ALL the countries that are ahead of us academically (too many to name here) have something like the Common Core – standards that are nationwide. Good teachers have been teaching these goals for decades. There is NOTHING in the core about methodology. It is a clear, well-thought out roadmap for your child’s education. It was designed to guide teachers on WHAT to teach. The Common Core was NEVER designed to tell teacher HOW to teach. We need to create more model classrooms, instead of trying to fix the teaching of 3 million, we should be trying to fix the teaching of 1,000 good teachers so that their classrooms can be resources that other teachers visit.” Related articles “ There aren’t very many model teachers in this country and they tend to be concentrated in only some schools. They need to see it more than once,” added Wees. “Professional development sessions, where you go over things with teachers very briefly, aren’t enough. Instead, he says districts should work on the changes more gradually. He says districts shouldn’t expect for every teacher to master the new curricula and new teaching methods at the same time. “Yes, but there are the standards as written, there are the standards as practiced by teachers and there are the standards as students will receive them.” “Are math standards going to help?” asked David Wees, a former New York City public school teacher and a formative assessment specialist for New Visions for Public Schools, a non-profit that advises 75 New York City public schools. “In higher ed, we were asking why were these students taking AP Calculus, when they needed to spend much more time on algebra,” said Daro.Īnd indeed, many states and districts – and teachers - are struggling with juggling the huge project of overhauling both their curricula and their teaching simultaneously. “Countries have varying levels of teacher quality but are still high performing.”ĭaro thinks that the Common Core addresses the main problem of the math classes of yore – that curricula went a mile wide and an inch deep – asking teachers to cover so many topics that none were given appropriate attention. “The problem was with what we were teaching, not how we were teaching,” said Daro at a conference of the Association of Mathematics Teachers of New Jersey. Related: Will weak teacher training ruin the Common Core? Some experts question whether it’s smart or even necessary for teachers to overhaul both the content and their pedagogy at the same time, though. That requires students to struggle, explore, share, justify, compare and debrief.” “But sometimes teachers need to turn it on its head with some version of you, we, I. “I, we, you sometimes makes sense,” said Leinwand. Like many Common Core supporters, Leinwand says the “I, we, you” model – where first teachers go through a problem for the class, then have the class work together on similar problems and finally have students work independently on problems – has dominated American math education for far too long. “We don’t have an achievement gap in this country,” said Leinwand.
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