Superintendent speaks about Common Core Standards

Throughout the past two months, our teachers have become intensely aware of the Common Core Standards and the need for all instruction to become data driven and to result in students who are career and college ready. Our teachers are working hard and putting in many extra hours re-working their lesson plans and creating interim assessments that are aligned to state standards, curriculum and college ready expectations.

Now teachers are beginning to make critical analysis of their assessments, resulting in re-teaching and changing of their lesson plans in an attempt to attain the goals of the Race to the Top. With a focus on literacy and mathematics, teachers in all subject areas are requiring their students to think more critically, read with a higher level of understanding, and to gain the ability to provide evidence of their knowledge through references directly made to their readings. This shift to factual understanding and objective analysis of their reading material is a complete change from the reading instruction of the past decade, where we asked students to react to their reading and talk about how they arrived at a specific mathematical solution even if it was not mathematically logical.

From now on, our teachers will be focused upon their students’ ability to justify themselves and their answers to questions by making specific references to factual material they have learned through their reading and instruction. The student, in other words, will be asked to provide written answers with information which they can reference in sources.

No longer will their teacher be asking for the students’ opinion regarding a topic. Their responses will be graded based on factual evidence, grammar, and language conventions. These are changes we do not expect will occur over night, in fact, this school year our state assessments will not yet address these changes at all. Students will first be assessed in this manner in the spring of 2013, so our staff and students will have time to practice, adjust and prepare.