Dear Megan,
I had lunch with a friend a few weeks ago who works as a math teacher at a charter school in Gaston County. The conversation meandered for a while, but came around to the Common Core Standards schools have adopted recently. I’d heard only a little bit about this initiative from my mother, a teacher herself, so I asked my friend to tell me a bit about it. My friend proceeded to expound at length on the challenges and pitfalls of implementing what she called a “completely necessary, yet completely impossible” set of standards for educating students. What was strange was that while she seemed so very excited that such an important step in educational reform had been initiated, she was quite daunted by the prospect of how to go about implementing such rigorous standards.
After our lunch ended, I thought more about these new standards and the huge and very real challenge they must be presenting to educators, administrators, and students. Also, it is such a recent change in educational standards, having only been adopted by most states in the last year, so current educational journals must be publishing some of the first research on this topic even now. I also knew that someone must have had success with this on a pretty big level for over 30 states to have adopted this set of standards. With these things considered, I thought it might be interesting to look at how the different states and school districts adopting the Common Core Standards are successfully implementing them for various populations for school. Who’s having success? What methods are they using? What are they doing to accommodate exceptional children like academically gifted or autistic students? All these questions made me think that this would make for an interesting inquiry project.
Therefore, I propose to begin my inquiry by learning more about what constitutes the Common Core Standards. I plan to locate and review the published standards and then search the current educational journals for research on implementing them, looking especially for articles that discuss successful teaching methods used and how special student populations will be accommodated. I will also use my connections with real educators, and plan to interview teachers and administrators that are facing and meeting the challenge of Common Core locally. I believe a combination of individual interviews and research from the literature will give me the best foundation of information and help me to see the issue from multiple angles. I hope you agree and think I’m headed in the right direction. If you have any suggestions on how I might improve my plan of attack on the research, I would appreciate any help you might have to give.
See you in class,
Meredith Brannon
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