twist: Each student has taken on the per-sona of a patriot, loyalist, or moderate. Teacher Brent Truchon, a lanyard dangling around his neck with the attached keys and school ID badge tucked in the pocket of his red button-down shirt, moves constantly around the room, kneeling next to students and their laptops to give one-on-one attention where needed, before stepping to the front of the class to rally them all to put more imagery into their poems.

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On Differentiated InstructionPublished February 3, 2010, in Education Week Digital Directions

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

the personal APPRoAch

Editor’s Note: With student diversity growing dramatically and schools facing mounting pressure to boost achieve-ment, many teachers are looking for ways to attend to students’ unique learning needs. This Spotlight focuses on how teachers are using differentiated instruction to give students individualized support.

CONTENTS:

NOw fEaTuriNg iNTEraCTivE hypErliNkSJust click on your story and go.

1 The Personal Approach

4 New Teachers Look for Differentation Help

5 E-Learning Seeks a Custom Fit

7 Exploring Differentiated Instruction

COmmENTary:9 Differentiate, Don’t Standardize

iNTErviEw:11 Making a Difference

aSk ThE mENTOr:14 Co-Teaching in the Multi-Level Classroom

Digital tools for defining

and targeting students’

strengths and weaknesses

could help build a kind of

individualized education

plan for every student.

T eachers have always known that a typical

class of two dozen or more students can

include vastly different skill levels and

learning styles. But meeting those varied

academic needs with a defined curriculum, time

limitations, and traditional instructional tools can be

daunting for even the most skilled instructor.

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www.edweek.org/go/spotlights

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