Teaching With Common Core State Standards

In 2004, a report entitled Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts was released by the American Diploma Project. The report was the culmination of several years’ work, with data collected from hundreds of high school teachers, college professors, and managers from U.S. corporations. The report concluded that American high school graduates are falling far short of the expectations placed on them by the workplace, and by colleges and universities.

The report stated that many students are woefully unprepared for life after high school, and that at least 28% of students entering college require remedial math or English instruction, and that more than 50% will take at least one remedial course before graduating from a two- or four-year college. The report, as expected, instituted a firestorm of national debate, and spawned many forums that focused on what could be done to boost student achievement.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative was created in part as a result of the Ready or Not report. One of the problems uncovered by the report concerned the inconsistency of the level and quality of content knowledge expressed by students from state to state. Since each state had its own process for creating and implementing educational standards, the content that students were expected to learn in one state was sometimes vastly different from the expectations in another state. Implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) seeks to ensure that all students nationwide learn a common core of knowledge that will prepare them to enter higher education or the workplace with sufficient knowledge and skills to be successful. To date, 45 states have adopted the CCSS, and are in various stages of implementation.

Without a doubt, learning about the CCSS and implementing them into daily classroom lessons is a challenging task for teachers. Fortunately, we’ve got many lessons aligned to Common Core State Standards in the Gateway, and we’re adding more each week. Registered users of the Gateway can search by standard by logging into their accounts and selecting the “View and Search by Standard” option from the left menu. This week I’ve featured three resources from the Gateway that are aligned to the Common Core. All week long, we’ll be featuring many more CCSS-aligned lessons and activities for all ages on our Twitter and Facebook pages, so be sure to check those pages. Also, please read Peggy’s companion column (linked below) for her ideas on the topic.

Adding Jumping Lima Beans
Subjects: Number Sense
Grade: K-2
This activity allows students to relate to a real world experience, as they count off with real lima beans at the beginning of the lesson. This lesson is completely hands on, as students use their own plastic lima beans to count and add. How do we add numbers? How do we know when we're supposed to add? Students will be able to add and to recognize the symbol of operation. Note: This activity consists of using manipulatives for addition only. This lesson was produced by Beacon Learning Center, an online educational resource and professional development center that offers standards-based resources and professional development activities.

Money Makes the World Go Around: Exchange Rates
Subjects: Geography, Measurement, Algebra
Grade: 6-8
Money comes in many forms around the world. Crisscrossing across the Google Earth globe, students connect the monetary units to the related country in a series of exchange rate problems. Each challenge is presented as a word problem which includes a unit rate. This is a great way to tie together economics, geography, math, and technology all in one lesson. Please note that you must have Google Earth installed on your system in order to access the lesson. This resource was developed by Real World Math, a blog created by Thomas J. Petra for teachers who want to extend the concepts of the math curriculum beyond textbooks.

Avoiding the Path to Panem
Subjects: Sociology, Current Events/issues, Writing (composition), Reading, Process Skills, Literature
Grade: 9-10
In this unit, students use evidence from the text of The Hunger Games to infer what events or series of events might have led to Katniss’s world. Students use primary source documents found through research to support their analysis. As students’ expertise emerges, they communicate and inform others about how we can avoid a similar path in our world. The culminating task of this project-based unit is for students to write an informative essay analyzing the evidence of a social, political or environmental issue we face (e.g. sustainability, poverty, war, racism, economics) that may have led us to Katniss’s world. Included in this analysis are specific recommendations of what can be done now to avoid this scenario. Students present their analysis and recommendations through a social network space (Glogster) with a call to action and an opportunity for others to respond to the vexing problems of our world. This unit should appeal to most students, given the extraordinary popularity of The Hunger Games trilogy. This unit was produced by Educurious, a nonprofit organization that offers project-based curriculum that connects students to issues that they care about.