Implementing the Common Core Standards

A West Virginia Status Report

Office of InstructionWest Virginia Department of Education

Status Report

• Adopted by WVBOE – May 2010– Decision made to place CCSS into the existing WV framework– 85 member work group assembled to begin the work– Implementation of Next Generation Standards Stakeholder group

formed• Implementation Schedule Adopted – January 2011

– To align content with the SMARTER Balance Assessment in 2014– Fall 2011 - Kindergarten implemented – Fall 2012 – First grade implemented– Fall 2013 – Second grade implemented– Fall 2014 – Third through twelfth grade implemented– Professional development scaled to match this schedule

Why is This Important for Students, Teachers and Parents?

• Ensures consistent expectations regardless of a student’s zip code

• Provides educators, parents and students with clear, focused guideposts

Points of Interest

• CCSS adopted by 47 states so far• Not a national curriculum• Fewer and deeper – increased opportunity for mastery• Movement of some content to more directly align with

developmental levels of students• Embedded literacy in all areas• Math and English/language arts only at this point• Work being done on other content areas • Member of the CCSSO State Collaborative on

Assessment and Student Standards for Implementing CCSS

http://www.corestandards.org/

http://wvde.state.wv.us/teach21/

Criteria for the Standards

• Fewer, clearer and higher• Aligned with college and work expectations• Include rigorous content and application of

knowledge through high-order skills• Build upon strengths and lessons of current state

standards• Internationally benchmarked, so that all students

are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society

• Based on evidence and research

Developing Cognition, Making Connections

The standards do address content. However, it is often overlooked that the standards identify the cognitive processes and learning strategies students need in order to acquire and retain curriculum content

Standards for Mathematical Practice

• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them

• Reason abstractly and quantitatively• Construct viable arguments and critique the

reasoning of others• Model with mathematics• Use appropriate tools strategically• Attend to precision• Look for and make use of structure• Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning

English Language Arts Standards

• Analyze how and why individuals, events and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text

• Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words

• Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently

• Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach

• Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others

• Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation

Key Cognitive Strategies

• Problem formulation• Research• Interpretation• Communication• Precision and Accuracy

Key Cognitive Strategies

• Problem formulation• Research• Interpretation• Communication• Precision and Accuracy

We should view content acquisition as a means to an

end; not an end in itself.

Curriculum

• Interesting problems• Investigations• Debates• Simulations• Games• Socratic questioning • Presentations• Projects

English Language Arts&

Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects

ELA Standards Advances

The standards devote as much attention on what students read, in terms of complexity, quality, and range, as they do on how students read. As students progress through the grades, they must both develop their comprehension skills and apply them to increasingly complex texts.

ELA Standards Advances

Balance of literature and informational textsNAEP Alignment in Reading

Distribution of Literary and Informational Passages by Grade in the 2009 NAEP Reading Framework

Grade Literary Informational

4 50% 50%

8 45% 55%

12 30% 70%

ELA Standards Advances

In order to prepare students for the challenges of college and career texts, the standards require a rich reading of literature as well as extensive reading of informational text in science, history/social studies and other disciplines.

ELA Standards Advances

The CCR standards define broad competencies in reading, writing, speaking, listening and language while the K-12 standards lend further specificity by defining a developmentally appropriate progression of skills and understandings.

ELA Standards Advances

The standards also require that students systematically develop knowledge of literature and informational text, as well as knowledge in other disciplines through reading, writing, speaking, and listening in history/social studies and science.

Organizations such as the Alliance for Excellent Education, ACT Inc. and the National Governors Association emphasize the need for high schools to do a better job of helping students gain vital mathematics skills by the time they graduate.

Where are we?

Multiple reports have documented the need for high school graduates who enter the workforce directly to be better prepared mathematically.

A 2005 report from the National Association of Manufacturers found that less than 20 percent of employers felt they were able to find sufficient numbers of qualified candidates for manufacturing jobs, and 51% listed mathematics and science as deficiencies of public education in preparing students for the workplace.

HSTW Survey results

• More than 75 percent of those taking a remedial course in college took such a course in mathematics.

• Eighty-seven percent of students taking four or more mathematics credits in high school did not need remedial mathematics in college.

• Sixty percent of students wished their high schools had placed more emphasis on mathematics.

• Thirty percent of career/technical students wished that their career/technical teachers had placed more emphasis on how mathematics is used in specific career areas.

Mathematics is often taught in isolation from other academic and career/technical subjects. Students do not see the connections to their lives and futures, and too many become disengaged and either fail or achieve at levels insufficient for success after high school.

In the mathematics classroom, students must be helped to understand why they are studying the mathematics content and how it is important to their lives and future work.

Career and Tech Ed can be a great partner to the mathematics teacher and curriculum.

The status quo is not working: High school mathematics is largely broken, effectively serving only a small percentage of the age cohort, on average, and fundamentally unable to respond to the calls for college and career readiness for all. Too few high schools take full responsibility for providing ALL students the reasoning and sense-making opportunities necessary to develop mathematical proficiency at the college- and career-ready level.

The reality is that all students need to learn essential mathematics, knowledge and skills. It is just as important for those hoping to enter a well-paying, high-growth career field right after high school as it is for those bound for college.

The Surprising Science of Motivation

Daniel Pink ted.com

AutonomyMasteryPurpose

Management

AutonomySelf-Direction

Engagement

Given where we are and where we need to be,

• Mathematics programs and courses should promote “integrated understandings” of mathematics, where geometry, number, algebra, and data analysis are mutually supporting .

All teachers must take responsibility for all students and must collaborate with a common goal: reaching more students more of the time

Given where we are and where we need to be,

All students must have access to the “regular curriculum,” and some students should receive additional support (scaffolded instruction, differentiated instruction)

Teacher collaboration should focus on quality instruction that builds on what students ARE thinking and pushes them to the next level

The practice of re-teaching needs to be replaced by new habits, such as “using previous mathematics in service of new ideas”

High School Mathematics must:

• incorporate real-life, authentic investigations.• require the use of higher-order thinking (analysis,

application, evaluation, synthesis, predictions and comparisons).

• include performance tasks — such as oral presentations, projects and problems — that take multiple class periods to accomplish and result in a product or performance that can be graded.

• incorporate technology to do research, present data and analyze problem solutions.

High School Mathematics must:

• include individual and group work and projects.

• include literacy strategies to help students read and comprehend the language of mathematics.

• target the “habits of success” that help students become independent learners, such as time and materials management , accessing resources and working well with others.

John Ewing (Director of Math for America) points out that the current status of high school mathematics is not a crisis but rather a long-term structural problem requiring fundamental long-term changes to address the changing needs of society and the world.

Insanity

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

Albert Einstein

The West Virginia Response

Common State StandardsThree Phase Plan

1. Study, develop an understanding of, and place the Common Core Standards for English and Mathematics into the WV Framework (2010-2011)

2. Alignment of Common Core Standards for English and Mathematics with current instructional materials, identify gaps and create digital resources to fill gaps (2011-2012)

3. Alignment of all Teach 21 resources to the Common Core Standards (2012-2013)