I attended The Blueprint for Educational Excellence National Institute yesterday and it was really good. We listened to an excellent presentation from Bruce Taylor on the Common Core. He was very engaging! He showed us that the CC is not that complicated even though there are thousands of pages of information. Basically, it comes back to good teaching. If we are focusing on what we need to teach since the students only spend 16% of their time in the classroom, they will be able to meet the standards and pass the state tests. There are about 13 terms the CC uses throughout the standards. If we focus on these, then students will do well. And, not only will they do well on the testing, they will do well in life!
Most of the CC is based on tasks like analyzing, summarizing, inferring, evaluating, identifying, supporting. Add in things like describe, compare and contrast, determine the main idea and you have the basis of the whole Common Core. Moreover, these skills are needed for everyday life. Do we analyze the problem with our car, or at least have a mechanic do so? Do we summarize the movie for our friends who haven't seen it yet? Do we evaluate our bank accounts? The problem is that most students don't really know what these terms mean in the context of the task. Many students believed that explicit meant adult content. They aren't totally wrong! It just obviously doesn't mean that when they have to answer a question about something they have read and are asked to support their answer with explicit facts/information/examples from the text.
We can embed the teaching of these terms and skills in our practice and not even need to have "test prep" as a separate subject. Moreover, Mr. Taylor believes we should be working on these across the curriculum and not just in ELA and Math. Students don't transfer their knowledge of these tasks to other areas, which is too bad because they are asked to do these all the time. If we can help them do that, they will rock!
I believe we can start this even in the primary grades. I have my first graders go back to the book to find the facts/information we will use when we do our comprehension work and our responding to reading. It isn't something they do independently yet, but they will get there. I also find that if I use the terms and then tell them what they mean in ways that they can understand this helps. Exposing them to that academic language is important. Don't forget to mention why they are doing something. Knowing the purpose and knowing that they can use this skill with anyone and in real life is empowering.
Check out some more tips I picked up from the conference in the reading section of the blog.
Thanks for stopping by!
Oh and happy April vacation if you are on it, like we are. Phew! I never thought it would come, and after our winter, it is so appreciated!! :)
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