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hobbesmaster posted:That is the goal of the people implementing it, as the nyt article says it isn't the goal of the authors. Public discourse has conflated the Common Core standards with the package of neo-liberal bullshit school reformers are pushing like score-based teacher evaluations. It doesn't help that the Department of Education endorses both. That NYT article was excellent. Having spent some time helping in fourth grade classrooms, I've noticed a lot of the same things. One thing they don't touch on, though, is that students are not keen on discovery either. Getting the kids to guess or discuss why they thought something was right or wrong was like pulling teeth. It's not just a matter of teaching teachers to teach. We also need to think about how to teach students to learn, because we've done a helluva job teaching them not to.
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Jul 26, 2014 18:52
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Papercut posted:Both are being pushed hand-in-hand from the top down, so it doesn't really matter in practice if they're not actually the same. The DoE and these billionaire's foundations are pushing this (Common Core, for-profit charters, union busting) as a single package. Even though parents, students, and teachers all seem to hate it, it will probably just be rebranded as many times as needed to muddy the waters enough for a top-down implementation of it. It's an important distinction because there's not a drat thing wrong with the standards themselves. That school "reform" assholes like it is regrettable, but not a good reason to go back to lovely state educational standards. It's possible to vigorously oppose union-busting, school privatization, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, etc. without ever mentioning Common Core.
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Jul 26, 2014 19:38
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comes along bort posted:Race to the Top grants (which in part involves shutting down public schools and shunting money off to charters) were tied to CC implementation. I'm aware of the connection, but the CC standards were developed independently from Race to the Top. The standards themselves are excellent, which is why it bugs me to hear teachers assume they must be bad because they got lumped in with all the other reform bullshit. Since they're already suspicious, they bite the "Obummer national curriculum" or "it makes math too hard" line without question, which plays into the hands of people who want to mandate terrible state standards and curricula. Asiina posted:There's a lot of policies that could be put in place, but honestly I think more openness and knowledge sharing is what is needed most. There's the idea of a closed door classroom that is very common and a lot of teachers even take pride in. That whatever policies come down from the ministry/board/state are fine but in the end I can close my door and it is my classroom with my students and I can do what I want to get them to learn. But the problem with that is when that happens struggles also become secret. This is a lack of accountability on teachers, which is considered a dirty word in some circles, but also a lack of support. In that kind of environment teachers won't really feel comfortable saying "I don't understand this concept, can you help me so I can explain it to my kids?" to other teachers or to their principal or whoever is coming in with the new idea for them to teach. And then if teachers are more vocal about their lack of understanding then those who are giving the information will have to realize they need to do a better job explaining it. My father is a 4th grade Title I specialist, and we had a similar discussion about teacher openness. He pointed out that the average teacher has been in the classroom for years, if not decades, now and doesn't always take kindly to the suggestion that the way they've been doing things for 20 years isn't "optimal," to put it kindly. How do you think schools can facilitate that kind of dialogue? For what it's worth, I'm studying to be an elementary teacher and thus far I have mostly positive things to say about the content and pedagogy we're learning, but it pains me how many of my peers are in the program because they're bad at math.
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Jul 28, 2014 01:07
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Skeesix posted:Nice post. I think that content knowledge is a real problem that people like to push aside because it's so hard to bring up to teachers. No one wants to tell someone who's been teaching for 30 years that they need to work on content knowledge because it sounds like you're saying that they don't know fractions. But still there's a difference between knowing fractions and really mastering them. There's one guy at Berkeley who wrote a 100 page text just on fractions in all their incarnations. Similarly, in college many education majors do not want to take content knowledge courses. The best books for teacher training are the ones that sneak in content knowledge under the umbrella of manipulative training like Beckmann's book. I would say, based on post-test hallway discussion, a solid half to two-thirds of my elementary math content class struggled to maintain the C-average necessary to stay in the program. Everyone says "It's just elementary math," but actually understanding it and being able to explain it to children is harder than it sounds. Hell, I didn't really understand why you cross-multiplied to divide fractions until I took the course because it didn't stick in fourth grade. I knew you had to do it, but I didn't know why and it led to a lot of stupid fractions mistakes later on. There's no way I could have effectively taught the concept to students if I hadn't learned it myself, and a lot of my classmates didn't pick it up because they just "aren't a math person" and blamed the professor for making them feel stupid. It's a difficult problem to solve because the common attitude was "I'm going to pass the course/certification and then teach the way I learned it because that makes sense to me," even though clearly it doesn't make enough sense to translate into solving word- or multi-step problems. Education classes can be really frustrating. Avalanche posted:Common Core in of itself isn't bad, but like many have said... implementation is the issue. And the implementation is complete poo poo. The expectations placed on special ed. by NCLB are probably the worst part of the entire law and nobody's in any hurry to fix it because "we need to have high expectations for all students." Data collection and analysis are wonderful, but turning them into a bar for teacher evaluation makes the data a punishment rather than a tool. In regards to implementation, I guess I'm arguing over semantics. I see the fight for teacher evaluation/charter schools/union-busting as existing prior to and in spite of Common Core. I worry that, by lumping all of it under one umbrella, people in power will jettison the easy part - the standards themselves - and leave the actually bad things, like Louisiana has. I think we all agree that the implementation has been really lovely, though, and that drags the entire enterprise down.
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Jul 29, 2014 17:50
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