These are my notes from today’s professional development day with Deer Creek Public Schools (in Oklahoma) focused on understanding the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), learning to ‘unwrap’ the CCSS, creating a CCSS unit based on an existing ELA or math unit, and learning about resources for teachers/students to share for teaching/learning. This day was led by Cindy Koss, the Curriculum Director for Deer Creek Public Schools. I attended today along with other representatives of Yukon Public Schools, where I’m working this semester as an innovative instructional coach.
This is the three minute reflection video teachers created at the end of the day.
If we start in kindergarten asking students to explain their thinking in math, how will that change what we’re doing in math class?
CCSS will force students to justify their reasoning, to do public speaking, practice oral communication skills
– justifying thinking is a key element
Marzano challenges us to move from the information age to the interaction age
– if CCSS will make a difference for us in Deer Creek
“Common Core is not a standards checklist”
– professional learning communities are where you talk about this integration
See this PPT from Ohio SDE: “Focus One: TPD Meeting” linked on “Mathematics Common Core State Standards and Model Curriculum”
CCSS are always looking for real world examples
The (+) in the standards indicates more advanced concepts or skills
What does literacy look like in the mathematics classroom?
In ELA with CCSS, we are all “Reading like a detective”
Common terminology for ELA
– ELA strands, topics and standards
Appendix B has appropriate texts by grade level, and appropriate tasks for students by grade
In Deer Creek, students in 6th grade will be required to take a 9 weeks course on “Presentation Technologies”
What standards do NOT define:
– how teachers should teach
– all that can or should be taught
– nature of advanced work beyond common core
MY COMMENT: I WANT THIS SLIDE DECK!
Larry Ainsworth is the author of “Rigorous Curriculum Design: How to Create Curricular Units of Study that Align Standards, Instruction, and Assessment”
– he developed a process for unwrapping standards, which long precedes Common Core
– we are going to follow Larry’s process today
1- select unit of study
2- identify matching priority standards
3- ‘unwrap’ selected priority standards
4- create graphic organizer and identify learning goal(s)
5- determine the big ideas
6- write the essential question
Official definition of unwrapping standards: “deconstructing the priority standards for a unit of student to determine exactly what students need to:
1- know (teachable concepts) the important nouns or noun phrases
2- do (skills) the verbs
Step 4: Create a graphic organizer
– unwrapped skills with approximate Bloom’s Taxonomy Levels
— recognize (main idea)
— provide (supporting evidence)
— contrast (facts, supported inferences, opinions)
— draw (inferences, conclusions, generalizations)
— support (inferences/conclusions with text evidence, prior knowledge)
— (this is what students need to be able to do)
Remember you can’t / shouldn’t use “verbs” in isolation here: it is VERY important what the context / subject of your lesson
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On this day..
- FaceTime Connection During a Tornado Warning - 2015
- Oklahomans Against High Stakes Testing Worship - 2012
- Flip Video Session Recording - With a Tripod! - 2010
- Forget the iPad - The MacBook Wheel is what you really want - 2010
- The Thursday Folder and Worksheet Measured Learning - 2009
- Join the Digital Literacy debate - Live! - 2009
- Exploring differences in preteen social networking sites - 2008
- Blogs, Wikis, District Polices, Walled Gardens and the Open Web - 2008
- An iPhone SMS poll demo over videoconference - 2008
- Sorry honey, you can't believe everything you read in your printed science textbook - 2008