Common Core Adoption: Inspire a Paradigm Shift

EducationWorld is pleased to share this excerpt from School Leader's Guide to the Common Core: Achieving Results Through Rigor and Relevance, by James A. Bellanca, Robin J. Fogarty, Brian M. Pete and Rebecca L. Stinson. This Solution Tree title guides school leaders as they implement the Common Core State Standards into their curriculum, instruction and assessment.

When faced with implementing the CCSS, principals should focus on the overall method they will adopt to bring the standards into their schools. An effective method is renovation and innovation (R&I). Its goal is transformation, and it asks the principals, leaders and teachers to make personal paradigm shifts in how they view teaching and learning.

When renovating and innovating, individual teachers have to assess their practice to determine how it fits with the Common Core and to seek out new aligned instructional strategies. In ELA, renovation calls for teachers to align all parts of each grade-level standard into the curriculum. Consider the implications of implementing a standard at the fifth-grade level from the domain Text Types and Purposes in the Writing strand. The standard consists of five parts (a–e), each of which teachers should consider when developing lessons to teach students how to write narratives.

The multitude of questions teachers will encounter may make many of them uncomfortable. To ease the process, school leaders often arrange for teachers to work together in a whole-school approach intended to make significant and substantive changes in teaching and learning. Teachers collaborate in grade-level or subject teams to unpack the relevant standards with a focus on the outcomes or results of instruction. They strive to set aside conventional practices such as covering content in a mathematics textbook, relying on familiar and favorite stories or novels, or grading a set number of writing assignments.

Managing this shift means there is little room for “one step at a time.” Random acts of individual change in the number of facts students are able to recall don’t qualify. The desired outcomes include (1) use of complex thinking and problem-solving skills that match with the selected standards, (2) understanding of the content element of each standard targeted, and (3) evidence of how well students’ performance aligns with the standards.

Principals who want teachers to move out of ineffective and obsolete teaching methods and make these changes play an important role in facilitating teachers’ paradigm shifts that reveal their own deeper thinking. It is not enough for principals to stand on the side and let teachers sink or swim.

So how does innovative leadership look and sound as principals spark creative thinking, problem-solving, deeper understanding of content, and improved assessment? Consider these examples:

•  “I know making these switches to informational text will take work. That is why I am saying it’s OK for you to leave out those other books and give more time to the Informational Text standards.”
• “I’m giving your team the authority to decide how you will restructure mathematics time. And I want you to test out your ideas and make sure they do work.”

Elementary teams adopting the R&I approach may start with the ELA performance tasks described in appendix B of the Common Core (NGA & CCSSO, 2010c). These tasks, based on the Reading standards, provide examples for teachers to identify how students demonstrate how well they can do the thinking that is called for in a standard. The figure below presents selected sample performance tasks for informational texts.

By identifying how the students’ performance looks or sounds at the close of the school year, the teacher teams can create full-year curriculum maps, continually moving backward in each unit plan. In each unit plan, they also start at the end with the performance assessments and work their way all the way backward through each daily lesson plan. As a result, they can start the year with less complex literature and informational text and advance to the more challenging text at year’s end. To assist with this flow, teachers can preview the given sample performance tasks in appendix B of the Common Core ELA and create their own performance tasks aligning each piece of literature or text with the final, desired competencies.

By creating a single rubric first to make formative assessments of students’ progress and ultimately the final summative assessment, the teams can build a consistent database that shows how their students develop the skills through the year. A simple, student-friendly, well-constructed formative rubric given prior to the first reading assignment will help all students know the full expectations and have the chance to self-assess their progress.

To construct a student-friendly guiding rubric, teachers select the standard on which they want to focus for the school year. They build the standard’s benchmarks by delineating their expectations of what students must be able to do at year’s end. These then become a tool that starts with students’ self-assessment of those behaviors.

After teachers have clarified the performance outcomes, they are ready to select the strategies that will be most powerful as the driving forces to increasing achievement and deeper learning. It is best if teachers initially select evidence-based strategies that will have the best chance for developing those critical- and creative-thinking skills positioned in each standard statement.

Some strategies—like project-based learning, problem-based learning, and explicit instruction of thinking skills—hold the strongest promise for moving students to deeper learning and work best within the CCSS framework, but are not the easiest to implement. These strategies, which teachers strengthen using inquiry, graphic organizers, and hypothetical thinking, are not quick fixes.

If teachers are most comfortable with handing out worksheets, lecturing, or using direct instruction, they will find that such outdated, ineffective, and shallow learning strategies are the ones most poorly aligned with achieving the CCSS expectations for deeper thinking and problem-solving. Thus, when it comes time to measure progress with their new performance assessments, teachers who accept the challenges to adopt more complex instructional models will see the most dramatic gains among their students who perform what they know.

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