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.