Teacher Fellows Blog

Teachers: What are your misconceptions about the Common Core?

I recently read an article in the Washington Post written by a disgruntled teacher who just received his ”training” in the Common Core.   As a Student Achievement Partners (SAP) Fellow, I have had the opportunity to work closely with the Common Core.  SAP is a nonprofit working with teachers to develop an online library of resources for teaching the new standards. I have assisted with the introduction and explanation of Common Core to district leaders from across the country and have worked with the standards extensively in my own classroom.

I would like to direct my comments to Jeremiah, the teacher from the Post article and any other teacher experiencing difficulty understanding and incorporating the Common Core.

As a teacher with 9 years of experience, five of them in high-needs public schools in New Orleans, I recognize that even the best of initiatives can be foiled with poor preparation. This is my greatest fear for the implementation of Common Core.

Jeremiah, reading about your experience makes me truly sorry that the Common Core was presented to you in such a scripted and uninformative light.  I would react to the training you received in the same way.

However, let’s talk through the intentions vs. actual practice. Allow me to explain the intention of the Common Core, as I understand it given my experience.

Exemplars

An “exemplar” is not and should not feel like a prepackaged lesson. It is a model. It is important for new teachers and veterans alike to have models and exemplars of what excellence looks like. We would never ask our students to produce mastery work without first providing them with examples. Why would we not provide the same scaffolding and support for teachers?

The exemplar is not meant to be scripted or read verbatim– it is a model of excellence that you, as an effective teacher, then modify to meet the needs of your room.  Teachers understand that each child needs something different – an exemplar cannot meet all of those needs. Those are your responsibility, as the purveyor of knowledge in your classroom.

Alignment to good teaching

Common Core asks that our children to be able to access informational and rigorous literary text, analyze it and defend answers with textually-based evidence, write eloquently by making connections between these texts, and use academic vocabulary appropriate to their grade level.  These requirements are directly, explicitly aligned to the needs of our children. I would never implement a set of standards that I did not feel aligned to the needs of my students and the world they will be entering.

Prior knowledge

Informational texts, such as the exemplar Jeremiah witnessed, are intended to be cornerstones to a unit – not the unit itself. It is not the intention of the Common Core to imply that other information should not be taught. We ought to remember that the activation of prior knowledge can put some children at a disadvantage, putting them at odds with the text before they even begin. Common Core does not ask that you do not teach historical context – it asks that you do not require it as a prerequisite to mastery.

Text-to-self connections

Common Core emphasizes that text-to-self connections should not take precedence or be made to feel more important than connections to other texts. As a teacher, it’s my job to know my students well enough to provide the connections that are right for them, whether linking the lesson to personal experience or other literature I know they have encountered.

Literary instruction has gotten to a place where if it doesn’t connect easily to a student’s life, they believe that they do not have to care about it. Are we, as teachers, helping them ready themselves for a global business community by saying, “How does this make you feel?”

The world will not care about the ability of our students to express their opinions about informational text. It is our responsibility to prepare them for what they will have to do with these texts and the Common Core supports the development of these skills beautifully.

Policy makers: What can be done to prevent chaos when implementing the Common Core?

“The best laid schemes of mice and men…” absolutely cannot apply to the Common Core!  This is a chance for our children to receive rigorous standards and an education will help them compete globally. When it comes to implementation, it’s clear there needs to better communication and better training for teachers. Here’s what I recommend:

1. State policy makers should band together in developing a team of expert educators who can conduct national trainings. If possible, they should coordinate with Student Achievement Partners (SAP). This will ensure proper alignment and messaging.
2. Use this educator team to vet materials being developed by textbook companies by rating them on quality and alignment.
3. Use the team to train and develop state and district Common Core experts.
4. Have the team develop meaningful professional development and training that is meaningful and closely linked to standards and real life classroom experience.
5. Regularly evaluate this team against rigorous goals to ensure quality.
6. Encourage districts to hire an expert – whose credentials have been vetted through SAP – who can support the implementation of the Common Core. This would not only ensure alignment but high quality professional development and the effective creation of materials.

I learned a new application for an old word in a recent article in Education Week (Vol. 31, No. 27).  The word is “churn”.  While the traditional definition is “to stir or agitate violently”, in this article, it refers to the practice of moving teachers around and compares this churn to a hurricane.

Urban school districts suffer the most from this type of disaster.  New teachers often leave the teaching profession within the first five years or they at least leave the urban schools for suburban institutions.  This creates a stir in the school or the entire district as educators move in and move out and others move in to take their place.  This interferes with relationship building between staff members and with their students.  This instability creates obstacles in developing trust and understanding.

A more complicated problem is that teachers not only leave urban schools, but often , those schools will move teachers around within the building (and sometimes between from one school to another) treating them as objects or widgets, merely filling a scheduling or staffing hole.  Teachers are not given the opportunity to develop expertise in a grade level or subject as they are moved about by the hurricane.  The article states, “For every two teachers who left the district or the profession during our study, another three were moved from subject to subject, grade to grade, or school to school.”  In addition to personal mastery, educators who are blown about are not able to form stable professional learning communities in which to grow in their abilities.

Educators, researchers, and policymakers have learned to accept churn as “background noise.”  The constant movement has become a fact of educator’s lives.  Further research showed that of controlled studies attempting to measure the effects of new interventions churn was ignored as a possible reason for failing to find effects from the interventions.

Churn is apparent even in the world of administrators where principals are switched about in efforts to turn around struggling schools.  As a result, teachers are constantly adjusting to new leadership styles.

What does this mean for teachers?

• Less knowledge. When teachers are moved from grade to grade, they need to learn new curriculum materials and new educational standards.  Looking at the National Common Core State Standards, it is obvious that a teacher would find differences and variance in the standards.  
  
• Weak relationships. Teachers in schools with a high-level of churn, fail to make lasting relationships with co-workers.  In fact, they may feel less inclined to even attempt the effort of connecting with colleagues if they feel that the coworker will only disappear at the end of the year. 
  
• High turnover. Teachers who feel like widgets will leave the profession http://widgeteffect.org/  Teachers who feel valued for their contribution to the education of children, stay.
  

What does this mean for students?

We have to remember that students ultimately suffer due to churn.  Students cannot build relationships when teachers are moving to other buildings.  Without a degree of staff stability, students encounter a new school climate every year of their education.

What does this mean for policymakers?

Teacher turnover has been talked about for many years.  Teachers leave the profession for a variety of reasons, but the fact remains that teacher turnover has related economic costs.  It takes money to train teachers and to provide them with materials to meet educational demands.  It takes money to recruit qualified individuals.

Turnover has educational costs.  If students are consistently taught by less experienced teachers, they will experience less effective teaching on the whole.  If students are taught by teachers who are always new to the curriculum, they will not benefit from a teacher’s deep understanding of a subject matter or grade level.

Turnover has personal costs.  Educators and administrators are never able to develop confidence in an area, a building, or a subject area if they are constantly tossed around by the winds of change.

Churn needs to be recognized and addressed.  It cannot be a necessary evil involved in education.  The root causes of churn need to be examined.  How arbitrary is churn?  What are the reasons that are given when teachers and administrators are moved or choose to move?  How can we convince teachers to stay?  How can we convince administrators to let teachers stay in one place long enough to develop a level of expertise?

Final Thoughts:

Educators leave the profession of teaching for a variety of reasons.  Although teachers may seek higher paying jobs, more often teachers site the reasons for leaving as “environments that lack essential professional supports including:

1. support from school leadership,
   
   
2. organizational structures and workforce conditions that convey respect and value for them, and
   
   
3. induction and mentoring programs for new and experienced teachers.”
   
   

When teachers feel valued and respected, they will stay – through thick and thin.  When teachers are treated like warm bodies to fill a classroom based on scheduling needs, they feel undervalued and unable to fulfill their role as a mentor for the future.

Some people think that anyone can teach.  That is a widget mentality and teachers are not widgets. 

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Outliers,” he takes a close look at the many details behind successful people. In looking at highly successful people he defines as “outliers,” Gladwell cleverly reverse engineers three secret ingredients necessary to becoming a highly successful person on top of just being smart and hardworking: opportunity, strong community, and cultural legacies.

These ingredients have huge implications for education and ultimately confirm that we must address the “whole” child.

Each ingredient as you might guess is complex and not created easily, For example, if a lasagna recipe calls for tomato sauce, you better not add a can of Ragu and expect great things.  To do it right we must start from scratch using only that which is fresh, ripe, and organically grown.

INGREDIENT #1: OPPORTUNITY

In his book, Gladwell uses several examples to show us that in addition to innate talents and individual effort, highly successful people have unique opportunities that add to their practical intelligence. Practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to who, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.”

While practical intelligence matters for success, it only matters to a certain extent and intellect and achievement are far from being perfectly correlated. Gladwell makes this point through the comparison of two geniuses: Chris, with an IQ of 195 and Robert, with an IQ of 130. Chris lacked many of the opportunities that Robert was given. He was poor, abandoned by his father, had an uneducated mother, and was often beaten at home by his mother’s partners. Chris never finished college and became a horse rancher. Robert won the Nobel Prize.

Being a speech language pathologist and reading about practical intelligence, I immediately correlated it with pragmatics, otherwise known as social language. This social piece of teaching a child is something we talk about in education, but it is often far from the priority.

If we accept that social skills will play a significant role in student achievement, then the teaching of this practical knowledge ought to be part of our strategic plan as educators.  While many students may learn good social skills from their parents, many others do not.  In order to create equal opportunity, we need to recognize and rectify this imbalance. That may require extending the school day/year, providing broader experiences, and teaching basic lessons on social skills.

INGREDIENT #2: STRONG COMMUNITY

Cognitive science teaches us that children learn best when their stress levels are low and when they engage in regular positive social and communicative interactions with peers. As such, we could conclude that the creation of strong school communities yields optimum learning.

Gladwell in fact supports this conclusion with an example about a community in Pennsylvania called Roseto.  The residents of Roseto had remarkable health statistics.  After researching diet, exercise, genes, location, etc, a physician named Stewart Wolf was left with only one conclusion:  “the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world.”

INGREDIENT #3: CULTURAL LEGACIES

The discussion of cultural legacies is fascinating and a must-read.  One example he gives is that Korean pilots have a statistically high crash rate.  After detailing the conversation between a NYC air traffic controller and a Korean 1^st officer and Korean Captain, he shows us how the different communication styles of the different cultures resulted in a fatal crash that could have been avoided. In response to these cultural legacy issues, the Koreans are now being trained differently on how to express emergency situations with less mitigation and more commands regardless of job hierarchy.

As we think about cultural norms among Korean pilots, is it so different to compare to our students? They have all come from different homes and have been taught a variety of behaviors. It’s up to us, as educators to better understand the cultural legacies of our students so we can teach them the skills they need to be successful.

So there you have it, the three secret ingredients necessary to address the whole child and create a successful adult. All of these are well within our control if we decide as a society that that is our goal. As teachers, we understand we have students from all backgrounds with various needs. We need the school structures, supports, and accountability to help us provide opportunity for all students, even those who may not have it at home.

With these secret ingredients would Chris not have also been an outlier?

What if his educators had considered his cultural legacy and determined that he needed strategic efforts at improving his practical intelligence and created a stress free community filled with positive peer/teacher interactions for which to help teach these skills and also gave him more opportunities to gain more practical intelligence with teachers/peers through such things as summer school and extended school day activities, so that he was logging more social savvy hours? Would the smartest man in the world then be curing cancer instead of shoveling manure?