Colleagues who have known me over the yeas ask, “Walter, what’s up? Why is ASCD supporting the Common Core State Standards?” as if we have gone over to the dark side. My initial answer is, “Standards are not evil!” followed by, “Besides, ASCD very thoughtfully and deliberately made the decision to get involved in this work. Common Core & Whole Child go hand in hand!”
The 5 strands of the Whole Child - healthy, safe, engaged, supported and challenged - are the centerpiece of everything we do at ASCD, and will be even moreso as we continue to move towards revolutionizing the ways we learn and work. But we need a way to determine how we know when we’ve met them…and what have we done to successfully address each one.
Enter the Common Core State Standards. Common Core measures outcomes in terms of access, delivery and expectations, promoting familiar ASCD themes of higher order thinking skills, habits of mind, quality content and essential skills. As ASCD Whole Child Managing Director Molly McCloskey emphasizes, it’s all about being inclusive in our thinking:
Each child, in each school, in each of our communities deserves to be healthy,safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. That’s what a whole child approach to learning, teaching, and community engagement is all about.
In concert with this philosophy, Common Core sets higher expectations for students. These standards are broad in scope, avoiding the narrow definitions we have become all too familiar with heretofore. Each state unpacks the standards and designs their implementation as it sees fit; they cannot be taught like traditional standards. The Common Core State Standards are both the answer and the higher level question, providing indicators of what we are doing broadly while forcing us to think more deeply about implementation.
Most importantly, and unlike previous iterations of standards, the Common Core creates the need to build structures so children can be successful. States cannot adopt the Common Core and successfully implement them without identifying the gaps in their current programs that have created points of failure for students in the past. If you are looking to transform education to meet the needs of every child, you must be a proponent of the Common Core State Standards.
ASCD supports the Common Core because we support challenging and improving education. Historically, we have always advocated for standards. So when the CCSSO presented the Common Core for adoption by states nationally, we assessed the soundness of the standards, examined them for pedagogical consistency with our commitment to the Whole Child, and decided it was a good match for the work we have always done. Since the Common Core movement takes on nationwide implications, we believe we need to be engaged in the discussion as a voice for excellence in instruction and development of quality materials. This is why we applied for and obtained a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant to help lead the important work of implementing the standards on the ground in each state.
As we begin, we realize there is no endpoint to this work. Implementation is an ongoing process, and there are plenty of ways for educators at all levels to get involved. ASCD Policy Programs Director David Griffith advises, “The time to get involved is now. There is some tendency for people to want to wait until test items are developed. Don’t wait.” Now is the time to help develop Common Core implementation in your state.
How can you get started? Well, subscribe to the free ASCD Common Core newsletter and follow ASCD Common Core work on Twitter using the hashtags #ASCDpolicy and #CommonCore and #WholeChildAdv. You can also learn more about our Common Core work at http://www.ascd.org/public-policy/common-core.aspx and the Whole Child program athttp://www.wholechildeducation.org/ and be sure to keep up with our monthly themes on the Whole Child Blog at http://whatworks.wholechildeducation.org/blog/. And of course, peruse the official Common Core State Standards initiative site at http://www.corestandards.org/.
At whatever level of education you serve, teacher and administrator, find out what your state is doing by visiting your state department of education or office of public instruction website to learn more and find out how you can get involved. Be a voice. Be active. Help inform and define how this important movement in American public education will make a difference for your students. At this point 44 states have adopted the Common Core State Standards, so there may also be work you can do in your state to advocate for adoption if your state has yet to join the critical mass. However you choose to be involved, now is the time to do so.
Is the Common Core a panacea for all those issues that need to be addressed in transforming education into a responsive 21st century institution? Of course not. But we have to start somewhere. And putting in place a single set of national standards by which all states work and teach is a laudable start. Come join us!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment