The Common Core State Standards are “a set of academic content standards for grades K-12 in English language arts and Math” published by the Common Core State Standards Initiative in June 2010 (Common Core State Standards Initiative n.p.). These standards have been adopted by nearly every state in the US, making it a nearly nationwide set of expectations for what students will need to know to be prepared for college and the workforce. After the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, a fierce debate has broken out over how these standards can be successfully implemented by state officials, administrators, and educators before the 2014-15 school year—when students will be tested with Common Core-based assessments. One area receiving a lot of attention in the Common Core academic literature involves professional development. The Common Core State Standards are so new that professional development has been only just developed by the individual states for use by the individual educators. This is if professional development has been planned at all--some states are relying on the educators to get creative and prepare themselves for the new Standards. This is the issue—what are officials at the state agencies doing, if anything, to prepare teachers to teach to the Common Core State Standards? In this article, I plan to focus on this question as it pertains to the North Carolina educational system for 6th through 8th grade Mathematics education, and I will introduce the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics and how they differ from the old standards. Then I will talk about how the changes characteristic of the Common Core Standards will be successfully implemented through certain kinds of professional development for North Carolina middle grades Math teachers. Finally I will talk about the question of successful professional development and whether researchers feel teachers are indeed ready to implement the Common Core in their own classrooms, ultimately affecting the success of the Common Core implementation.
State officials adopted the Common Core State Standards for grades K-12 for English language arts and Mathematics shortly after it was released in June 2010. It is important to note that this is a package deal—“when adopting the common standards, states agree that they will not pick and choose which standards to adopt, but will adopt and implement the full set” (Regional Educational Laboratory, et al. 3). This means that North Carolina has adopted the full complement of Math Standards, which includes separate Math Content and Math Practice Standards. These Standards in Math were designed to close the achievement gap between students in the US and those of high-performing nations like Japan. Indeed, according to Achieve, Inc., an organization involved in the creation of the Common Core State Standards, “the Japanese Course of Study was an important resource” in the development of the Common Core (pp.2). This organization explained that the Common Core developers simply used the Japanese Course of Study and made it more specific and detailed, while keeping the two sets of standards “substantially similar in terms of focus” (Achieve, Inc. 3). This organization believes that the more detailed standards will help teachers to effectively prepare for the Common Core in their classrooms, stating that “teachers who use the [Common Core State Standards] will be more likely to understand the expectations and how content progresses from grade to grade” (Achieve, Inc. 3). John Kendall, author of an e-book on the Common Core State Standards, mentions that the biggest differences between current Mathematics standards and those of the Common Core occur in the middle grades curriculum. He says that “probability and statistics begins in 6th grade, and students begin working at expressions of ratio and proportion in 7th grade. In 8th grade, students are not only expected to apply the Pythagorean Theorem but also to prove it” (Kendall 25). Kendall notes the differences in standards in terms of how teachers will view them, stating that “teachers may find that the specific descriptions, arguments, and proofs required present a greater challenge than their states’ standards for middle school” (Kendall 25). An educator herself, Marilyn Burns seems to agree with Kendall in his assessment of the differences in Common Core Standards. She recognizes that “for example, students should be able not only to figure out the answer to a problem like 15 x 12, but also to demonstrate an understanding of multiplication as defined by the Practice Standards” of the Common Core Mathematics Standards (Burns 44). Indeed, the Common Core State Standards seem to place an emphasis on concepts rather than simple computational skills. Stephen Sawchuk, an education journalist, writes about this major departure from the old Math Standards, “the idea being that understanding how and why algorithms work is as important as crunching numbers” in the Common Core curriculum (Sawchuk 18).
So, the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics are clearly different from any other set of academic expectations—what does that mean for teachers? Sawchuk thinks the new Common Core Standards spell disaster for the teachers charged with their implementation. He says that, “evidence from a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation study suggests that teachers already struggle to help students engage in the higher-order, cognitively demanding tasks emphasized by the [Common Core State Standards in Mathematics], such as the ability to synthesize, analyze, and apply information” (Sawchuk 18). Achieve, Inc. disagrees, stating that the Standards make clear what teachers should do and how to do it. They state that the Common Core Standards are designed with a higher “level of specificity” than any other set of academic expectations, “making the coherence and the developing rigor of the content more evident” to teachers (Achieve, Inc. 3). Burns thinks that the Common Core State Standards can be implemented successfully if educators start in a certain place. She believes that “assessing students’ facility with numerical reasoning is essential to implementing the math standards” (Burns 44). In Burns’s opinion, this is the first step for teachers if they are to help their students; diagnosing flaws in their reasoning skills will allow teachers to know where to begin when attempting to teach their students the analytical skills they need to perform well on Common Core-based assessments.
Even with the debate between proponents and dissenters of the Common Core State Standards, the path is clear—professional development must be a part of the implementation process for state educational agencies to successfully implement the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics. This can be simplified because, as Kendall says, “the essence of the Common Core initiative can be induced from its name” (Kendall 27). He explains that “the nature of the core is of an essential and irreducible set of knowledge and skills, while common suggests a social contract and all that it implies: shared benefit and equitable treatment” (Kendall 27). The fact that so many states have adopted and are now implementing the Common Core State Standards, particularly in Mathematics, means that educators across the nation are working right now to develop tools and lessons to help educators implement these new standards in their own classrooms. Burns, now the founder of math education consulting firm, has developed the Math Reasoning Inventory (MRI) that teachers can use free of charge to assess how their students reason out math problems. She believes the MRI “enables teachers to focus on strengthening any deficient reasoning strategies and underlying concepts about Mathematics”, skills already established to be critical to high performance on the 2014-15 Common Core-based assessments (Burns 46). Tools like this can be used by North Carolina middle grades students to prepare their classes for new assessments and determine where they need to begin when instructing to this new curriculum. Still, people believe that more hands-on professional development is needed. Sawchuk argues that “teachers are wrestling with an absence of truly aligned curricula and lessons”, a fact which North Carolina education agencies are attempting to address (Sawchuk 17). According to the Regional Educational Laboratory, North Carolina agencies “reported that their state could benefit from the cross-state collaboration fostered by common standards, such as shared instructional resources and textbooks, joint professional development efforts, and the use of common assessments (Regional Educational Laboratory, et al. 7). North Carolina plans to use a multi-pronged approach to professional development in particular, reporting that they will “use the Internet to provide online training sessions, including webinars and professional development modules” along with “a combination of face-to-face, direct training for school staff” (Regional Educational Laboratory, et al. 13).
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