New Common Core Standards: *Gulp!*

Our first day is tomorrow, though the kiddos don't return until Monday. We're scrambling with paper and bordette and little cut out letters and glitter and rosters and name tags and...what's this? New Common Core Standards?! Kentucky, like forty-six other states, adopted these national standards in an effort to win Obama and Duncan's Race to the Top. While Kentucky was not successful in this aim, we still won a great opportunity to completely overhall our instruction in English language arts and math.

I was fortunate to have worked with the new standards last school year and during the summer for the Gates Foundation's Common Core Curriculum Mapping Project. I created a curriculum module for writing monologues aligned with the standards. More important than this prestious opportunity was the chance to "get my hands dirty" so to speak, and really dive into the standards. While they are impressively rigorous (sixth graders are now to type three pages in one class sitting, for example), they are also clear and well organized, and will make standards-based grading, data driven instruction and alignment of learning targets with assessment much easier. They also bring reading and writing accountability into the science and social studies classrooms, which will reinforce the notion that the strongest teachers already believed - literacy underlies success in all text-based content areas.

The curriculum I followed last year and will follow again this year is the College Board's SpringBoard program for middle and high school students.

The SpringBoard program is already aligned with the common core, though I didn't realize the standards alignment was accessible online. No, instead I thought it would be a good idea to spend four hours mapping the first unit of instruction in alignment with the new common core; still I'm glad I did as it prepared me for the instruction.

After mapping out the curriculum, my colleague and collaborator, Ms. W, and I planned two ways to pre-assess the students initially. First in literary reading, then in language, or grammar. We would administer a reading test to them with questions directly aligned with the literary reading standards and use a checklist to identify whether students were demonstrating, developing, or not demonstrating the skill. Likewise, with the language standards, we developed a checklist and plan to use analyses of their writing to determine whether or not they've mastered the skills.

Because the pre-assessment contains some copyrighted material, I'll just share the checklists here.

Language Standards Checklist

Literature Reading Standards Checklist

Armed with hard copies of the standards, web resources, plans, pre-assessments and these checklists, I'm hopeful that these new standards will prove as an opportunity to radically improve and tighten my instruction. I'll let you know how it goes!