About 70 teachers participated in a June workshop in Peoria, Ill., which was designed to help them teach language arts as described in the Common Core State Standards, the Peoria Journal-Star reports. The vast majority of American students will receive instruction beginning next year in the Common Core, so workshops like this are common nowadays in schools across America. They’re often led by a representative or master teacher from the state’s education department.
Most teachers in attendance at the Peoria workshop had already noticed the different approach to teaching in the Common Core. It focuses on preparing students for college and the workforce, unlike previous learning standards, which presented students with information about more topics than the Common Core does, in a push to make them ‘well-rounded.’ The new standards require a critical reading of texts and an in-depth understanding of their meaning, especially as that meaning applies to college and career readiness.
An example given in the Star-Journal article was to consider the sentence “Jose avoided using the ukulele.” Katy Sykes, a language arts specialist with the Illinois State Board of Education, said when she taught elementary students, she might have zoomed in on the word ‘ukulele’ and developed all sorts of creative lesson plans around that word. Under the Common Core, she said the word ‘avoided’ is probably a better choice for focus in that sentence, since kids are much more likely to encounter ‘avoid’ than ‘ukulele’ in their future studies. In other words, developing lesson plans around ‘avoid’ might prepare students better for future school work than singing songs, however cute they may be, about ukuleles.
Under the Common Core, students don’t simply read stories, but the standards encourage the reading of novels. They don’t simply read books but scientific articles, newspapers, and history texts. In other words, old state standards tended to spread out the information presented to students—a mile wide but an inch deep—while the Common Core, adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia, forces students to understand concepts from the text at a much higher level. They can’t just glance over text and expect to master the objectives in the Common Core. Rather, they’ll have to read texts more critically.
And this adds to the burden of teachers who teach kids how to read critically. “We’re asking students to think more critically than we’ve asked them to do in the past,” the paper quoted Monica Tatum, a sixth-grade language arts teacher at Lindbergh Middle School, as saying. “That means we, as teachers, are going to have to think more critically as well. Now we have to look at the reasoning behind students’ answers, versus just looking at the answers.”
