A reader proposes a way to make the Common Core work for students:
I would use the Common Core standards a bit differently. I’d expand on what I did a couple of years ago when I was in the classroom teaching with Moodle and Google.docs and a variety of devices. See-http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2010/09/writing-the-elephant-in-the-living-room.html where I wrote about it.
With the Common Core, I’d encourage the students to try to make sense of the wording in the CC and then to choose which ones they’d like to accomplish and let them decide how they would accomplish that learning. They could post their learning products in a Moodle Database and let their peers and their teachers comment. Anyone with appropriate access could also see the learning products and comment. Some of those products could be posted on district-wide learning product showcases. I think with a litttle effort all of the schools in the country could do a collective learning fair on the standards, ribbons optional. There would be all kinds of different examples of how students from around the country demonstrated their learning of each standard, or as many as they got to that year. Schools and teachers can choose not to use the standardized tests that the big corporations sell; they’re free to build their own assessments and correlate them to the standards. I’m an advocate, too, of using technology like iPads and BYOT environments to do formative assessments; multiple choice questions can be great learning tools if used right. See – http://www.naiku.net/ Teachers and schools just need to stand up and speak up. The standards aren’t the problem. Claiming authority of teaching and learning is the issue. Teachers and schools need not abrogate authority to entitiies outside of their schools. |
Great idea. It has all the right ingredients, I.e. student choice, assessment, PBL, technology, especially as it relates to bringing a school district together as a learning community. Thanks!
Are you old enough to remember when kids made up there own games and played kick ball in the street until the street lights came on? They didn’t have hand-held games or computers in that idyllic time. There was another golden age for teachers too. We used to make up our own lessons and assessments, and the classroom was our world, free from parasitic start-ups and their eduproducts. We are at that historical moment, the one akin to when manufactured toys started to replace children’s organic imaginations.
Common Core will completely replace our teacher imaginations, not in and of itself, no. Twenty years ago I would have welcomed a national curriculum, but not now. Back then, i would not have been concerned that it would have become ripe for plunder by venture capitalists and their start-ups. I never would have imagined such a thing.
Once these edutoys become ubiquitous, all schools and districts will want the latest eduproducts, just like our kids wanted the latest toys. We won’t have the heart not to give in. Teachers will be at mandatory PDs about how to use the latest thing. They will be considered Luddites and dinosaurs if they don’t comply, or worse, they will be accused of supporting the status quo. Parents will want to know why their kid’s school doesn’t have the latest edutoy. Teacher’s pay and benefits will level because districts must now keep up with the latest eduproduct advancement.
The Common Core is going to further materialize the classroom. Everything will, from here on, be shiny, new, aligned, next-best, until teachers are just technicians hired to oversee the computer lab–once called their classroom
“there” should be “their” in the first line.
We must be wary of any national social experiment that mandates all children learn and think the same way at the same time.
please add ; AT THE SAME TIME to the end of my previous comment
I wasn’t sure where to share this article so I decided to add it here. It shows what is possible and I found it very uplifting: