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Taking CCSS From Theory to Practice
Transitioning to national Common Core State Standards will mean raising the level of teaching and learning. As administrators plan to lead the charge, how will they ensure that positive change is taking place in every classroom?
That’s a major topic of discussion during a day-long workshop offered by the North Carolina Principals and Assistant Principals Association. Dozens of educational leaders are at NC State’s McKimmon Center to examine the nuts and bolts of implementing CCSS. Instructional specialists are leading discussion-based sessions focused on ways to make sure teachers understand what they will need to do differently to meet the new standards.
QTL's Rachel Porter leads the discussion.
One impact of the transition will be a need to design lesson plans that address higher order learning. Participants spend some time examining the standards, then talk in small groups about what they’ve learned.
One summarizes the impact by saying, “We saw that the kids will be learning content, but not learning it in isolation.” Another notes that the new standards will take students from “regurgitation to digestion” of information – actually learning rather than just reciting what they’ve been told. A third participant says examining specific skills across grade levels reveals that “as they progress with that skill, they’re also going up in the Bloom’s Taxonomy.”
After a whole-group discussion, Instructional Specialist Rachel Porter points out that while K12 standards are transforming, College and Career Readiness standards are not changing. The new K-12 standards have been re-designed to build knowledge and skills and lead toward college and career readiness.
What teachers need to understand is how their grade level connects to that anchor, how the language changes, and how it progresses through the grades. Teachers will be encouraged to look at earlier grade standards to see where students will have come from, and later grade standards to see where they’re expected to go next.
Schools need a comprehensive plan for improvement.
For principals, it’s about understanding the change, and knowing where to point teachers for detailed information on standards, lesson plans like those found at http://commoncore.org/free, or other important information like the notes on how CCSS affects EC teachers and students at www.cec.sped.org. It’s about developing a proactive, deliberate, focused comprehensive plan, then working with teachers to carry it out in spite of barriers, challenges and ‘initiative fatigue.’
“Our goal today is for you to have a better sense and more concrete understanding of what those things mean,” Porter says, “so you can convey that to teachers.”
Instructional Specialist Pam Edwards tells the group a key to success will be diagnosing whether teachers are ready for Common Core implementation, and determining what additional professional development or other steps are needed to get everyone moving in the right direction. An early step is identifying school leaders. Who will be on the leadership team? What will they be responsible for doing? What needs to be done right away, and what can come later? What external support is needed?
“Think proactively,” she says. “What do you need to start immediately doing? You are going to have to prioritize. But if you’re going to lead this transition, you now as well as I know, you’re going to need a process.”
The later afternoon sessions focused on just that, with participants working in small groups to research, brainstorm, and begin putting together concrete ‘next steps’ for implementation in their own schools.
NCPAPA is partnering with The Centers for Quality Teaching and Learning to conduct the Raleigh sessions this month, and additional sessions in other cities during 2012.
Featured Posts
If you’re looking for a collaborative project with a visual end product, here’s another new Web 2.0 resource to try. NOTA lets users create an interactive digital poster that includes a variety of resources, including text, photos, clipart, maps, links, and more. There’s even a message board function, though it seems to be in beta mode.
Washington, DC instructional technology specialist Mark Brumley posted a very nice three-minute tutorial on the HP Teacher Exchange, and the user interface is really pretty self-explanatory once you understand the basics that he covers. You have to create a user account, but are up and running after you complete that quick process. I was able to create the following QTL Poster as a test in just about 15 minutes.
NOTA allows users to create an interactive digital poster.
If you have an appropriate project, I highly recommend giving NOTA a try.
A participant in one of our recent ExplorNet workshops on Multimedia and Webpage Design gave us a pleasant surprise when she told us she had a prior history with our programs. Gail Thompson teaches Business Education now at Raleigh’s Athens Drive High School. But back in 2006 and 2007, she was a teacher at Dillard Middle School in Wayne County when the school implemented the QTL Foundations program. She told us she still uses the concepts she learned in QTL almost every day. Continue reading
(RALEIGH) – What good is technology if it sits on a shelf? That’s been a persistent question for administrators juggling budgets and deciding whether interactive tools are worth the price. Amid budget cuts and belt tightening, no one wants to spend precious dollars on tools that aren’t effective. But instructional leaders are desperately looking for solutions that help teachers manage and effectively teacher larger and ever more diverse groups of students. Student response systems, or clickers, are one such tool, when they’re used purposefully to increase engagement and assess student understanding. Continue reading
One-on-one teacher coaching plays an ever larger role in our efforts at The Centers for Quality Teaching and Learning. The reflective approach our expert coaches use has a two-fold benefit: it trains teachers to examine and improve their own classroom practices, and does so without putting them on the defensive. Continue reading
Looking for ways to engage your students and motivate them to be self-directed learners? Here is the second of five installments of surefire tips! This time we focus on Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences and find out “WHAT KIND OF ‘SMART’ ARE YOU (AND YOUR STUDENTS)?
WHY DO WE CARE ABOUT HOW KIDS PREFER TO LEARN?
Dr. Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences has strong implications for how our students will develop into adults, get jobs and support families. Many adults find themselves in jobs that do not make optimal use of their most highly developed intelligences – for example, the highly bodily-kinesthetic individual who is stuck in a linguistic or logical desk job when he or she would be much happier in a job where they could move around, such as a recreational leader, a forest ranger, or physical therapist.
The theory of multiple intelligences gives adults a whole new way to look at their lives, examining potentials that they left behind in their childhood (such as a love for art or drama) but now have the opportunity to develop through courses, hobbies, or other programs of self-development. Continue reading
Rachel Porter
QTL Senior Instructional Specialist
Recently a colleague gave me a piece of paper with what looks like a paper doll with a backpack on it. This paper doll student is covered with little text boxes containing attributes like ‘literate consumer of media’, ‘multi-lingual’, ‘capable technology user’, ‘critical thinker’, ‘strong team contributor’, and on and on…17 in all. She explained that the image represented the characteristics a present-day kindergartner should possess by the time they graduate from high school. Hmmm…interesting.
I immediately asked myself, “Do I possess these 17 characteristics?” Continue reading
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