Common Core Implementation for Cross-Curricular Learning - Hart District PD

Karen Patiño from the Kern Union High School District is today's presenter.
Images taken from this online resource:
http://cccss-standards-assessments.wikispaces.com/file/view/Making+the+Moves+handouts.pdf

The Changing Classroom

• One-room schoolhouse
• Encyclopedia set at home revolutionizes knowledge
• IN 2013: facts are readily available online

Achieve

Preparing all students for tomorrow. Today.

The students who are the product of CST years have been trained to be passive learners. It is from this that the Common Core movement was born.

Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects

"Technical Subjects" are any subjects in which you develop proficiency over the years

The Common Core State Standards, when adopted, did NOT change content in science, social studies, or English.

Social studies teachers: no one is changing your content standards. The CCSS change the skills with which you approach the content standards.

The Common Core State Standards currently have been adopted by 45 states.

Here is a great math standard that we can pull into non-math classrooms:

• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
• Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.

Question: Could we re-write our content standards to "Common Core-ify" them?

Anchor Standards

This standard says you need to read at grade-level.

• When kids don't know multiplication facts, we hand them flash cards and tell them to practice, practice, practice until they get it right.
• When kids can't read at grade level, we often say, "OK, I will do that for you."

"Michael Phelps swims for miles and miles and miles to eventually be assessed."

The only way that kids get better at writing is to practice writing.

The cool thing about CCSS is that the standards are both horizontally-aligned and vertically-aligned.

"I choose C" - a video from xtranormal

"The only thing that the CSTs really assessed was the ability to identify a correct answer."

We have also created kids who have learned that one choice is right and three choices are wrong.

The story of the Poker Chips

• Johnny wakes up with thousands of poker chips every morning. He feels that he can take risks.
• Tommy wakes up every morning with five poker chips, and he is really nervous to spend those poker chips and take those risks.

An interview with Microsoft. The first interview took place in a bar with all the other applicants. The world is changing.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment

The Smarter Balanced Assessment. It has both selected response and constructed response question.

There is a lot less lecture in Karen Patiño's school district, but lecture still exists--in school and in life.

Interesting phenomenon: kids in the 1990s didn't have computer skills, then we taught them computer skills in late 90s, early 2000s, then with CSTs they lost it again.

This year's Smarter Balanced Assessment is a practice only.

What is the solution? How do we get our kids prepared?

• "Students must be immersed in language instruction."
• EL students are in language-immersion. They learn skills in ELA, and then practice those skills throughout the day.
• "All teachers are language teachers--they teach the language of their subject."
• Read, write, and speak like a historian, like a scientist/researcher.

"We will only change when given the opportunity to experience something new and better." - Richard Dufour

We need to be convinced that this change is going to be better for kids.

Lots of things have been thrown at us over the years, and not all of it has been better.

Engagement model (from Spencer Kagan): Showdown!

Pose a question, write an answer on a slip of paper. 1-2-3-showdown! And then kids slam down their answer. The teacher ceases to be the center of knowledge, and they are sharing knowledge from each other.

"Reading like Colombo"--reading like detectives to verify the answers they shared during the game.

K-3 - students learn to read

3rd grade and beyond - students read to learn

Presenter rolled her eyes at the "poetry unit." Is poetry no longer important for our lives?

So maybe she's talking about poetry skills, poetry devices, not the actual content of the poetry. Poetry is very important for connected with life experiences, but perhaps she means that we don't necessarily need to teach students the mechanics of poetry.

When you transition from individual to group work, the work that they do in one setting must support and "plug-in" to the work of the other setting.

The Common Core movement is about empowering students.

The Field Trip lesson example has:

• Engagement
• Assessment
• Tier 1 Intervention (we can intervene because they are working in groups)
• Cooperative Learning
• Argumentation
• Oral Language Development

Ask them to show you where. Where is your evidence?

Give students opportunities to speak--oral language is where students have the best language skills.

Best of the best teachers identified by schools: 98% the teacher was speaking.

Who is developing their language skills in our best classrooms? The teacher.

"Mommy, what means waist?"

Karen and her young child in the mall. "We need to make sure those pants fit in the waist." Child: "Mommy, what means waist?" 10-minute lesson on waist ensues. Later in the mall, Karen tries on a dress. Child says, "Mommy, that dress looks good, especially in the waist." Her child owned that word.

To what end?

What is the purpose of this lesson? This activity? This front-loading?

Vocabulary is not front-loaded for you in real-life. When we do this, we are not teaching kids to be independent readers and independent learners.

"Your students know more words than they can read."

They have heard words in oral language that they haven't necessarily read before.

Essential Words

Take four of your essential words and create a summary.

You have to read things THREE times to get to meaning.

Repeated Reads

1. Decoding
2. Fluency
3. Meaning

"I don't read things three times."

Yeah, exactly, because you all are college graduates. However, if you read Chaucer tonight, you would read three times.

When the content is heavy, the language should be light.

Once students understand the content, the complexity of the language can increase.

Scaffolding is a temporary support structure.

They are great support structures that eventually need to be taken away.

Karen Patiño just destroyed the "cheat-sheet notecard" on the exam. Thank you!

Your students aren't analyzing if you did the analysis for them.

This will be work, but the work is worth it.