Some thoughts on Common Core 2 of 2

Please take a look at part 1 if you haven't already. It's shorter than this post and covers much of the same material from a general standpoint. In this post I'm going to be looking at the second NPR article, What Does A Good Common Core Lesson Look Like? I intend to go point by point through both the article and the included lesson (PDF) because, hooray, it's a lesson for 9th Grade English class! As a side note, if this post seems to change half way through it is because I'm writing as much as I can before work and then spending 12 hours in the ER before writing the rest of it later.

#167311957 / gettyimages.com

I would like to note that Getty Images does not have any images of female werewolves so I opted for a post-transformation wolf that appeared gender neutral. This picture will make more sense in a little bit.

Like all good internet citizens, I skimmed the article and immediately went to the comments section. I promise that I have gone back and reread the article and lesson plans. Hopefully my point by point analysis will convince you that I'm not just spouting opinions blindly. But, the comments produced both an excellent summary and a great way for me to indicate my bias in analyzing this article.

AjaxinCharlotte  Vern Wells • 3 days ago 

As far as I can tell from the article, the lesson plan is as follows:
1. Teacher introduces the standards.
2. Teacher introduces the story.
3. Students read the story.
4. Students circle unfamiliar words and in pairs try to define them.
5. Students complete one short-answer question.
Am I missing something here? This does not seem to be the most earth-shattering lesson plan I have ever seen. This is the best that this high-powered research group can come up with? As for using context clues to define vocab words, see my other post. I'm looking at the bios of the people involved in Achieve. They seem very long on administrative experience, and a little short on actual classroom experience. Reading one bio, I see that the person who directed Ohio's "K-12 literacy initiatives, [and] served as the State lead for Ohio in the development of the Common Core State Standards in English language arts/literacy," has had exactly five years of experience actually teaching in the classroom. And that experience is barely mentioned in the bio, like an afterthought. Seriously. Can I have your job? I'm coming up on a decade in the classroom, and I don't care what research purports to show, experience matters. I'm a better teacher than I was three years ago.
I really feel like it takes a minimum of ten years in the classroom before anyone should even try to start calling the shots at the policy level. But experienced teachers are in very short supply because the job is not respected. And a lot of potentially great teachers move on quickly to swankier, cushier jobs rather than continue hacking away in the classroom.
My ideal teacher? Mr. Miyagi. 70+ years actually practicing the art form. Small class sizes. Lots of direct instruction. No strong desire for fame and prestige. Martial arts schools have a much better paradigm, IMO, probably because if their teaching is not good, their students will get their butts kicked.

Yup. After my skimming, I felt almost exactly this way; maybe less ranty about the curriculum author's qualifications and the lack of supply of good teachers and needing more Mr. Miyagis in the world.  I definitely think the lesson plan is nothing new or groundbreaking and is something that teachers around the nation have been doing for years. I bet if we go back to the limited classroom time of the teacher-turned-curriculum author, we will find that she was doing this kind of lesson long before Common Core existed. Why? Because teachers tend to find lessons that work for them and stick with it. Adjust here, change there, adapt this way and that, of course, but the skeleton usually remained the same.

All that said, let's dive deeper into both the NPR article and the lesson plan in question. Anya Kamenetz begins by pointing out that NPR is running stories all week about the challenges facing teachers and schools as they adopt Common Core. Why, bemoans NPR, even in this internet age, is it so difficult to find materials aligned to Common Core? As we saw in the previous article, however, most of the materials which already exist are Common Core aligned. If anything needs changing it's usually minor and usually not a question of content but of labeling it in a way that a bureaucrat would recognize as "aligned". Maybe use some percentages!

It doesn't give me much hope that NPR just accepts the shortage of curriculum material at face value. The next section is probably a good indication of why they accept it. The article outlines a variety of companies and non-profit organizations that make materials and help teachers convert old materials into new. We've got EQUIP, Achieve, EngageNY, and many other not mentioned in the article. Each of these organizations offers services to schools and teachers. Some are free and funded entirely by grants from large foundations. Some are not and require schools or their teachers to pay per lesson  or to subscribe for continued access. These organizations have an interest in drumming up business by peddling half-truths about shortages. I'd also imagine that the venn diagram of teachers and NPR listeners overlaps significantly. Is this an article or is this advertising? That line is blurry throughout our media landscape and it is blurry here.

"The bottom line is that there is not a ton out there that is truly aligned, rigorous and high quality," said Kate Gerson, who works with EngageNY as a research fellow and is a former classroom teacher. "So you have to be very, very careful about what you use."

Yes, don't just use any old lesson plans, use EngageNY lessons! They've got moxie! They're 88% Common Core aligned! The cynic in me would point out that the foundations which contribute millions of dollars to NPR are the same foundations which contribute millions of dollars to EngageNY and organizations like it. They are called things like The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Like any good sales pitch drug dealer journalistic report, we get access to a free sample of one of these very rare and difficult to produce Common Core lessons. Indeed, this lesson is probably what brought most readers to this article to begin with. Teachers are, after all, wondering what exactly makes something aligned with Common Core special and different. Unfortunately, the article doesn't have any information about the mystical process of alignment. We just have to take Kate and Anya at their words that this lesson is aligned and therefore "good" as the title implies. Never is the titular question "what?" answered.

Since were dealing with NPR, we have to assume that there's a certain type of listener and it's no surprise that the article highlights a lot of aspects surrounding the text's diversity. Notice that nothing is mentioned about the content or how this will help kids learn. Learning is apparently secondary to Common Core's sales quotas goals.

The story hits the three main points that Gerson says the Common Core standards are looking for. The first, and most important, is that it's complex enough to be a challenge for freshmen. Students are typically going to be encountering stories a year or two earlier than they did under old standards, which means the books may need to be screened for provocative material as well. 

The second is the "canon." That's a nebulous concept in any age. But Russell's work meets recognized benchmarks for literary quality — her debut novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and she's the winner of a 2013 MacArthur grant. Being new is good, too. "The phrase 'contemporary authors' is in the standards in multiple places," Gerson says. This story was originally published in 2007. 

Finally, including work by a younger, female writer meets the standards' call for diversity of all kinds.

On the surface these are each really important changes to the way teaching looked 20 years ago and 50 years ago. Point one is complete bullshit. I do not understand where the idea came from that teachers nationwide were teaching stories which were too easy for their students, especially given the point made about literacy later in the article. I taught freshmen in special education classes and in a general education environment and I can say that St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is not much more complex than any of the texts which I used and saw others using. It certainly isn't going to be more challenging than Masque of the Red Death which I used.

But that Poe text brings us to the second point, cannon. 20 years ago the idea of teaching according to a literary cannon was pretty much as dead as the old white guys in it. We were taught that the things which distinguished so-called great works were inventions of white male privilege. In many cases that was true. In more cases, reading from the cannon was simply unnecessary or limiting your freedom in choosing works to teach. Another argument is that not highlighting works from minorities and women does damage to the richness that is literature. 50 years ago, the response to such an argument would have been that we teach certain canonical texts because they exemplify the qualities that we want students to identify and, hopefully, build into their own writing. They also have had an impact on the trajectory of literature throughout history. We teach Shakespeare because it is good and because so much literature since then is in conversation with Shakespeare's works. The Fault in Our Stars broke box office records this past weekend and it has been a best selling young adult novel for a while. It absolutely is in conversations with Romeo and Juliet as well as numerous other canonical works. Knowing about the cannon makes readers more informed when they read newer stuff.

The pendulum is swinging back toward the style of 50 years ago. Teachers are being urged to teach stories broadly recognized as being of high quality by the literary community. A few things are different; we've kept the focus on women and minority writing. We've added a focus on using more current writing. The Common Core cares more about quality writing then about the conversations writers have across the centuries, though. Will it help? I don't know. Students' propensity for boredom and distraction never ceased to amaze me. Yeah, a story about wolves will probably generate some interest. That it is modern and by a woman will help too. But there are going to be plenty of kids who are still not going to like the story, I promise. Also, if you clicked through to the .pdf of the story linked above, you're going to encounter a photocopy of the pages of a collection of short stories. That format alone is going to turn kids off. It's black and white. It's paper which will turn nasty by the time the first two classes get their hands on it. It's, well, old. I wholeheartedly support this trend but I don't think that it's going to suddenly make a new generation of literary geniuses.

If the first selling point is for the latte swilling, Volvo driving, Obama voting set, the second is marketed to grammar nazis and literacy junkies like me. As usual, the brand new super fancy extra special Common Core aligned lesson is a rebranding of an education mainstay: the word study. This approach to building vocabulary and improving reading comprehension has been around forever.

Then, students turn to individual close reading. They are told to reread sections and draw boxes around unfamiliar words. They write the definition of new words on Post-It notes. Forty percent of the class time — the biggest chunk of the lesson — is spent this way. This is crucial, Gerson says: "The biggest change [with the Core] is that we as teachers must get smarter about how to construct learning experiences where students are doing more work than we are."

Oh Post-it notes! They're so colorful and fun because they aren't something boring like paper. And I'm definitely in favor of working less while my students work more. Here's the background on this style of teaching literacy. Teachers give kids stories like the one above and kids encounter words they don't recognize because they're kids and there are more new things for them than adults. Teachers trained in the last few decades have one and only one approach to help those children learn. It's called guessing but nobody in the education business calls it that. They call it learning words in context. The process is exactly as described above. They read, find an unfamiliar word, mark it, and try to figure it out in every way possible without actually looking it up or asking what it means.

You may feel like I dislike this kind of literacy teaching and you're right. I dislike it because it doesn't work. Context based guessing is hugely inaccurate - like, correct less than 30% of the time inaccurate. I think it comes from a confusion in teaching literacy between how to teach the literal and useful meaning of words compared to the figurative and symbolic meaning of words. The latter relies hugely on context within the story, poem, play, whatever. Using context is an essential method for creating patterns of symbolism throughout a story which make it have a meaning beyond the literal words in its pages. When the teachers and the standards are calling for teaching the craft of writing, they're going to want to use a context based approach, among other approaches too. When teachers and the standards are calling for teaching literacy, using a context based approach is, I think, hugely counterproductive. Here's and excerpt of the first paragraph of the short story:

At first, our pack was all hair and snarl and floor-thumping joy. We forgot the barked cautions of our mothers and fathers, all the promises we'd made to be civilized and ladylike, couth and kempt. We tore through the austere rooms, overturning dresser drawers, pawing through the neat piles of the Stage 3 girls' starched underwear, smashing light bulbs with our bare fists. Things felt less foreign in the dark.

Our lesson assumes that the students will encounter unfamiliar words. Let's take the first sentence apart and see where kids are likely to trip up.

• At first, clause signifying that the pack changes from its current state at some indefinite point in the future; 90% of the kids aren't going to realize that independently. 
• our pack, subject offers two areas of confusion one minor and one major. our indicates the author is a member of the pack; 10% of students won't get this. pack is a collective noun used primarily for wolves and dogs; 50% of students won't get this.
• was all hair and snarl and foot thumping joy. predicate: A tricky one. hair will be easy enough and just about every student knows what hair is. snarl is going to be unfamiliar to many students, say, 50%. floor-thumping joy will only make sense to kids familiar with dogs who are able to figure out that the sentence is talking about wolves; 70% won't get this.

Before you go off thinking I'm vastly underestimating the reading ability and background knowledge of the students, let me point out an important fact mentioned in the NPR article: "In a recent survey of 20,000 teachers, 73 percent said they taught students whose reading levels spanned four or more grades." This is a 9th grade lesson. You can correctly assume based on the data that almost 3/4ths of your class is reading below 9th grade level or worse; if they are 4 levels below 9th grade, thats 5th grade! You, the 9th grade English teacher are now seeing kids do one of two things: 1. They are using way, way too many Post-it notes. 2. They have realized they don't know most of the words and have given up. Maybe they picked one or two just so they could say they did something. Maybe they are playing and talking. Maybe they just put their heads down and try to sleep. 

Common Core likes to advertise that it's pushing teachers to pick challenging texts, as noted above. So a challenging text in 9th grade means that an average 9th grader should be able to read about 90% of the words. That's how literacy researchers define challenging: 90%. Anything harder than 90% becomes counterproductive because the students aren't able to make sense of the sentences. Yet, here we have a lesson for a population which has readers as low as 5th grade! Maybe lower. They're getting about half of the words in the story which means they're not getting the story. If a student can't understand what a sentence says, how can she use context to help her guess a word? How can she use this mystery language to "determine the meaning of words in context and how they contribute to tone RL.9-10.4?

She can't and she shouldn't but the way learning words is presented focuses exclusively on guessing through context. The method fails when no context can be established from which the students can guess. That's all ignored by the fancy new lesson plan, though. What appears to be more important is the idea that students are taking learning into their own hands.

One major strategy the standards introduce is for teachers to get out of the students' way and not to make it too easy on anyone. "It's very common to want to protect, advocate, support and ensure the comfort of students that are struggling," Gerson says. "What all the research is telling us is that we must create content where there is a productive struggle ... where all students are being asked to work toward the same target as everyone else."

The idea of a productive struggle is great! I love that idea. The problem is, every student has a different ability level. I will productively struggle when I read Paradise Lost. My student will productively struggle when she reads Of Mice and Men. The boy sitting next to her will struggle when he reads Goosebumps. I simply don't understand how the research can say that most classrooms have 4+ different reading levels and that they should all work toward the same goal. Maybe those researchers haven't met? 

Next we get this whole section about Hermione Granger syndrome in which the teacher ends up always picking the same few kids in class because they're the "know it alls" just like Hermione. HGS is purely a symptom of the above problem. When only a few students in a class full of kids are capable of comprehending the text, of course only a few students are going to participate.

Finally we close with a bit of analysis. We learn that the lesson closes with a "quick write" that asks the student to compare the opening paragraph they didn't understand with an epigraph they probably didn't read. We are also told that the composition is the assessment of standard RL.9-10.4. In case you didn't remember, that's the standard about how authors use words to create tone and meaning. The exact writing prompt from the lesson plan is "What specific phrases or words reveal the connections between the first paragraph of the story and the Stage 1 epigraph? Cite evidence form the text in your response." If you were wondering, the Stage1 epigraph is the short description before the first paragraph.

So, throughout the entire lesson, all the kid has to do for a grade is read the epigraph and the first paragraph of the story - literally 12 sentences - and write a short essay about how they are connected: not how the author makes tone and meaning as indicated in the standard, just how they are "connected." All that vocabulary work is not assessed or graded. All the reading they do of the story is not assessed or graded. Indeed, none of the heavy lifting done by the students is significantly related to the actual assessment. And then we end up puzzled when "In the two states that have started giving Common Core aligned tests, test scores initially dropped by 25-30 percentage points." Maybe because your writing assessments are are only tangentially related to the actual teaching and learning taking place?

To review, the lesson sets out to assess the following standard: "RL.9-10.4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language evokes a sense of time and place; how it sets a formal or informal tone)." Then the students spend the majority of the lesson (40% according to the alignment percentages included in the lesson packet) reading and working in pairs to define the literal meaning of unfamiliar words. And then they are writing an essay which is basically just "compare these two paragraphs." 

The lesson may be in guaranteed alignment with Common Core but it's not in alignment with itself. Indeed, the lesson specifically avoids any analysis of word choice and the impact of word choice on meaning and tone of the text! The lesson specifically avoids any instruction related to the assessment! Why is this decision made? What possible justification could exist for the complete lack of instruction? As near as I can tell, the lesson just assumes that by guessing at the definitions of unfamiliar words children will come to understand how words lead to meaning and tone. Here's a good example of the problem: 

Speaking from her own experience as an English teacher, she said, the tendency all too often has been to instead spend class time "performing" literature — spelling out the subtext, defining tough words before students have a chance to puzzle over them, and advertising key plot points like the voiceover on a Bravo reality show. 

Introducing the standards will ideally refocus English class. "The goal has moved from getting the salient points in the narrative to getting better at reading," says Gerson.

Teachers and curriculum designers, in an effort to stop other teachers from just explaining all the good stuff, have decided the best approach is to not teach at all. That final sentence is a doozy too! She comes right out and says that it does not matter if the kids understand the story but that she wants them to be good readers! How can a good reader not understand a story? Reverse that: How can someone who can't comprehend a story be a good reader? It boggles the mind! Furthermore, if better reading is the goal and you use word study to hopefully improve students' reading ability, why aren't you assessing their reading?

So, Mrs. Gerson is probably not to blame for all of these issues. She's just a salesperson for EngageNY and their products and she's employing her organization's corporate media partners to market to teachers and parents, especially the liberal ones who are battling tooth and nail in NYC and elsewhere to get rid of Common Core. And that's where my problems with Common Core fall: With the behavior of the organizations behind it's development and implementation. It's clear from this lesson, and the 52 other lessons in the linked instructional unit, that the people working hardest for Common Core are producing lessons no better than anything that came before it. The lessons are still junk. The goals are still confused and poorly assessed. The people behind them are still too far removed from the classroom.

The standards are fine. Kids should be able to accomplish the goals set out in the standards. Yes, I want students in 9th grade to identify how authors use language to create meaning and tone. Hell, I really liked the CC aligned story about young savage wolf women being tamed and turned into socially acceptable ladies. Oppressing women is one of our educational system's greatest accomplishments! Yes, I want more freedom in choosing texts for my students.

What I do not want is the gigantic apparatus of bureaucratic appeasement which comes along with Common Core. I don't need to justify in every lesson that my students are learning according to some chart buried in a .pdf in my administrator's office. I don't need to subvert my students' literacy so I can make assessments which a paper pusher will recognize. And I sure as hell don't need some collection of lessons written by committee to pass the Common Core Turing test but are ultimately empty of substance.

Some thoughts on Common Core 1 of 2

I posted a bunch of stuff this morning about Common Core and more just keeps coming into my media diet so I thought I'd write a bit of a longer post. Before I get going, I'm just going to come out and say that, at this point, I have no problem whatsoever with the Common Core Standards. Seriously, go read them. They're fine and say stuff about what kids should be able to do when they leave a certain grade and are mostly appropriate given the age and backgrounds of average (white, "middle" class, non disability ) students.

#sb10069478l-001 / gettyimages.com

Most of you know that I'm not arguing against the standards when I bitch and moan about Common Core. Usually I'm arguing against the way testing is used or against the way many states are using Common Core to advance other agendas. Sometimes I also bemoan the absurd sums of money flowing around but never really seeming to impact the students.

Two articles from NPR popped into my stream today and I'll focus on those here. The first, Teachers Hit The Common Core Wall, is pretty standard fare. Note: an audio version is included for the reading disinclined and part 1 of the story is here. Cory Turner writes that schools' responses to Common Core all pretty much fall into three categories: 1. do nothing. 2. buy stuff from companies. 3. develop CC materials in-house. As you might expect, the focus is on schools that develop CC aligned materials in house; although, I love this bit about percentages of alignment:

Lain started the company to help schools with Option Two. Districts pay a subscription fee. In return, they get access to Learning List's private database, which includes reviews of products that may or may not line up with the Core standards. And a quick run through those reviews reveals serious variety in alignment. One product is 88 percent aligned, while another is just 63 percent aligned. A few are better. Some are far worse.

I for one want all my CC materials with a Chaotic Neutral alignment. More seriously, I have, uh, serious doubts about this kind of "alignment" measuring. It's clearly designed for the bureaucrats who are charged with making large purchasing decisions on behalf of districts. They either know nothing about teaching or don't have the time and resources to vet instructional products properly. Saying something is 88% aligned vs 66% aligned is great marketing but not much more. How, after all, could a Shakespeare play or the Federalist Papers be reduced to a percentage of alignment? Oh sorry teachers, were's going to have you cut Ophelia out of Hamlet because there's no gender standards this year. It's not in alignment!

Looking toward the third option, NPR links some great resources for those of you currently teaching, and discusses how they're generating lesson plans, .ppt slides, and more! All for the picking. I definitely support the beg, borrow, steal approach to writing curriculum. There just isn't the time to always generate new material for every class, every lesson, and every school day. What used to happen to me was, I'd find a good lesson and then adapt it to other units. Basically making it my own over the course of the year. I also realized that most teachers are making the same kinds of lessons and covering the same kinds of materials. This despite CC being relatively new and supposedly fixing the great disparities between schools.

The article profiles a district pulling apart old materials only to find out that, surprise, they mostly align to Common Core:

Baumann had her teachers take this old workbook (which the district couldn't afford to replace) and pull it apart. Then they went through every lesson, every page, every line and figured out what pieces corresponded to the new standards. Some sections worked but were in the wrong order or assigned to the wrong grade. Once a page had been matched up with the Core, it was color-coded based on the appropriate grade level and taped to the wall.

And here, in this quote, is the absurdity of it all. Most of what teachers were doing before Common Core is exactly the same as what they will be doing after Common Core! When they point out that something is "in the wrong order" or "assigned to the wrong grade" these educators are not saying "research shows the order of learning needs to be x,y,z and these should happen all in 10th grade." They're merely saying that their district decided to put it in a different order than before. So they make the changes and build a big color-coded wall chart and all settle down for a good night's sleep safe in the knowledge that they won't really have to change anything at all. In fact, that's the first sentence of the concluding paragraph!

When they finish, those old materials made new will be handed out. 

It's funny that the real story is there the whole time, plain as day: Common Core is neither new nor novel. Honestly, it rehashes the same tried and true ideas made into a "new" silly set of standards. My education career has been really, really short. Yet in the 3 years I was in the classroom (not always as the teacher) I saw 4 different sets of standards. Strangely, that didn't entail 4 different lesson plans or 4 different text books or 4 different approaches to learning. When I got my classroom did I write my lesson with Common Core in mind? Not really. I wrote my lessons based on what my students needed. Then, I looked back to the standards and made changes as necessary. More often than not, few changes were needed and those which I did make were mostly to satisfy the administrator who would be reviewing my curriculum looking, I suppose, for that magical alignment percentage. I think I will just write "This Curriculum is 100% aligned to Common Core" in big bold letters at the top of all my lessons from now on.