Aligning Your Curriculum to the Common Core State Standards

Joe Crawford

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781452216478
• eBook ISBN: 9781452269290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Avoid "analysis paralysis" and just get started!

Now that most states have adopted the new Common Core State Standards, the next major challenge is to simplify and implement them by 2014. That is why it is important to begin this work now. Joe Crawford, Milken Award-winning educator and author of Using Power Standards to Build an Aligned Curriculum, shares his proven process for building a viable local curriculum based on the CCSS. Readers will find:

• A system for creating local standards from the CCSS
• Methods for connecting the common, formative assessments to quarterly instructional objectives
• Ways to scaffold learning expectations
• Examples taken from districts where CCSS is currently implemented

Included are helpful charts and graphs plus access to Internet-based software for mapping the CCSS to curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Schools cannot continue to do what they have always done and expect a different result. This book explains how to facilitate learning for all students while taking advantage of the new culture, technology, and norms of today?s learning environment.

1	Overview of CCSS and Associated Leadership Issues

CHAPTER EXPECTATIONS

This chapter is a discussion of what standards are, the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and the issues present in those documents and their implementation. There is also be a brief outline of the process of creating local CCSS (Power Standards) and instructional objectives with sample local CCSS and instructional objectives and how CCSS are a real game changer in that development process. The chapter will close with a discussion of system thinking as it applies to curriculum, instruction, and assessments.

ACTION STEPS

Steps to consider and address in doing this phase of the work:

• Leadership Challenges in Implementing CCSS
  • Make sure everyone understands a standards-based curriculum.
  • Establish a belief in and sense of urgency around the new CCSS.
  • Understand the staff development issues involved.
  • Build local consensus.
  • Familiarize yourself with standards, curriculum alignment, and content alignment issues.
  • Break down professional learning into manageable chunks.
  • Align assessments to the CCSS.
• What Are Standards?
  • Develop and use a standards-based curriculum.
  • Align the curriculum.
  • Think of content as a means to a performance end.
• Staff Development Issues
  • As a leader, design, implement, and monitor the process of standards implementation to ensure a common interpretation and implementation.
  • Ensure that all teachers follow a district model to implement and use the academic standards in instruction and assessments.
  • As a district leader, ensure that appropriate staff development is provided.
  • Build understanding of the CCSS.
  • Develop local understanding that a standards-based approach to education is the core issue that must be addressed and then adjust that standards-based approach to the CCSS.
• Defining and Creating Local CCSS
  • Understand local CCSS (Power Standards).
  • Use what has already been developed as a basis for moving forward.
  • Determine how to develop quarterly instructional objectives based on the local CCSS to ensure scaffolding.
  • Ensure that all teachers of a given subject teach and assess the same skills at approximately the same time during the academic year.
• Systems Thinking
  • Define a curriculum, instruction, and assessment system.
  • Determine learning expectations, clearly define those learning expectations, and assign specific learning expectations to grade levels, courses, and academic terms.
  • Develop a system of common, formative assessments based on those intended learnings to be given during the year to measure progress toward the end-of-year expectations.
  • Use an assessment system, share those results, and hold discussions to identify the reasons for variance in student performance and share instructional strategies to improve.
  • Monitor the process to see if the teachers are following the curriculum expectations and ensuring that they are doing so.

LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTING CCSS

For any initiative as massive and complex as the new CCSS, the challenges for leadership are significant and worthy of consideration. As I have done this curriculum alignment work over the years and just recently begun to really focus this alignment work on the new CCSS, I’ve noticed several areas that particularly impact leadership and must be addressed by leadership. This process manual will help the reader do that work, but I thought it best to briefly list those challenges with a quick explanation of them in this chapter, whereas more complete discussions will be held throughout the book.

Following are the major leadership challenges associated with this effort:

Make sure everyone understands a standards-based curriculum. While standards have been around for years, not all districts have spent the time and resources to ensure that the teachers really understand standards and faithfully implement a standards-based instruction cycle. This has to be addressed locally and is discussed below.

Establish a belief in and sense of urgency around the new CCSS. Many educators have been through so many initiatives—state, federal, and local—over the years that they have adopted a somewhat jaded “this too shall pass” attitude toward almost any new initiative. We will deal with this throughout the book and in the actual development and implementation of the work processes this book proposes.

Understand the staff development issues involved. Staff development issues in this implementation process are huge. Not only does leadership have to ensure that all in the professional learning community understand and accept the CCSS but that their understanding must span and be articulated among and within grade levels as all the educators strive to implement the CCSS in the same manner at the appropriate level. This issue will be addressed specifically in the design of the work process.

Build local consensus. Building local consensus on the exact meaning of the academic expectations outlined in the CCSS is critical to doing this work. I just spent three days doing this work in a district. Here are some of the questions I heard while I was walking among the teachers doing the work: What does this mean? How will they measure that? How can we get all of this done? What will happen if we identify the wrong CCSS to emphasize? Again, the actual work process itself will address these issues, and these issues will be specifically addressed through the process itself.

Familiarize yourself with standards, curriculum alignment, and content alignment issues. Some of the new CCSS set learning expectations that are not aligned with current state assessment systems. For example, while probability does not really enter the CCSS until sixth grade, some state assessments put great emphasis on that skill in third grade. What should teachers do in the design of curriculum expectations? This is a particularly thorny issue and will be discussed in the appropriate sections of this book, but this is really a local decision. I do, however, encourage teachers to address those skills they know are on the state assessments.

Break down professional learning into manageable chunks. The sheer amount of and complexity of the CCSS is intimidating to many teachers, learning all of those expectations in all of the grade levels is seen as impossible, and many teachers seem unwilling to expend that much effort on an almost undoable task. The professional learning has to be broken down into more manageable amounts. I believe the work advocated and the forms proposed in this book will help address this issue.

Align assessments to the CCSS. Since the CCSS have already been released, what about the assessment system? Will we ask people to do the curriculum alignment work with no knowledge of the assessment system? Many teachers feel they have been “bitten” by unfair, unaligned assessment systems in the past, and they have serious reservations about doing the curriculum alignment work when the assessment system is yet to be developed. This issue is really one where leadership must work with staff to build credibility and confidence and show them the only alternative we really have; move ahead with the curriculum alignment work and then adjust when and if the assessment system is deployed. We simply cannot wait until the assessment system is deployed to begin this work. Leadership must convince the staff that the national assessment is to be in use by 2014, and we cannot wait to see that assessment before doing this critical work.

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of leadership issues, but it does show the major leadership issues that will need to be addressed. This book will address these at the appropriate time.

WHAT ARE STANDARDS?

Develop and Use a Standards-based Curriculum

The CCSS are here and are in the process of being adopted by all or most of the states. With the local and national politics that are swirling around this complex and long-awaited issue, I will not attempt to outline the current state of that adoption process as that can and will change from day to day. Suffice it to say that the CCSS have been adopted and will continue to be adopted and revised as that adoption process moves forward. That approval process functions as it will and as it should function, completely beyond the control or purview of this author and this book. American democracy will deal with these academic performance standards and all new issues in its own way and edit, change, and amend as the democratic and political processes demand.

The more important issue is that first and foremost this new national initiative is a set of national academic performance standards, not a national curriculum in the traditional sense of the word, but a set of national academic performance standards, or a description of the skills that we want all students to know and be able to do. While it seems almost repetitive to discuss standards and what they are, I am always amazed at the lack of awareness on the part of so many about what standards really are and are not. In the traditional curriculum environment, districts that have or had curriculum documents that really drove instruction created curriculum documents that addressed the content to be covered, the chapters in the book to be covered, or presented actual sample lessons to demonstrate for teachers how to teach certain content. That traditional definition of curriculum is what, I believe, has so hotly fueled the debate on a national curriculum, but we will discuss this issue in more detail later in this chapter and throughout the book.

In the new era of a standards-based curriculum, content must be a means to a performance end; regardless of the content that is used, the root issue is the student performance or standard that the teacher is trying to get the student to learn. For example, the CCSS for English/Language Arts in sixth grade (RL.6.2.) expects students will “determine a theme or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments.”

Content Versus Standards

An academic performance standard is a description of skills that we want students to know and be able to do, not a description of content to be mastered. As a young teacher, I taught Julius Caesar, way before anyone was even talking about standards. It was pretty straight forward; we started in Act 1 and worked our way through the entire play, scene by scene and act by act. I wanted the students to understand and retell the story of Antony and Brutus and all the other characters; all of this was covered in a final exam asking students to retell what happened, identify certain things, and interpret the play. That is the way it was done and in many cases is still done in American classrooms. While I may have accidentally touched on these CCSS shown below, these were not intentionally designed into the lesson, and that is the problem.

• RL.6.1. Cite the evidence in the text that most strongly supports a specific analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
  RL.6.2. Analyze in detail the development and refinement of a theme or central idea in a text, including how it emerges and how it is shaped and refined by specific details.
  RL.6.3. Analyze how complex characters, including those with conflicting motivations or divided loyalties, develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme.

With standards, America is now defining the skills, not the content, students are expected to learn.

As we continue to draw the distinction of a standards-based curriculum, it is important to point out several noteworthy characteristics:

• Content is not addressed. There is no concern for the content to be used; there are suggested books and readings in the CCSS, but the standard itself is a performance, not specific content.
• It defines the skill(s) that is/are expected to be mastered.
• The verbs clearly define the level of Bloom’s Taxonomy at which the students will be expected to perform—determine, provide a summary, and so forth.
• There is no attempt to prescribe an instructional strategy.

Align the Curriculum

This is a huge instructional shift for teachers; the issue is no longer the content or the chapter of the book to be taught, but rather the skill the student is expected to know and be able to do. In the example of my teaching strategies, I simply “taught” Julius Caesar, and then assessed the students to see if they “knew” the content I had just taught. I used my own assessment and my own grading criteria (though I was forced to use the building grading scale, which has absolutely nothing to do with assessing or reporting on skill acquisition or demonstration) to determine who passed and who failed. I then recorded those results and moved on to the next curriculum piece to be taught.

Had someone asked me what skills or standards I ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• partners4results Software Availability
• 1. Overview of CCSS and Associated Leadership Issues
• 2. Curriculum Issues and a National Curriculum Model
• 3. The Development and Use of Local CCSS, Quarterly Instructional Objectives, and Common Formative Assessments
• 4. A Sample K–12 Curriculum
• 5. The Journey Ahead
• Resource A: Collated Feedback on CCSS Work
• Resource B: Suggested Forms for Developing Local CCSS (Power Standards) and Instructional Objectives and Feedback Forms
• References and Suggested Readings
• Index