Can the common core standards remind us of something vital to our teaching?
Cutting right to the chase, very indelicately and quite deductively, therefore out of sync with much educational etiquette: Standards seem to have taken the place of students as first on our priority list as teachers and educational leaders. Now, let’s see if that case can be made.
The common core standards are bringing much debate these days. For some, they are just intuitively essential, and it’s almost a scandal that it’s taken this long. Others have adopted them but can’t see how to pay for the technology-oriented assessments called for so they may be backing off. Some see early research as showing the standards helpful to strong schools and districts while leaving behind those which don’t need yet another reason to be left behind.
Other groups find them too contemporary in parts; for example, giving up classic literature at some points for the ephemeral ‘truth’ of technical white papers. Finally, some find the standards intrusive and symptomatic of centralized controls which are inimical to millennia of local educational ‘ownership.’
I think the standards may show us something else more fundamental to the direction of education. Take a brief glance at history to locate ourselves and try to get a vantage point.
Standards-based, high stakes testing instruction in America of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is a philosophically realist response to fears of Sputnik showing the Russians leaving the US behind. Following that Red Scare of the 60’s, we have the TIMSS Terror of the 90’s and beyond. How many other developed nations are ahead of the US in math and science scores?
While our curriculum is thoroughly influenced by this motivation and momentum, our schools of education still prepare teachers ideologically with a constructivist philosophy derived from Dewey where teachers lead students in discovery. How those two coexist in contemporary classrooms is a huge subject in itself.
The introduction (or onslaught, depending on your perspective) of the common core has highlighted something else about standards. They aren’t being used in their analytical particulars just to write textbooks and create curriculum at the publication level. Because the common core has come quickly into a mandated status, it is often being applied directly at the level of the classroom teacher.
Lesson after lesson is being created at a furious pace (with the pace not being, perhaps, the only furious part of this teaching equation) by teachers given workshops and often being told the new tests are coming within a year of when the standards were introduced to them. Certainly, other standards have been applied this way and matched to classroom instructional plans which prepared students item by item for standards and therefore tests. The common core is just a turbocharged version of this process.
Plenty of problems – granted — but what are the alternatives? Would you do without standards?
Perhaps that sounds silly. Aren’t standards just another way of saying that we have high expectations for our students’ learning, and even more fundamentally, aren’t standards just a definition of goal-directed behavior in our teaching? This is not a monolithic subject but, fairly broadly, I would say “no”.
Standards are where so much of today’s curricular creation starts. Lessons are built from or around or correlated with standards. And the standards being used are relatively low-level, highly analytic sub-sub categories of broader strands describing student behaviors and abilities. Standards which birth instructional lessons and units are analytically derived component parts taken as necessarily constitutive of the ‘whole’ of strands behaviors. The synthetically perceived “educated student” is seen as an almost necessary byproduct of the student trained in skill after skill and content nugget after content nugget.
Even more, when we start with standards we work our way back through a series of lessons which almost always make a constant velocity assumption about students and their learning. Program my pacing to cover my standards through the given instructional time on task. I’m jumping quickly here, but consider whether the learning done by real children isn’t more a problem or opportunity in acceleration, to speak from the descriptions of physics. We gain traction with student learning early-on and then build momentum. As engaged learners, students – well taught and lead – seek out much of the learning for themselves as we guide them in activities which call for greater learning to reach personally affirmed goals of understanding and communicating, of doing and creating.
In our ideologically purer moments haven’t we sought to start with the student, directing our attention to the lofty goals of higher learning, and equipping the student along the way to continue pursuing that higher ground? All so much vacuity and vain imaginings?
Look with a colder eye on the process of connecting standards with classroom activities. I find the process missing students rather than connecting with them when executed by all but the most masterful of teachers. And those teachers can connect all the more completely and effectively if they have a synthetically understood picture of a student well-trained, relationally engage the student they have today in class, and pursue rich and real teaching and learning with the student along that growth path.
Does any of it ring true to you? Does it speak to what we treasure in education above most all else? Does it touch upon the fundamentals of teaching as such, rather than just in a particular setting with at-risk or basic skills or enrichment or Twenty-First Century or any of a number of other academic descriptions?
Teachers and students as the heart and soul of every day and every action. Teachers and standards left in great measure to the textbook researchers, the curriculum committees and the test creators. Standards most certainly have their role, but is it as daily guide to the teacher?
Might the standards even be serving as a barrier to the best in our teaching? Might the standards opaquely obscure the needs and engagements and identities of the real boys and girls, young men and young women we are attempting to teach?