By Lisa DiGaudio, Founding Principal of New Dawn Charter School

To implement the Common Core, you need to think in terms of 12 “shifts” that need to be made—6 in math and 6 in English language arts. In this blog entry, I’m going to focus on Common Core Shift 2: Knowledge in the Disciplines for Grades 6-12.

Okay content area teachers, take a few deep breathes. Shift Two is not as bad as you think it is (and yes, Math teachers, that includes you too!). The goal is to have students reading and using what they have read in their discussions and writing assignments. Essentially it is a more aggressive push at showing evidence. Instead of saving this skill for writing assignments, students have to use it all of the time in the classroom. I wanted to give a few ideas on what this would look like and how it can be done. In an earlier blog I talked about “themes” for the whole building to work on, and used The Hunger Games as an example. This can certainly be done on some level at certain times during the year, but in reality, you’re all responsible for tests here. Getting results is the bottom line, and planning to use curriculum within this shift to yield results can seem daunting, especially for a new teacher.

So let’s start with Math. If you log into the EngageNY site (www.engageny.org), you’ll see that New York State gives you a few lovely exemplars to consider implementing at specific levels. It’s a great sample of units, but you’re not going to see much literature from it. In fact the resources mainly  direct you to your SMARTboard resources--that is, if you have one in your room. This is about literacy. If you’re teaching your students about polynomials, then what literature, outside of the textbook, would you introduce? Well there are a few places to go. First, particularly if you are a middle school teacher, you can go to Scholastic and look at the resources for MATH magazine. Not only do they have age appropriate articles and scenarios for the students to read, but they also include the CALCULIT section, which gives you fiction and nonfiction books to introduce to your students when teaching a unit.

For high school teachers, you have a little more clicking of the mouse to do. Amazon offered several different titles on how to teach polynomials, and books for students to read. Articles from magazines that could help produce mathematical scenarios would probably work best. At the Network Team Institute in Albany in November, we learned in math how to take a question from the concrete to the abstract. We worked formulas based on the information provided, and as the scenario got more difficult, there was less information to call upon for reference. This would be a good place to start with high school students. The scaffolding for the students having a hard time, to the students who need to be challenged, can be easily situated when you plan ahead.

The thing is this: whether it is math, science, social studies or any other elective, you want to start thinking about how you are going to introduce literature. A small passage may be a great opener, reading a paragraph and then reading related materials for homework, along with the mechanical elements (such as math problems or science labs). The key is shifting the balance to more and more informational text, and using it as the central focal point to what you are teaching. If you are teaching about the Civil War, then what piece of informational text best exemplifies the complexities of the war and Lincoln’s position about secession? What fictional texts could be used to support these big ideas? How can students reference these works in their conversations with you and with peers? How can they reference these works in their writing? By shaping out the scope of use for literature, we gain a better picture of how to implement the big ideas, scaffold for acquisition level and then move to deeper places, where the pieces will continue to resonate with students.

Our high school students do have to become better at referencing materials they are working with. Getting in the habit of citing informational text during conversations with peers and teachers, and in their writing assignments, will build analytical skills that will carry through for college. The ability to use many resources as a backup to original thoughts is important. As a freshman in college, I struggled with recalling information to defend my stance on things. I got better as the semester wore on, but it took a lot of reading, and a lot of arguing with my professor, to get in the habit of referencing text to back up my views. One of my professors back then used to say, “who are you and why are you an expert”? It angered me then, but it was true. Students at that age aren’t creating new information, they are agreeing or disagreeing with it, and “because I said so” doesn’t really pass muster for an argument. They need to use relevant works that support their claims, and that ability is what builds skills in analysis, synthesis and ultimately, ownership of the concepts.

By Lisa DiGaudio, Founding Principal of New Dawn Charter School

To implement the Common Core, you need to think in terms of 12 “shifts” that need to be made—6 in math and 6 in English language arts. In this blog entry, I’m going to focus on Common Core Shift 1: Balancing Informational and Literary Texts as it pertains to math.

Whether we are in a content area in the middle or high school, or in elementary school, the shudders I have seen teachers make regarding Common Core and Math has been a regular occurrence in the last year. The first instructional shift in math (FOCUS) is to gain deep understanding of concepts in different grade levels, so that when we get to shift 2, Coherence, there is a natural transition of skills that students can complete from one grade to the next. By doing so, students will listen, speak, read and discuss their understandings with their peers and teachers (remind you of anything?).

It’s no surprise that Common Core wants our children interacting with numbers in the same way that we want them to interact with literature--informational or fiction. By increasing the level of discourse our students have with numbers and number concepts, as they progress to more abstract concepts, they retain the skill and apply it to new concepts in later years. Just before the winter holidays I was coaching a Kindergarten team at my school on shapes. It was a perfect time for teaching shapes to Kindergarteners because I was able to use so many different materials like dreidles, trees, lights, ornaments, candles, etc., in the classroom to show the class that shapes are all around. Starting with the concrete begins a foundation of learning that students will be able to use as they move on in their understanding of geometry. We started our lesson on shapes by learning a “juicy” word: attributes (noun). We wrote it down on chart paper, and the teacher and I began to describe our basic characteristics. From there, we held up different objects in the classroom for the students to identify and then describe with that object’s attributes. Throughout the week the students worked on different sorting activities based on a shape’s attribute, read The Shape of Things by Dayle Anne Dodds, and learned other juicy words like parallel and perpendicular.

By the end of the week, the class was busy identifying the attributes of shapes all over the school, sorting them according to the number of sides they had, comparing and contrasting squares and rectangles, and putting triangles together to make new shapes, like diamonds and squares. If we look at the focus that is recommended in the Common Core for Kindergarten through second grade, we see that fluency with numbers, adding and subtracting, is key. As the students identify shapes and their attributes, they can continue their relationship with numbers by counting sides, sorting shapes and then move on to more abstract concepts like, “What happens to a square when you take one of its sides away?”

In grades 3-5, Common Core dictates that the focus moves to multiplication and division. I loved teaching the algorithms for problem solving, because it offered so many alternatives for my students. We used to have Lattice Method wars, seeing who can solve a long multiplication problem the fastest using lattice. (I’m a huge fan of this method, especially for my kids who have a hard time with the conventional method and remembering multiplication facts beyond single digit numbers.) In these grades, thematic teaching can also be introduced, with full units aligning to each content area. For example, in third grade, where world communities is the focus of instruction, a thematic unit on Rome can have students learning how to estimate how many bricks it took to build the Colisseum. There are great resources out there that can help you develop these problems (such as the NOVA classroom, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/colosseum/qanda/) and build them out to other content areas. The games, the politics of the time, climate, and foods cover the math focus, enable us to look at an even distribution of fiction and informational text (and also great scenes to show from the movie Gladiator).

In grade 6, ratios, expressions, equations and proportional reasoning are the focus. Remember when I talked about the fabulous presentation I saw given on Common Core Math at the Network Team Institute in Albany? Well this is perfect here, going from the concrete to the abstract. We were all presented with a simple problem and we needed to figure out the answer. Thematic units can be used here too. One of my favorite units to teach, using figurative language, was on Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. Since we were practicing our listening skills for the ELA exam, I always made sure I had a read aloud each month for the classes. Instead of formal notes, I asked the class to keep a journal of the pictures in their mind as I read the story to them. These journals would then be evidence for a later assignment that they would work on at the end of the story. After I read them Hatchet, we watched the movie Cast Away, with Tom Hanks. Aside from the settings (I’ll get to that in a second for this theme unit), the book and movie correlate perfectly, right down to the decisions regarding possible suicide or carrying on in the hopes that salvation would come. Now for a theme unit, a comparison of average temperatures of the movie and book, plus rates of survival in “real life” can be a component of the overall project, including the effects of the diets the characters maintained while marooned.

I want to go back to algorithms for a quick moment, as it is vital to give every student a chance to problem solve in their own way by reviewing the steps they took and focusing on each step made towards a solution. By approaching expressions, equations and ratios in this way, students will also see how they relate to basic number sense.

In grades 7 and 8, as our students are getting ready for Algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus, they will focus more deeply on ratios, proportions and expressions. Learning how to problem solve culminates with interaction of the “unknown”, that missing number or missing component of a problem that will lead to larger unknowns as the students enter high school math. Grades K-8 embody the building blocks of number competency, moving from the concrete to solving for the unknown. The math portions here will gain strength by incorporating fiction and nonfiction texts to support the concepts and help students grasp the concrete.

I’m going to cite Scholastic.com again, because it does indeed have a plethora of materials, including printables and short movies that will correlate to just about any math topic you have. It’s funny. I never believed in myself as a math person. When I took the CLEP exam for my Elementary Education certification, I thought I would die trying to get through the test preparation book. While I passed the CLEP with flying colors, my ongoing insecurity about my math abilities led me to not take risks when I taught math. Sitting in the Network Institute session with Andrew Chen was a real treat. In just four hours, he had me believing in my math abilities once again. Andrew didn’t wave a magic wand either. He just cultivated our self-belief that we could indeed come up with a solution on our own given the facts.

So, by learning to make Shift 1 for the Common Core in math, I learned the lesson at the heart of this first shift: When it comes to instructional focus, regardless of the grade level, we must realign ourselves to sticking to the facts, and helping our kids get comfortable working with them.

Lisa DiGaudio
Curriculum Developer for Charter Schools

I want to get the dialogue going around the curricular shifts for Common Core. This can be so difficult for schools that are well-entrenched in their own curriculum, especially as their resources are already aligned to support that curriculum. I’m going to start by reflecting on what I wrote for my grade level teams at Lefferts Garden Charter School and sharing what some of their feedback has been.

First, I’m not a big believer, particularly at the Elementary level, of a standardized textbook. Facts are left out, topics are watered down into these miserable little passages. I don’t remember what textbook it was, but I remember being totally shocked at the one paragraph in a sixth-grade textbook that described the Holocaust as “reference material”. That being said, my curriculum maps outline the topic and essential questions, along with different resources, primary and secondary, to use for support. Of course, because I am writing it, I didn’t think twice about whether this would be complex or not for a new teacher to visualize. Low and behold, after a training courtesy of our participation with the Network of Independent Charter Schools, feedback included a need for a textbook or additional resources.

My first reaction was one of surprise. Why would a textbook be useful when they are so limited? But then I started thinking about my first year as a teacher. I was hired the day before school started. I was petrified. I had no curriculum, and there were no books. I was lucky I had great teammates that gave me a curriculum map from the year before so I could start planning. That’s when it hit me. The resources were given out, but maybe I needed to better explain how to use them. This led me right into curricular shift one for Common Core: the balance between fiction and nonfiction texts for instruction.

At the elementary level, the goal is to use 50% informational and 50% fictional text to support your lessons. For my team that needed the extra support in using resources, the first order of business is to do an inventory of fictional and nonfictional texts to use during the units of instruction and how to use them. What will the teaching points be? What are the goals for student learning? How should these resources extend into other subject areas? Starting with the overarching questions is key to building a strong foundation for new teachers,as well as giving seasoned teachers new ideas from different perspectives.

I was thinking about the first unit that we all seem to teach on some degree the first month of school: All About Me. Every year, the kids come strolling in and we have them write some fluff piece on their summer vacation or something that happened to them while they were out of school so we can see to what degree they can put words together in sentence form. Then from there we build on that to establish the classroom community, the school community, the local community and then larger and larger, state, country, continent, world. For our early elementary children, spatial awareness in this direction helps them see beyond themselves, and become aware that there are children next to them who can be just like them or be different. It’s with this very basic outline that we can begin to investigate resources to teach children how to expand their awareness beyond themselves.

The first place to go for resources is your classroom. Take an inventory of your nonfiction books first since that may be a challenge for some of your staff. When we hear nonfiction, we think “textbook”. We have to remind ourselves that literacy is more than just reading fictional materials, and it’s more than just reading. It’s discussing, it’s writing, it’s talking all the while using text evidence to support what you’re trying to say. After gathering nonfiction books on the topic, now pick the same amount of books in fiction. There’s your 50% balance. For every piece of informational text, a fictional text should also be used. Need help getting ideas? Log into the Scholastic website (www.scholastic.com). They have a book wizard function for teachers and administrators looking for different resources. In some cases you can access free downloads. (Free is always good!) Other great resources? Try YouTube. There are a number of teaching channels that include all sorts of resources to support your teaching students to learn more about themselves and the world around them. If you have a subscription to Discovery Education (www.unitedstreaming.com), there are literally thousands of videos with lesson plans included to teach just about any topic you can imagine.

The biggest resource we forget is the students themselves. The best way to show them the difference between a primary and secondary resource is to play a game of telephone with them. The first person to speak the message is the primary source. Everyone else is secondary, and to verify what they say is correct, they have to cite who they got the information from (their friend next to them). When so many things get all jumbled up, it’s funny to track who heard what in the circle. Student experience is the strongest teacher, and they will always remember the difference between primary and secondary sources! (Trust me, I have kids who are now almost out of high school asking me if I remember doing that with them, along with making the loser sign for right angles; making an “L” with your thumb and forefinger and placing it on your forehead).

When you break down Shift One of the Common Core in this way--whether you are a brand new school or you have been around for some time and still worried about how this is all going to work--it becomes more manageable.

Next week, Shift Two, Knowledge in the Disciplines for Grades 6-12!

Lisa DiGaudio
Founding Board Member, New Dawn Charter High School
Curriculum Coordinator, Lefferts Garden Charter School

In an earlier blog post, I introduced this blog series as a means of talking about how to implement the common core into your curriculum. For immediate reference, I want to point out three sources that I found very helpful when writing the curriculum for Leffert Gardens Charter School:

• The Network of Independent Charter Schools Resource Library entry on Common Core: http://indiecharterschools.org/commoncore.php
• The New York State Education Department: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/common_core_standards/
• The Gates Foundation Common Core Maps: http://commoncore.org/maps/index.php

You can actually purchase additional maps and lessons for all grade levels via the Gates Foundation site; it was $20 well spent!  Not only does the site membership include maps, but in the maps are additional resources that are free of charge. These lessons can fit just about any school curriculum, and they are written by teachers in the field.

Now back to the "how" on implementing the common core. There are two things that must be considered when you start. The first, and probably the most difficult for me, is looking at the standards and figuring out which ones would be most often tested on the State Assessments. The test is changing each year, in an effort to accommodate the push on informational text, yet at the same time, the skills being tested are not consistent like we were accustomed to in the past. When I prepped my students for the New York State ELA exam prior to the change in cut scores (2009-2010 school year), it was easy to go back into the old tests and look at the item analysis provided by the State. I was able to look at each exam, record the performance indicator tested and compare its frequency from year to year. In this way, I could adapt the level of practice I would impose on my students in a variety of ways, from the “one passage” drill, to packets of skill practice and writing within that skill. We don’t have that luxury currently in grades 3-8. The pitfall for me in writing the K-2 curriculum at LGCS is anticipating the level of frequency of the common core standards and the shifts that are required from the state standards year to year. (The state website again is very helpful on this topic, directly addressing the shifts, though basically every school must be fully using CCSS by the 2013-2014 school year.) As I looked over this timeline, I made the decision with my principal, Marc Magnus-Sharpe, that our best bet would be to just jump right into CCSS and implement it fully into our curriculum now. This gives us the entire school year to ready our second graders for the state assessment next year, which will use the CCSS entirely for 2012-2013.

With that determination, the next point is to figure out how to get alignment going in the curriculum. I am going to focus on social studies in this blog entry, mostly because it’s what I used to teach and it’s an easy connection to ELA instruction. The first thing I did for my level of students (grades K-2 right now) is to lay out the topics of study. Our school follows the New York City Department of Education curricular alignments as close as possible, along with a focus on environmental science.  I looked at the curricular units for the grades throughout the school year.  Let’s look at a topic for November in Kindergarten as an exemplar:

Unit of Study for November in Social Studies: Myself and Others

Overarching Question: How are people unique?

Performance indicator: All people share common characteristics (3.1d)

Common Core connection: Read to the children Lon Po Po: A Red Riding Hood Story from China (Ed Young)

Teaching point: Compare and contrast Little Red Riding Hood stories. Have the students make connections on how people from far-away places can have many things in common with us.

Kindergarten students, with assistance, will be able to compare and contrast the attributes of people from China and the United States via Lon Po Po.  This is the intent of common core, using different texts to learn content. It’s important to note that the common core is not a set of standards that spoon feed teaching and learning to students and teachers. It is a framework to take these learning experiences and deepen them for our students. Is it easier for our Kindergartners to learn cultural diversity through a textbook, or by being engaged in a Read Aloud, and then taking that content and applying it to their own classroom? The experience should set the bar for more learning experiences in the future.

This is not the be-all, end-all of how to implement the common core. I hope that this blog will serve as a vehicle to talk about all of the ways that we can not only just teach the standards, but to deeply engage our students in learning experiences that matter. It’s funny, but I just finished reading John Dewey’s Experience and Education (1938!) about that very thing--quality experiences are the basis to learning. Here we are almost 75 years later, and that element--the quality of learning experiences--remains the basis for how our students should learn content.  I look forward to sharing ideas and experiences of my own, as well as learning from and sharing your comments to improve our students’ learning experiences within the Common Core and well beyond it.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

Lisa DiGaudio - Founding Board Member, New Dawn Charter School, NYC

One of my favorite activities to partake in the fall is attending the New York State English Council Conference, held at the Desmond Hotel in Albany. The drive up the New York State Thruway, looking at the beautiful foliage, is a great time for renewal and motivation for me. I always find something new to hook into and use.  As a teacher, my first year at the conference, I learned how to use graphic organizers like the Four Square method. For my reluctant writers, this was a revelation for them. As an administrator, I was able to meet other admins from around the state and talk about recruiting and teacher quality and training. All in all, the Desmond is a lovely place to go even when there aren’t conferences happening. The fall weather, the accessibility to downtown Albany, and also a great park, The Crossings, allows you to truly enjoy all that “upstate” living has to offer.

This year my mission was to attend as many sessions on the Common Core as possible. The general vibes from the teachers I had from last year were no different this year. High school teachers were lamenting the death of “literacy,” administrators were skeptical about the implementation of PARCC standards (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness in College and Careers) and if they were actually going to happen, as there is now talk that PARCC standards may actually become “optional” for school districts . With all of this uncertainty, only two things remained clear: High School teachers were thankful for the return of the January regents, and Common Core is an annoyance that will hopefully go away.

As you know from my last blog post on the Common Core, I quite like the common core standards. The interdisciplinary approach gives teachers multiple opportunities to address content in a variety of ways, deepening critical thinking skills. For example, one of the sessions I attended, “Reading Social Studies: The Character Connection” (Louisa Kramer-Vida, Ed.D, C.W. Post University) focused on teaching social studies like we would teach ELA, with “characters.”  By teaching social studies with a “story,” students can make the connections to their studies as they would with a novel in ELA. To me, this is what the Common Core seeks. As I reflected on what I am writing for my own school’s unified curriculum, the goal is to connect our students to the people and places around them.  Instead of creating characters, we want to connect our students to their own community, developing their sense of space from the small to the very large. For older students, connecting them in the same way is equally important.

One of the most emotionally charged portions of the conference was for me hearing Erin Gruwell speak about “teaching hope.” She talked about her work as a classroom teacher in South Central L.A., and the birth of the “Freedom Writers” from her decision to connect her students’ pain to books. The character connection for these students was so clear. Ms. Gruwell built a curriculum of violence and teens for her own students to relate to, as violence was so prevalent in their own lives. By learning how to connect to characters with similar circumstance, and subsequently learn the facts, these students grew emotionally from the experience. I spent the whole lunch hour crying, thinking about the students that New Dawn Charter High School will be recruiting for September, and further realizing that we need to be doing exactly what Ms. Gruwell was doing with her students, giving them hope for something better.

Something else also came out of the Reading Social Studies session, and it was a comment that one of the participants made when we were talking about the differences of teaching from a textbook vs. teaching from a novel. She said, “We forget that literacy is more than just reading fiction.” I thought back to my first methods courses when earning my degree in School Leadership…we learned that in implementing change, buy in takes at the minimum three years for full acceptance. The comment about literacy brought me back to this. This is the second year of the Conference, and last year (Year One I’ll call it in Common Core discussions and implementation) was full of complaints and criticisms. This year, criticisms were still prevalent, but there were more workshops, and fully attended ones, that focused on implementing the common core in the classrooms. The literacy comment connected me to this level of buy-in. Criticism can come from fear and resistance to change in itself. While the common core dictates that by a student’s senior year 70% of their “literary” studies be rooted in informational text, that does not denote the “death” of fiction. One of the biggest differences I found in my own studies at Adelphi University during my freshman year was that most of what I was reading was informational text. I was a history major, and I was studying primary documents on a variety of topics. The fiction I read was in my honors courses, and I hated it! What I would have appreciated from high school was a better way to read non-fiction quickly and efficiently. 

So the take away from the conference? Common Core is definitely here to stay, regardless of what the tests are going to look like. Resources, different thinking, and creativity are required when thinking about implementing the common core. But this isn’t reinventing the wheel. To a certain degree, maybe we have all been a bit complacent when thinking about our lessons and curriculum. Erin Gruwell was a terrific example of what we all should be doing for our students, and I am sure there are many, many teachers out there, doing the same thing, day after day to reach their own at-risk students. If we choose to look at common core as a limit to what we can teach, then we will indeed be limited in what we achieve with our kids. If we choose to look at it as a “do over” in curriculum planning, then we give our own students the chance to have their own “do over” in learning.  In ten years, maybe common core will become of those of buzz words that got retired, like how “differentiated instruction” replaced “tracking.” When we look at curriculum and teaching in a way that includes everyone, there’s no place to go but up, even if it includes the necessary grumbling and extra hours to make it work.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

By Shawn Stelow Griffin, The Finance Project

In late 2009, the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) announced a joint effort to create recommended standards for students in grades K-12 in English language arts and mathematics. Over the past two years, these two prominent national membership organizations have convened experts to write and vet the standards. To date, 44 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the standards. Chances are, your state has adopted these standards, and your school must now adjust its curriculum to meet these new standards. Not to worry—there are a number of resources that can support these efforts.

 Resources

In New York, the board of regents adopted the Common Core standards in January 2011. According to a timeline posted on the NY State Education Department website, every teacher should implement at least one unit aligned to the Common Core Standards each semester.[1] The timeline calls for full implementation of the Common Core Standards and aligned assessments by the 2014-2015 school year. The timeline is accessible at: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/common_core_standards/ccstimeline.html.

Teachers and leaders at independent charter schools in New York have two key websites to turn to for information and support:

• The state education department’s Curriculum and Instruction office has a Common Core portal on its website. A Common Core Implementation toolkit of information can be accessed at: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/common_core_standards/toolkit.html. This portal provides copies of the standards themselves, as well as supporting resources such as test exemplars, samples of student work and the research basis of the standards. The toolkit also links to national resources available at the Common Core Standards Initiative website.
• The second New York state resource is the EngageNY website. This website provides support to teachers and administrators in key areas of education reform in the state. Common Core resources on this website include curriculum exemplars, details of instructional shifts, a video series that explain the standards in depth, and the implementation timeline.

For readers outside of New York state, most state departments of education have developed web-based portals of resources to disseminate state priorities for implementation as well resources to assist teachers and administrators in the development of units, lessons, and resources that align to the new English/Language Arts and Mathematics standards. Other states are building resource pages and structures to support the implementation of the Common Core standards in their states. Here is a sampling of web resources from selected states from across the country:

• California: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cc/: for state curriculum documents and a parent guide
• District of Columbia: http://dcps.dc.gov/DCPS/In+the+Classroom/What+Students+Are+Learning/DCPS+Common+Core+State+Standards: for implementation plans and assessment plans
• Illinois: http://www.isbe.net/common_core/default.htm:  for implementation plans as well as assessment transition plans
• Louisiana: http://www.doe.state.la.us/topics/common_core.html: for the state’s implementation plan, information for parents and teachers
• Maryland: http://www.marylandpublicschools.org/MSDE/programs/ccss/?WBCMODE=Presentat%25%25%3e%25%25: for state common core frameworks and other information
• Massachusetts: http://www.doe.mass.edu/candi/commoncore: for state frameworks and a state assessment transition plan
• Maine: http://www.maine.gov/education/lres/commoncore:  standards documents as well as documents detailing the state’s perspective regarding the application of the Common Core for English language learners and students with disabilities
• Michigan: http://www.michigan.gov/mde/0,4615,7-140--232021--,00.html: for assessment transition plans, and grade by grade crosswalks of the Michigan Content Expectations to the Common Core standards

There’s an App for That!

A quick search of the Apple App Store reveals several iPhone and iPad apps designed to support teachers and administrators as they design lessons and units aligned to the Common Core standards. One of the apps, Common Core by Mastery Connect, is available for Android phones as well.

• Map your existing curriculum, materials, units and lessons/activities: Using curriculum and unit maps for your school, overlay current unit topics and curriculum scope to the Common Core Standards. This strategy will give you a clear vision of changes that need to be made in order to meet the scope and sequence of the Common Core. Recalling that New York state has an implementation timeline, needed changes can be addressed purposefully in a way that adheres to the implementation timeline.
• Work hard, and smarter: Independent charter schools are lean organizations, with staff playing multiple roles within the school. Many independent charters become part of collaborative networks in which they share resources and information and, in some cases, staff. Collaborative networks can work in person or using platforms such as Skype and/or Google Docs to co-create units and lessons aligned to the Common Core. Armed with a plan describing the sequence in which curriculum revisions will occur, school leaders can explore the creation of writing teams or other strategies to encourage collaboration and sharing among other independent charter schools.

Check out the blog series on implementing the Common Core at an independent charter schools in New York, written by Lisa DiGaudio, to see how one school is redesigning their curriculum. What other strategies are you exploring to complete the curriculum revision process? What planning frameworks or work management tools are you using to track progress in this effort? How are you sharing new units of study among your faculty and staff? Feel free to post your ideas below to keep the conversation going.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.