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.