These are the folks leading ed policy: Common Core model lesson doesn't fit guidelines

[HiPointDem]

It is this absence of context that most worries me about the way we seem to be responding to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)--as if this document somehow represented a completed whole that we could pick up and apply directly to children like a topical cream to an itch.

I keep returning to the video of David Coleman offering a model lesson "about what it might look like to take the Common Core State Standards in literacy seriously in a daily classroom..." What continues to astound me is that any teaching and learning model could be offered that fails to include students. Mr. Coleman delivers his model without the students. One of the most important maturation shifts I see in teachers happens when they shift their attention from focusing rather exclusively on what they are teaching, to focusing on what children are learning and how they are expressing that learning...


http://vimeo.com/25242442

David Coleman, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Student Achievement Partners, demonstrates two lesson plans - "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and "Gettysburg Address" - that are aligned to the Common Core State Standards. This plenary took place on Tuesday, June 7, 2011, during the PARCC Transition & Implementation Institute held at Gaylord National Hotel & Convention Center at National Harbor, Maryland....


Mr. Coleman offers us a rather incomplete model, but truly it is not his offering that concerns me. Mr. Coleman is not a teacher... Rather, I am deeply concerned by the large number of educators, such as state commissioners, superintendents and other administrators who have watched this model and have have failed to articulate how partial an offering Mr. Coleman serves. The absence of students in a national model lesson is a fundamental problem, not a semantic difference. We need to ask ourselves: Do we see teaching as connected to learning or do we see it as a solo act?

Then the writer muses on the lesson coleman delivers, and ends with the kicker:

The weird thing is that Coleman's example doesn't fit this standard for two objective reasons:

Dylan Thomas is not an American poet.
Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" was written in the 1970's.

Now the point here isn't "Gotcha, it is impossible to teach this lesson under Common Core." But it is very, very peculiar that Coleman managed to construct his standards in such a way that his own examples don't fit. It is bizarre, really. And incredibly careless. Insultingly so. The idea that this standard is psychometrically distinct is ridiculous.

http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2012/09/do-not-go-gentle-into-that-common-core.html

[mbperrin]

1. Simply, no one-size-fits-all curriculum is ever the answer. Nor could be. Ever.

But yes, that's the current direction - what's presented and how is far more important than if anyone learns anything from it.

I literally had a district curriculum coordinator tell me that every student should have exactly the same experience in every section of the same subject without exception, and therefore, we should avoid putting any of our personality into any part of the process.