Common Core State Standards

  • Victoria Deneroff

  • I’ve just started researching the history of CCSS and standards in general because I’ll be teaching a special topics class about them. In the pre-standards days, textbooks determined curriculum. I started teaching  high school in the 80’s, and when I asked the department chair what the curriculum for earth science was, he said, "Well you have the textbook, don’t you?"

  • This mindset, or perhaps you could call it a paradigm, of curriculum being presented to rather than developed by teachers, carried over into the standards era. People expect that they will be told what to teach, even when we have standards that expect teachers to develop their own curriculum.

  • In this vein, ten years ago when I was teaching a masters-level class in elementary mathematics pedagogy in Los Angeles, I assigned the students to develop a mathematics unit to teach their students about the meaning of the equal sign. The class kind of stared at me. Finally somebody said something very close to: We don’t know how to design lessons any more. All of their lessons were derived from the central office and were completely scripted.
    I don’t think state DOE’s and other people in charge of curriculum understand the re-education it will take to use CCSS the way they were intended.