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
Founding Board Member & Principal, New Dawn Charter School

Well, you can’t have a school without students now, can you? Your enrollment policy is so important at this time because it must be reflective of what you put in the charter. Remember, you were chartered based on certain “promises” you made to the state/authorizer when you wrote the full application. You can’t write your application for high school students and then decide that you’re going to be an elementary school. It doesn’t work that way. In fact, if you were to change your enrollment policy, you might have a deal breaker on your hands. Stick to what you wrote! (To see what we wrote for New Dawn Charter School, download a copy of our application.)

Make sure that your enrollment policy is aligned with state guidance and laws as well as your enrollment and retention targets listed in the charter. Be sure to include targets for English language learners (ELLs), students with disabilities and students eligible for free or reduced lunch. Even if it is not formally required, it is best to submit your enrollment policy to your authorizer prior to beginning the enrollment process in order to ensure full compliance with your charter and state laws/regulations.

Hand-in-hand with the enrollment policy should be your recruitment plan. As a charter school, you must perform outreach to your entire community, including  the ELL population as well as the Special Education population. So, where do you go and how do you effectively recruit students? Part of the process in getting your charter was reaching out to the community. The same needs to be done for recruitment. This means handing out flyers, attending school fairs, going to local churches, meeting local representatives, and attending community board meetings. All of these activities will put your school on the map. Radio spots, newspaper articles, interviews, anything you can do to get the mission and vision of the school out there for the public to see will help you make your numbers. Stick to your recruitment plan outlined in your charter. This will help you stay on course. Social media like facebook and twitter are also two methods to get your name out there. In many instances, you can connect all of these on your website, enabling visitors to see any kind of activity happening with the school. Check out the websites from some of the Model Schools in the Network of Independent Charter Schools to see how they provide materials and information to help in the recruitment process:

Academy of the City Charter School

Bridge Boston Charter School

Broome Street Academy

Challenge Pre Charter School

Heketi Community Charter School

Inwood Academy for Leadership

John W. Lavelle Preparatory Charter School

Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School

Lefferts Gardens Charter School

New Dawn Charter School

Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation

Staten Island Community Charter School

Tech International Charter School

Do not forget to make sure your recruitment materials are in the languages that dominate the community in which you seek to open. Handing out flyers in English will not encourage non-English speaking applicants to come to your school. By distributing flyers in many languages, community members know that you are in tune with the entire community living in the neighborhood who will benefit from having a charter school in the area. Again, this includes reaching out through local media (newspapers, radio and TV stations, etc.) but in multiple languages. I know of several schools that have weekly spots on different local radio stations, have had camera crews come in to do small spots advertising the school for websites and local TV stations, and have written small articles for the local papers in the languages spoken within their neighborhood. Making sure that your website is available in the predominant languages within your community is key to successful recruitment. See, for example, the Boston Bridge Charter School website, which uses the Microsoft Translator tool to allow users to translate pages in their website into various languages. There are a number of other translation tools available for free on the web, including Google Translate and Free Website Translation.

Reaching the special education population can be a bit tricky, as some potential parents do not want to entrust their children in a new school if they have special needs. One of the myths about charter schools is that special education students are not serviced in the same way as traditional public schools. It’s important to reach out to local supports for special education. (In New York State, you should contact your local Committee on Special Education). Establishing a relationship with local resources agencies is paramount to ensuring your students receive the proper services. It’s also important that parents see that you are active in implementing the goals set forth in a student’s individualized educational plan (IEP) and helping that student be successful in achieving those goals. These small steps speak volumes to parents and community members who may be skeptical of a charter school’s effectiveness in teaching students with IEP’s.

If you begin thinking about recruitment as soon as you are chartered, then you will be on the right track. Once again, there are many resources available to you for help. Authorizing agencies typically provide you with the timelines in which certain activities must be conducted. The Network for Independent Charter Schools, particularly through the Online Hotline, is available to help with questions and training that you may want to receive. Don’t be afraid to ask for help--it is there for the taking and is intended to help your school be successful! When we’re successful at recruitment, we are successful at helping more kids achieve their dreams.

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!

Outside of writing the full charter school application, preparing for the interview with the review committee is one of the most stressful parts in the chartering process. This is the job interview of all job interviews, folks. It seems like a huge task, the applicant group sitting with the review committee around a table, needing to answer their questions on point. For some board members who may have expertise in banking or real estate, for example, they may have a hard time understanding the nuances of the instructional program. On the other side of that, educators may have a hard time fielding responses related to the budget over the five-year period or the impact of using a private facility instead of shared space. Either way, the committee needs to be comfortable with each other, be able to jump in and respond where appropriate and most of all, be confident with the panel and the team.

The New Dawn applicant group was at an advantage, as most of us had worked together in various stages on the PICCS program, which helps charter schools implement a series of tools to help drive performance forward for all students. With the experience and training in our PICCS school improvement engine, we were already aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the group, and we all took pieces of the charter that would showcase our strengths. We spent hours upon hours studying and building a “go-to closet” of resources that we could cite when responding to questions. For example, if a question came from the panel regarding our accommodation of the projected ELL population in the school, not only should any one of us be able to answer that question, but we should be able to cite curriculum and other resources to support our response. This meant studying a great deal of information over a very short period of time.

Slowly, we built out our sections of expertise. Each of us took our areas of expertise and worked on these elements, making notes, practicing answering questions with each other, and then having a conversation about our responses. Like following a Peer Review protocol, we each gave warm and cool feedback to increase our ability to respond and improve the level of ease in which we could answer questions in our field of comfort, and out of our field of comfort.

The New York City Charter School Center was so helpful in this regard. We scheduled a meeting with the center as a “mock interview.” The panel asked us very tough, very pointed questions, and if we did not respond in a way that completely answered the question, they would redirect and force a response out. After the question and answer period, the panel gave us feedback on every aspect of our responses. If you don't have such an ally organization in your area, then reach out to other charter schools that are already open and see if members of their founding team would be willing to hold a "mock interview" for you.

This process was extremely helpful! They critiqued our opening statement, the way we actually looked when we answered questions, and whether we smiled or showed we were nervous. They were even able to show us how to look confident when we might falter on a response. They advised us on where to sit (which of the panel should sit next to each other to show unity) and how to sit. It actually reminded me of a funny seen in Ocean’s 11, when Brad Pitt’s character is telling Matt Damon’s character to do all of these things in his performance with Andy Garcia, “Don’t say three words when two will do, don’t keep your hands in your pockets, don’t look away, he’ll think you have something to hide.” The depth to the feedback really gave our teams the ability to further prepare, and to prepare well. So thank you so much, once again, Charter School Center staff!

Having that vital feedback then gave us the chance to go to work. We made notes, we read the charter inside and out. We practiced with each other. The more you practice, the better you get at responding. It really gives you the confidence walking in to the real thing that you've “got this.” The other factor was the level of trust that our team had in each other. We all had each other’s backs. During the interview we would support each other, filling out answers when needed, and each of us had a chance to respond to the panel. Thanks to the rigorous mock interview we had with the Center, when we met our review panel, the entire meeting just flew by. We were able to answer the questions with ease, we were able to be comfortable with the panel (who were very inviting and supportive in their own right), and after it was all said and done, the panel warmly thanked each of us, noting the preparation we had brought to the table.

Just like the public meeting, there a few things to be absolutely ready for: 

• Treat your appointment like a job interview. DO NOT show up in jeans and a sweater. Suits only folks!
• Make sure you remember everyone’s name on your panel. People tend to make very silly mistakes when they get nervous. Write everyone’s name down by creating a very simple seating chart, so you can mention your reviewer or colleague by name when you need to speak.
•  Smile. It really shows confidence and ability.
•  Write the key words of the question down, and take your time responding. Showing that you are thoughtful and not just pulling information out of a hat so to speak will win points.
•  Make sure when you leave that you shake every reviewer’s hand and thank them. They spend a lot of time reviewing your application and your interview. Ultimately their feedback is the key in getting your application chartered.

It was quite an accomplishment for New Dawn making it through this process. We are lucky to have a close knit group of educators dedicated to building student achievement. We work together on various levels and share many of the same ideas on effective instructional practices. We took the time to be organized, to practice, and to be super prepared. In the end, all of these elements truly helped us be successful.

Next up…Hooray we’re chartered! Now what do we do?

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.

According to New York State Law (as well as charter law in most other states and localities), the public must be sufficiently informed about charter schools in their community throughout the process. One of the last steps before the interview process is the public hearing. The purpose of the application hearing is to provide the public a chance to ask questions of the charter group, namely the lead applicant and founding team. Many concerns are raised during these hearings, particularly when charter schools are seeking to share space with district-operated public schools. Prospective charters may have to delay their openings because at the last minute if the district-operated school works to prevent the charter school from entering the building. These discussions can be extremely contentious, and just because there may be open space in a district-operated school does not mean sharing will be welcomed or even tolerated.

The public meeting usually takes place in a location that is common to other schools that are seeking to open in the district. The prospective schools arrive with materials that describe the mission and vision of the school. Each school has the opportunity to speak about the mission and vision of their school, and then respond to public comment. We treated this hearing as a “practice” of our interview with the review panel. One of the most important things to demonstrate to the public and to the review committee is the unity you have with your founding team. You must be in full agreement on how the school is going to run. Your responses should be able to flow seamlessly from one person to the next. You have to show confidence, sincerity and knowledge. You have to respond to tough questions with the same grace. It’s a good place to put that to practice, as the public hearing, though not a factor in getting the charter (in New York State), can cause the review committee to raise questions if there is a serious outcry from the public hearing.

Our public hearing for New Dawn Charter School's application took place shortly before our interview with the review committee. Fortunately, there were no concerns raised at the meeting about our school. This was in great part due to our outreach and engagement of the community in the process of developing the charter application (see a discussion of how to identify the right founding team members to assist with this process in my post on Writing the Letter of Intent). In fact we were honored to have a community member speak positively on our behalf.  But this isn’t always the case. I have attended meetings in the past where charter applicants have to come to these public meetings and not taken them seriously. Follow these easy points, and this hurdle can be easily cleared:

• Dress professionally. While this may seem obvious, it is important to share this point with all of the individuals representing your team. The public hearing is your chance to show you are a professional group.
• Speak clearly and answer questions directly.
• Make eye contact when you speak (I’m not kidding. I watched a presenter never lift his gaze from the floor. This does not project confidence or trust.)
• Do not show you are flustered by tough questions. Getting defensive or giving wrong answers can happen when you get nervous, but this only makes the audience angry.
• Be humble. I’m a big believer that when you are dealing with children, your ego has to get checked at the door. Everyone has an opinion when it comes to teaching and learning, and you must be open to hearing every single one. It’s about the children, not you.
• Be gracious. Thank the audience for the time, be accessible after the meeting convenes if it seems that there might be other questions.

Transparency is the key to being in control. If you show you are willing and able to show the community the ins and outs of your school organization, the more trusting they will be of your presence in the community. Know your charter in and out, and be able to speak to every element in it. Community members will feel good knowing that the applicant group knows their stuff and  are comfortable with each other and their community!

Next time…the big “show”! The Interview.

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 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.

In my last post on starting a charter school, I rather lengthily talked about writing the full application. The narrative section of the application is one of the most important pieces of the entire process. In New York State, there are information sessions set up for groups looking to submit applications. You can go here http://www.p12.nysed.gov/psc/documents/NovDecInfosessions.pdf to get the latest information on dates and times for the 2011-2012 cycle of applicants. It would be helpful to review the 2010 and 2011 cycles, which outline the process, and show you how many applicants started the process to how many applicants finished with a NYS Board of Regents approved charter. The guidelines in the kits are strict. Page overages or being under the required pages could end up costing you a spot further along in the process. If you are located outside of New York State (where I am working on our charter application), be sure to take time to review all of the specific guidelines provided by your authorizer.

And don’t forget about the Network of Independent Charter Schools Online Hotline. You can use it ANY TIME, free of charge, to ask questions specific to your charter application process!

After the application narrative is completed, you must spend some time thinking about what attachments you will include to support your narrative.  I’m going to walk through the attachments prepared in the New Dawn full application, which you can find here: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/psc/2011CSFullApplications.html. The first two attachments are standard for the full application. It includes a roster of all the individuals associated with your charter: board members, prospective employees, and community activists. The next is a certification statement that the lead applicant must sign. Those are the “easy” attachments to fill out.

The next attachment is the school schedule. This takes some careful consideration, because you have to think about the needs of your student body and what they will be taking over a period of time. For high schools, the challenge of what new entrants will need vs. a student who needs everything can be tricky. Elementary schools have less struggles with scheduling, just needing to account for scheduling with student/staff projections over the course of the charter. The school calendar must also be included, ensuring the number of days of instruction, along with holidays and school closures are listed over the course of the charter.

The Corporate By-Laws is a legal requirement. The By-laws of your charter establish the name of your school, the mission of the school and the purpose of the charter. This document outlines the roles and responsibilities of the board of trustees. This includes the roles of the board in relation to school governance. Code of Ethics is next.

The next section is dedicated to the proposed employees and board members of the school. With each role, a curriculum vitae is included, which supports the individual’s credentials. This is important, because it provides transparency to the authorizers on the abilities of the team to run a school. The New Dawn applicant group features many talented educators and administrators who have decades of experience with children, managing organizations and designing curriculum for the target cohort of students. Following the credentials of the members, attachments include a Statement of Assurances for each member, along with a signed Request for Information sheet, providing information required on the pages from the charter office. Essentially ,the request for information establishes no conflicts of interest from the board and prospective school employees.

The organization chart is another important component of the attachments. This gives you the opportunity to really think about the structure of accountability and reporting from the student level up to the board of trustees. These relationships establish the basis for school culture and relations within the community with teachers and parents. Following the organization chart is the description of each of the positions listed in the organizational chart. New Dawn chose to have an Executive Director and Principal, so that the Principal would be free to spend time in classrooms and foster a true learning community with feedback regularly taking place in the classroom. The last section is the budget. This shows the fiscal health of the organization and its capacity to serve its students over the life of the charter.

No matter what may be required by your specific Authorizer, these attachments are important, and I would recommend preparing all of them even if they are not legally required by your Authorizer. It shows how the instructional program of the school will be supported through the organization, board of trustees and budget. All of these components demonstrate the health of the organization and the ability to run the school throughout the length of its charter and through renewal to the next charter. Demonstrating sustainability is the key to getting your charter approved.

Next time…preparing for the meeting with your community board.

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

In my last blog entry on "Starting a Charter School," I talked about writing the letter of intent. The letter of intent for New Dawn Charter School (the school I am helping to found) was due January 19, 2011. Shortly thereafter (February 2) the full 20-page prospectus was due. As I mentioned last week, from over 80 founding groups, just 36 were asked to turn in full applications. We were lucky to be one of those 36, and then one of the 22 invited for an interview with the selection committee. This was a tremendous source of anxiety as each deadline came and went. For all of us, opening a school of our own was our chance to prove how much we know about effective teaching practices and how students learn.

The Prospectus is an abbreviated version of the full application (download a copy of New Dawn's Prospectus). It was required to be just 20 pages in length and outline the overall structure of the school. The first part, our mission statement, describes what it is we are looking to accomplish when students enter the building.  This is New Dawn’s mission:

 New Dawn Charter High School will provide over-aged and under-credited students 15 - 21 years of age living in Sunset Park, including those who are English Language Learners and those with special needs, the opportunity to return to school and obtain a high school diploma through a rigorous NYSED standards-based education program. Within the framework of the education program, three programs will be offered: 1) Interventions for those with fewer than 11 credits, and for those with more than 11 or more credits: 2) Internships in the community and 3) College enrollment.

The next sections describe each element of the school, from the instructional program to finances. It is important in this brief outline of the school that we share the team’s ability to run a school. In two separate places we wrote small blurbs about ourselves that demonstrated why we were a strong founding group as compared to other applicants. One of the most important things that we had going for us, besides the majority of our team being affiliated with JVL Wildcat Academy Charter School, was our training in the School Improvement Engine through the Partnership for Innovation and Compensation for Charter Schools (PICCS). This extensive, YEARS-long training has made the bulk of the founding team capable of guiding the development of Individual Learning Plans (ILP’s), staff development through Peer Review and Professional Learning Communities (PLC’s) as well as using the TERC data analysis tools. These elements are all significant evidence of how as a team we are not only in tune to student needs, but also in tune to faculty needs.

Throughout the prospectus, we each took sections to write as a base for the lead applicant, Sara Asmussen. My strengths lie specifically in instructional programming, using advisories, the workshop model and differentiating instruction. I had been trained on how to implement Individual Learning Plans (ILP’s) in the classroom, and piloted their use with my sixth grade ELA class (and yielded a 98% passing rate on the ELA exam for 2009). Other team members took the sections on student recruitment, due to their familiarity with recruiting similar students for Wildcat Academy. Scheduling and increasing the number of students enrolled from year to year are also important elements of the prospectus. The reviewers need to see that we can amend a school schedule to address the needs of a continuously increasing student population.

A strong budget, which balances from year to year indicates to the reviewers that the founding group understands how the state budgets and federal funding formulas work. This means that the budget doesn’t rely solely on state released funds and grants and has the capacity to generate income to accommodate the needs of the building. This is a tricky piece often, and truly showcases the handicaps that charter school operate under. Public schools are given buildings. Charter schools, if they are lucky, can get approved in sharing space with a district school to avoid the rent payment, but often the shared space issue is acrimonious. Rents are a huge issue for many mom and pop schools. You’re looking at over a million dollars per year in market share rent (in New York City and other major metropolitan areas) plus all of the things that go with it--building maintenance, utilities, etc. Without funding from outside sources, getting a building right from the start independent of district space is next to impossible. Also, with the economy the way it is, loan agencies and banks are not willing to extend lines of credit to a school to get a building, furniture, etc, unless they have been operating in some cases as long as three years.

Writing the prospectus really forces you to take all of the big ideas that your team developed and show evidence that these ideas are going to work. Student and staff recruitment plans, strong budgeting over a five-year period (the life of the charter in the case of New Dawn's application) and a solid instructional plan for the students, complete with plans for differentiation, staff development and capacity building are all factors that evaluators review when moving on to the full application phase. Thankfully, after much nail biting, New Dawn was approved to move to the full application, followed by the capacity interview. Coming up in my next blog entry: Preparing for the big application, meeting the guidelines put out by the authorizer, and then defending your views to the review panel.

Download a copy of New Dawn's Prospectus now >>

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This blog post is part of the Charter Notebook, sponsored by the Network of Independent Charter Schools, a project of the Center for Educational Innovation - Public Education Association.

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.