The accuse to the teachers and administrators from eight school districts seemed simple enough: Create an activity, chosen a performance cess task, that would show, when solved, that students understand a unit covering Mutual Cadre standards that California and 45 other states and the District of Columbia have adopted. Really understand, not by just choosing a multiple-choice answer, but by explaining or illustrating in multiple means the depth of their noesis.

Math teachers from Clovis Unified and Sanger Unified work on a performance assessment. They include, from left, Marcy Zunich of Clovis; Robin Ingram of Clovis and Meagan Speer of Sanger. Photo courtesy of the California Office to Reform Education.

Math teachers from Clovis Unified and Sanger Unified work on a performance assessment. They include, from left, Marcy Zunich of Clovis; Robin Ingram of Clovis and Meagan Speer of Sanger. Photo courtesy of the California Function to Reform Educational activity. (Click to overstate.)

The exercise, done in teams of 6 or and then, divided past grade and subject, over 2½ days in Berkeley last month, was hard, sometimes exasperating but also enlightening.

For many, information technology offered a revelation: Replacing the California state standards in math and English language arts with Common Core volition require not only learning new standards just also adopting a new mindset and approach to educational activity essential concepts in depth. For some teachers, in that location will be the stark realization that they don't have the content noesis of math that Common Core demands. For districts and teachers for whom Mutual Core remains an abstraction or a headache to be dealt with later, that news will come as a shock.

With the introduction of Common Core standards, "we are asking teachers to view teaching and learning differently," said Olivine Roberts, the chief academic officer of Sacramento City Unified.  "The modify can be uncomfortable." Sacramento Metropolis, which is farther along than virtually districts in implementing the new standards in at least a few grades, was one of the districts at the Mutual Core training concluding month.

Challenges and opportunities

Collectively, the eight K-12 districts – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Long Beach, Fresno, Oakland, Sanger, Clovis, and Sacramento Metropolis – contain CORE, the California Office to Reform Education. The Summer Pattern Institute was their first joint venture in training teachers for the Mutual Cadre.

The leadership of Cadre, the eight superintendents, and, from what I could surmise, those at the conference were convinced that the new national standards are superior to the current California standards. Teachers will spend more than time on fewer standards, trading breadth for depth with the goal of developing problem solving and disquisitional thinking skills. Supporters say Common Core standards are more coherent and better integrated from 1 grade to the next. The new end-of-year tests, which will supervene upon the California Standards Tests, are to be more than enervating, requiring students to demonstrate a conceptual agreement every bit well as mastery of specific skills.

All of this may testify true, but the firsthand challenges of implementing Common Core standards are daunting. The preferable way of implementing standards – the logical procedure that  California phased in from 1997 to 2003 – is to prefer detailed curriculum frameworks, which lay out strategies and guidance for teaching the standards; approve and buy textbooks and instructional materials; and thoroughly train teachers before students are held accountable for end-of-yr or summative assessments.

With Common Cadre, in that location's no time or state coin for that sequence. The end-of-year Common Core tests, which a consortium of states, including California, are devising, are to be administered in 2014-fifteen, less than three years from at present. The math curriculum frameworks that California is developing will be adopted in November 2013, with the English linguistic communication arts frameworks to follow in May 2014. Formal textbook adoption won't happen until 2022 in math and 2022 in English language language arts, although an interim review of materials is happening this twelvemonth. The state Section of Education is promising to post online teacher training units this autumn. But for the well-nigh part, when it comes to professional evolution, it'south pretty much every cash-strapped district and canton function for itself.

Back up from foundations

The Core districts understood that collaboration could be their salvation. "In an ascetic budget environment, nosotros've been making ourselves more focused," said San Francisco Unified's new superintendent, Richard Carranza, who encouraged the teachers at the conference to practice inspired work. "Hither you have eight districts saying Common Core will be a priority for all of us. That'southward the crux of why we think Mutual Core is doable."

The staff of Core are likewise planning to draw from the expertise and online resource of other states, peculiarly those – like Massachusetts – that have used Race to the Top dollars to bound ahead with Common Core. That's the i big advantage of participating in a national endeavor.

Math authority Phil Daro speaks at the CORE Summer Institute.

Math authority Phil Daro speaks at the Core Summer Establish.

Phil Daro, who has devised big-calibration math professional person development programs for states and had a manus in developing Common Core math, praises that intent and says it'southward about time California worked in concert with other states. "California has been and then insular for decades. We talk to ourselves and oasis't looked at what other states have been doing," he said during a intermission at the Summer Found, where he was a keynote speaker.

More a million students attend the CORE districts. Their districts' size (they include the land's first, third, and quaternary largest) and their willingness to work together and to share their work online for free with the rest of the state have attracted philanthropic dollars. California Pedagogy Partners, the Stuart Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and The James Irvine Foundation are underwriting Cadre and funded the $276,000 price of the Summer Blueprint Institute.

The districts sent 128 teachers and bookish coaches and 27 district leaders – covering grades 3, 5, and 7 in math and ane, 4, 7, and nine in English language arts – to the Plant. There they heard national specialists – Daro; psycholinguist Kenji Hakuta of Stanford; WestEd's director of standards and assessments Stanley Rabinowitz; and Margaret Heritage, a data, teacher evaluation, and cess good at UCLA – address Common Cadre themes and bug.

Just the bulk of the time was spent studying examples of functioning assessments and designing elements of their own. A performance assessment requires that students do a set of tasks instead of only choosing from a list of possible answers. A operation cess might cover several weeks of work and involve a cluster of standards. They could be used as a unit of measurement exam for grades, but, more than probable for the CORE districts' teachers, they volition exist used as a formative assessment – a diagnostic tool that teachers can use every bit role of the instruction process to recognize gaps in students' agreement before moving on to the side by side unit (or topic). It's critical in math, which depends on a sequence of knowledge leading upwardly to algebra and advanced courses so that, every bit Roberts put it, "a crack now does not become a chasm later."

The CORE superintendents proposed organizing the Institute effectually performance assessments.  "The assumption is that a teacher who can create an assessment that checks students' understanding of the standards, then adjusts instruction based on students' needs is an effective teacher," said Rick Miller, a quondam deputy land superintendent who is at present the executive director of CORE.

Intense attention to fractions

The Common Cadre standards devote a lot of attending to fractions equally a building block of algebra, which about students under Mutual Core would take in 9th form. Since California's land policy for the by decade has been to button more than students to take algebra in eighth grade, defenders of the current state standards have attacked Common Core math standards equally less rigorous.

"The Mutual Cadre standards are mediocre: They are clearly meliorate than those of about 30 states, as good as those of nearly xv states, and conspicuously worse than those of three states, California among them," says Ze'ev Wurman, a software engineer from Palo Alto, who was a member of the Mathematics Curriculum Framework and Criteria Committee that developed California's 1997 mathematics framework. Supporters respond that some students will be ready in 8th course, just those who aren't will be meliorate prepared for algebra a yr afterward, with fewer ending up repeating the course. Teachers won't accept to spend time teaching what students should already know.

"I taught loftier schoolhouse for 10 years," relates Philip Brann, a math specialist with Sacramento City Unified. "I would spend the offset four weeks of whatsoever algebra class making sure kids could comfortably sympathize fractions and integers."

At the Institute, Brann and Roberts joined four teachers from Sacramento City and Los Angeles Unified at a 5th grade math table, where they worked on creating a functioning assessment involving equivalent fractions, like 1/3 and 2/half dozen, and the addition and subtraction of fractions. The grouping struggled to come up with everyday situations that students could relate to. Roberts reminded the group to first with the result – what evidence of proficiency teachers will want to encounter – and then work backward to construct the activity to elicit information technology.

This is what the group eventually came up with:

An assessment, involving multiple standards, asking students to explain their understanding through pictures, number lines, graphics, or words is different from the multiple-choice tests that many students have been used to. Teachers volition have to teach math differently, besides. Traditional textbooks, with scripted instructions teaching one standard at a time, won't be sufficient for developing the mathematical reasoning that is Mutual Cadre's objective. Relying strictly on teaching algorithms, procedures, and tricks (see the "butterfly" method to add together and subtract fractions) to get a right respond won't assist students explicate the concepts underlying the answer, Brann says.

"There is such a disconnect between how math is taught and what is necessary for kids to call back mathematically. Common Core standards address that, but nosotros are asking teachers to fundamentally modify the style they approach math education," he says. "Educators go fix in their ways. They'll say, 'Hey, this is what I do.' It volition be up to leaders to say, 'No, you don't have information technology; change the mode you teach.'"

That experience can be intimidating to teachers, or, Rick Miller says, it can be empowering. "Common Core gives teachers the opportunity to take control of the classroom," Miller says "and become engaged in how their students acquire." Information technology tin can free them from a pacing guide tied to a unmarried textbook, both in math and English linguistic communication arts.

Phil Daro, the math expert, says that he would make teaching math content to elementary teachers a district'southward acme priority. Many elementary teachers' lack of math content knowledge has been a trouble, he says, and that will become evident with the rollout of Common Core. Daro recommends creating "book clubs" at schools where teachers can regularly review math content together, and he urges "over the shoulder" collaboration, where teachers can observe i another'south practice.

Teachers at the Summer Institute will endeavor out in their classrooms this fall the two-dozen performance assessments in math and English language language arts that came out of the Institute. There eventually volition be a library of hundreds of performance assessments given over the course of a year that Core will mail online. Some will be adult locally, others chosen from other Common Core states, and some may be available from Smarter Balanced, the consortium of states that is creating the end-of-yr Common Core tests.

The bank of examples will save teachers the time and effort of having to develop the items themselves. But the goal is for every teacher in the CORE districts to become through the experience of creating their ain, in conferences like the Summer Institute or district workshops.

"Every teacher needs to get through the procedure, for the process is the learning. It'southward laborious, simply it's what needed to create a shift in pedagogy," says Sacramento Metropolis'south Olivine Roberts.

There are tens of thousands of uncomplicated and centre school teachers in the Core districts. The Summer Found was just a very get-go pace.

John Fensterwald is the editor of EdSource Today. Contact him at jfensterwald@edsource.org.

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