The Learning Network: Teachers, What Are Your Thoughts on the Common Core Standards?

Michael Appleton for The New York Times A parent of a student at the Earth School in Manhattan wore a button protesting standardized testing based on the new Common Core standards.  Go to related article »

The work of this blog is to suggest ideas for teaching and learning with The New York Times. We don’t do original reporting, and we don’t offer opinions on education issues. Instead, like teachers everywhere, we strive to facilitate discussion on issues of the day rather than imparting our own points of view.

But as we have experimented with the new Common Core Standards over the last two years, we have also been aware of how politically charged their implementation has become.

For some, it’s not so much the standards as the inevitable related standardized testing that is the issue. Many, from Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers to the National Council of Teachers of English to the New York Times editorial page, have recently called for caution on testing until teachers and students have a chance to adjust to the new requirements.

For others, the standards themselves are the problem.

The Republican National Committee rejects them on federalist grounds. Others dislike them because of the way they have been adopted and implemented. Still others say that we need less standardization, not more, or that national standards are beside the point when bigger issues of inequality are the real issue. Many simply see them as part of a troubling wave of change around the direction of education policy in the United States in general.

Common Core defenders, however, say the standards are powerful and much-needed — as a way to help students compete in a global economy, and as a way “replace the mediocre patchwork of learning standards” that predates them.

We thought we’d both explain how this blog is approaching the Common Core and ask you about your own experiences and opinions as we plan for the next school year. Please join the conversation below.

What We’ve Done on the Blog So Far, and Why

One of the first things teachers noticed about the Common Core Standards was the fact that they require significantly more nonfiction, or “informational text,” across the curriculum.

Since the C.C.S.S. definition of “informational text” includes pretty much everything The Times publishes, we saw this as an opportunity to help teachers use Times articles, essays, infographics, videos and photographs alongside literature and other classroom materials to make connections between academic content, students’ lives and the world at large.

Of course, making those connections has been the chief focus of The Learning Network for our entire 14-year history, so this wasn’t a departure for us.

Standards or no standards, our work is to make the newspaper accessible for learners. It’s why the liveliest part of the blog has always been the daily Student Opinion question, and why we run features like our new photojournalism activity and our summer reading contest.

But to help teachers understand how what we do works for the Common Core, we also aligned our lesson plans this year both to the McREL Standards we’ve always used and to the new C.C.S.S.– a task that wasn’t hard given that we’ve occasionally been accused of overstuffing our lessons with so many complex activities and questions that some of them could serve as graduate seminars. Next year we may well add the new science standards to the mix.

But because the shift to more nonfiction is the subject of much controversy, this fall we also published a lesson plan inviting students to examine the standards themselves, and discuss the question “What should children read?”

Perhaps the most obviously C.C.S.S.-aligned experiment we did this year was our Friday “Common Core Practice” series, in which we collaborated with two teachers and their freshman humanities classes to post three standards-based writing prompts drawn from each week’s Times.

Their students have just created a video that sums up better than we ever could the benefits of reading the newspaper regularly.

For these teachers and students and for us, however, the focus on the Common Core was just a lens through which to see the work we would have done anyway. Yes, the prompts addressed the argumentative, informative and narrative writing the standards highlight, but the exercise was much more about the serendipity of discovery a reader can have paging through The Times, and about creating a culture of lifelong learning.

As the two teachers — Jonathan Olsen and Sarah Gross — say: “We’ve used newspapers in the classroom before the Common Core, and we’ll continue to use them if the Common Core disappears. Reading and writing with The Times works no matter what standards you’re following.”

We suspect that’s how many of you feel about what and how you teach, too. Several teachers have told us they will tweak the good work they’ve always done in order to address the standards more directly, but, like Mr. Olsen and Mrs. Gross, they already have a solid sense of what works with their own students.

This summer we’ll be thinking about where we should go with the standards for 2013-14 ourselves, and your thoughts will help. We hope you’ll weigh in.

Questions for You

We know that the answers to these questions are not simple, but please post briefly below in response to as many as you like:

What have been your experiences so far with the Common Core?How prepared do you think you, your students and your school are to begin addressing them during the next school year? What do you think of the standards themselves?What are your thoughts on how they have been implemented so far?How do you feel about what this blog has been doing around the C.C.S.S. so far? What else could we be doing? How can we help you?

Thank you, and happy summer.

View the original article here