Beak Honig
January 29, 2014

Bill Honig

Nib Honig

The Common Core State Standards land what students should master, just they are not a curriculum.

Jumping from the standards to create lesson plans misses a crucial middle pace of developing a coherent curriculum. The absence of this more complex work of creating a local curricular framework for the district, which informs the sequence and breadth of instruction (usually referred to as "telescopic and sequence"), volition upshot in weak implementation of Common Cadre. For case, one of the math standards for seventh course is to use proportional thinking and percentage to solve bug such as: "If $50 is xx percent of your total funds, how much exercise you lot have?" That standard doesn't answer the question of how much instructional fourth dimension should be invested in helping students master this standard (really quite a lot), what strategies will be effective, what should be the progression of learning and how does instruction correlate with previous units.

A similar point is made in the English Language Arts standards. They stress the need for a coherent curriculum and a systematic build-up of cognition both through literature broadly defined and the disciplines. They state: "Past reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the groundwork to be better readers in all content areas. Students tin can only proceeds this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge inside and beyond grades."

Unfortunately, many districts have non undertaken this crucial work. In a Common Core survey conducted last October past the Consortium for the Implementation of the Common Core Country Standards and the County Offices of Education, which covered 818 districts representing 83 percent of California'south public school enrollment, only about one-3rd of schoolhouse districts have created a scope and sequence for the the Common Core standards in either English language Language Arts or mathematics for at to the lowest degree some grades. More than one-third of school districts study that this work is planned for the future and well-nigh one-quarter report that they are not planning to engage in this work at all. Alternatively, only about half the districts are creating units or lessons, or aligning existing units or lessons to the Common Core standards.

Although many districts and professionals are understandably feeling the pressure of the impending Smarter Balanced assessments and will be tempted to rely exclusively on the telescopic and sequence of the textbooks they adopt, this strategy may be less than ideal in the long run. A unmarried textbook is no substitute for a district plan that encourages the use of a combination of resources and provides teachers guidance on the club in which standards should be taught, how much time should exist spent on them and how they fit in the larger context of the course-to-grade buildup of knowledge. Teachers need this context to maximize the outcome of adopted materials. Thus, many effective districts are developing their own curricular frameworks to support the more than circuitous pedagogy envisioned by standards.

For example, Long Embankment'southward scope and sequence documents provide a comprehensive "blueprint" for strategically sequencing and operationalizing the course-level/class standards in English Linguistic communication Arts and Mathematics. The disquisitional attributes of each certificate are:

  • Units laid out in sequence past theme/title;
  • An indication of how much time to spend on each unit;
  • A narrative description of each unit of measurement explaining its focus and purpose;
  • A description of the standards to be assessed for each unit;
  • An cess narrative detailing:
    1. The determinative cess strategies and practices included in each unit of measurement so teaches can monitor how well the students are learning;
    2. A notation of formative assessment lessons that volition exist included in each unit during the second half of the unit with time immune for re-teach/review; and
    3. An caption of the structure and purpose of the acting or end-of-unit of measurement assessment and a listing of item types that may be included, along with the rationale.
  • The reading level range of the texts used in each ELA unit.

There are also other very useful resources bachelor to aid in developing a coherent curriculum to implement the Common Core standards.

  1. The California State Board of Didactics has but adopted the California Mathematics Curriculum Framework, which offers specifications and communication for curriculum and instruction to implement the Common Core standards plus connections to other national and state resources that support this effort. For case, it relies heavily on work from Arizona.
  2. The Instructional Quality Committee (IQC) has approved the draft of the English Language Arts/English language Language Development Framework incorporating both the board-adopted Common Cadre English Language Arts standards and the English Language Development standards for English Learners. It is undergoing a sixty-day review (delight feel gratuitous to offer us some advice) but the draft framework is besides extremely useful in giving guidance on developing local ELA/ELD curriculum and instruction.The ELA/ELD framework stresses not only the goals of college and career readiness but likewise didactics for citizenship and to produce broadly literate individuals. It emphasizes the need to advisedly nourish to what students read, hash out and write over their schoolhouse careers to attain these goals both in schoolhouse and in an organized independent reading program. It is organized around five interrelated strands mutual to both ELA and ELD (with ELD teaching helping English Learners primary the Common Core standards)—making meaning such as drawing inferences;language including vocabulary, syntax, bookish language and text structure;written and oral expression; a build-upward of content and bailiwick knowledge; and foundation skills including the skills of decoding, understanding syllabication and becoming fluent.
  3. At its January coming together the Land Board of Educational activity unanimously adopted 31 K-8 base program mathematics texts. Each of these programs has been reviewed for fidelity to the standards and frameworks and offers a curricular scope and sequence that can be very useful in developing local curricular frameworks, if not relied on exclusively.
  4. A leadership planning guide completed concluding October by the Consortium for the Implementation of the Common Cadre Country Standards and the California County Superintendents Educational Services Clan stresses the critical importance of each district deciding on a coherent and sequenced curriculum to implement the Mutual Cadre land standards. The guide as well offers very useful advice on implementation of Common Core.
  5. A Nov study by Hannover Inquiry contains an exhaustive list of Mutual Cadre curricular resources and planning tools beingness used past the various states. Some other listing of resources is available at the CDE website and a national open resources list aligned to the Common Cadre tin be establish at OER Commons.
  6. Finally, the California Department of Education/Canton site Brokers of Expertise contains a host of resource and has just initiated a specifically designated CICCSS group page for word of implementation of Common Cadre. Many states have likewise produced curricular planning guides. For example, the Colorado Department of Didactics has posted their ain guide (Colorado'due south Commune Sample Curriculum Project), as has New York.
  7. Many district telescopic and sequence efforts and units of instruction for standards implementation are available at the CDE, CCSESA and county office of education websites. Virtually districts are willing to share their piece of work.

I hope this piece will be useful in supporting our collective efforts to improve educational performance. By placing instruction and a coherent curriculum based on Mutual Core standards at the center of a 5- to ten-year improvement effort and by building school, district, land and organizational capacity to continuously support that implementation, we should be well on our way to a successful launch of these potentially transformative standards.

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Neb Honig is chairman of the Instructional Quality Commission and former California State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

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