I recently answered questions from a parent of a kindergarten and second-grade student in Baltimore County, Md., regarding the Common Core standards, now being used in schools across Maryland and several other states, including Illinois. Her questions and my response and follow-up are here:
What exactly are the downsides/upsides to common core and how is it playing out in Baltimore County. At the moment I don’t really see much difference in how my children are being taught. … My children are in kindergarten and second grade. … When my daughter was in kindergarten at … she was doing pretty much exactly the same things as my son is doing this year. I also don’t see a huge difference in the methods being used for reading and math at her school from last year. The homework looks like a step forward but the methodology of using math manipulators etc all looks the same too me. Her reading is still 100 book challenge and spelling looks like spelling. Open court reading is the same in Kindergarten too although I have not seen that yet in second grade. … I guess I just don’t understand what is supposed to look different. I really honestly don’t understand this whole controversy and I wish someone really could just explain what is the difference in the curriculum because to me it looks and feels exactly the same.
I can’t really address the “political” controversy over the Common Core, because that is something that is taking place very, very far away from the schools (THANK GOD!). Many people are upset because the standards were developed behind closed doors, with very little input from parents or actual classroom teachers. Most of the educators involved in the development of the standards themselves were college professors, and others were actually non-educators or people who thought they knew how to run schools simply because they once WENT to school. There’s not much I can say about that.
But after the standards documents were developed, released, adopted by Maryland and most states, and now that I’m working with them very closely, I’m a big fan. The big deal is that they “promote” higher thinking, which you’re not going to see in kindergarten. They really are more “in tune” with how kids think, and for that, I can talk about kindergarten and second grade. However, teachers are still trying to figure this out themselves, so let me fast forward a year or so, to prepare you to what (I hope) you’ll see next year in third grade.
And keep in mind, this is just one example, but it shows what I mean about being more in tune with how kids’ brains work.
Under the old state curriculum, in third grade, students were required to know their times tables up to 9 × 9 = 81. In fourth grade, they were required to know how to multiply a single digit number by a three-digit number, as long as the resulting product was under 1,000.
In the Common Core, things get shifted around a little. Third graders are required to know how to “multiply one-digit whole numbers by multiples of 10 in the range 10-90 (e.g., 9 × 80, 5 × 60).”
Now, it’s very likely, since teachers don’t change grades very often, that your kid’s third-grade teacher next year doesn’t have lesson plans to teach students how to multiply one-digit numbers by 60, 70, etc., because she didn’t have to do it under the old state curriculum. But also, many teachers go way beyond the required state curriculum, and so she may have lots of materials and lesson plans that teach different types of multiplication. In this case, she could also have a problem, if her materials, that she has spent many years preparing and fine tuning based on the students she has taught, don’t address the new Common Core standards.
What she will definitely have to do is evaluate all her teaching materials and make sure she is covering the new standards in her lesson plans.
So in one sense, multiplication is still multiplication, so on a cursory glance at the materials your kids are bringing home, it might look the same. They still have to learn how to spell, how to multiply, and all those things they did under the old state curriculum. But under the Common Core, the skills may be in a different grade. That’s a big part of what everybody’s so worried about during the transition to the Common Core standards.
That’s what people are worried about, but I would like to also take this opportunity to tell you what they’re so excited about. Under the Common Core, the learning standards are grouped into “clusters.” For example, the third-grade standard I talked about above is considered not a “Major” cluster, but a “Supporting” cluster. Teachers should use multiplication in their lesson plans throughout the year to support the skills in the Major clusters.
Under the old state curriculum, teachers tended to develop lesson plans that would just teach kids their times tables, for example. The lessons under the Common Core (I hope) should use multiplication facts to support other standards. This is how kids think: they’re a lot more multi-tasking than you or I ever were. They need to have a “menu” of solution strategies to solve problems, rather than just focusing on one learning standard at a time.
This is known as “broadcast” learning, and the term stems from channel surfing. If one channel doesn’t feature anything of interest, kids just change the channel. It’s kind of the same thing with the Common Core clusters. If this strategy doesn’t work for solving a problem, kids can pull in another strategy.
At least that’s the theory. And I think after teachers get accustomed to kids with quasi-ADHD switching strategies as they work through a given set of problems or reading texts, the kids will benefit in the end. It will, I think, come more naturally to them, and they will retain the skills they learn, since they learned them not in an isolated lecture about just that one skill but in the context of a larger problem. Nobody will tell them, “Today we’re learning about times tables.” They’ll not only need to know their multiplication facts (or really, how to multiply numbers within a certain range, not from memorizing them but from using “place value strategies”), but they’ll also have to recognize when those multiplication facts should be used to solve a problem.
Let me briefly touch the other things you mentioned. Open Court reading came around about 12 years ago, so it was a program developed long before the Common Core. The program has been criticized for some of the very things the Common Core was designed to fix: it really doesn’t allow kids to “explore” and it tends to dampen creativity. However, it has a very strong emphasis on phonics and it’s pretty difficult to find a curriculum that builds reading comprehension better than Open Court.
But Open Court is a “curriculum.” The Common Core isn’t a curriculum; it’s just a list of standards: the skills and concepts kids need to master by a certain grade level. The Common Core for kindergarten includes this standard: “Demonstrate basic knowledge of one-to-one letter-sound correspondences by producing the primary sound or many of the most frequent sounds for each consonant.” If a school or teacher decides to use the Open Court curriculum to make sure kindergarten students master that particular standard, that’s fantastic, I think.
The Common Core doesn’t specify what particular curriculum a teacher has to use. That’s both good and bad from a teacher’s point of view. On the upside, teachers are totally free to use any curriculum they think might work best with their students. The one used in Baltimore County probably won’t match the one used in Albany, N.Y., or Peoria, Ill., because the kids are different there. Teachers in Maryland like including subjects like the Chesapeake Bay in their lesson plans because kids are (I hope) familiar with it and it’s comfortable: teachers don’t have to waste lots of time teaching kids what the Bay is just to teach a lesson in phonetics, right?
On the downside, some teachers aren’t as creative as others. For these teachers, not having marching orders laid out in front of them is a source of anxiety. They find themselves staying up until all hours working on lesson plans. This is causing many of them to say they’re unprepared and need more time to prepare for the Common Core.