November 6, 2012
This post originally appeared on November 6, 2012 on ASCD’s Inservice blog.
By David Griffith, ASCD Public Policy
If you’re an educator in one of the 46 states that has adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), you’ve not only been learning about the standards and what they mean for you and your students, but you’ve most likely begun implementing them as well.
As you’ve been busy moving forward, you probably still have a great deal of questions. Does your district or school have the technological capacity to administer the new computer-based assessments? How can you better leverage technology for teaching to the standards? How can you take your understanding of the standards and translate them into effective lesson plans? What are the best professional development resources on the Common Core, and how can they help you?
You’re not alone. The ASCD team has been keeping an ear to the ground and has been working to provide answers to these and other questions. We’ve surveyed our conference attendees, held focus groups, and listened to the feedback in the field from all around the country to learn your perceptions of the new standards, budget concerns, and more. And this year, we gathered data from four statewide summits in Arkansas, Colorado, North Carolina, and Utah. All of this listening, gathering, and analyzing of data and information is helping us identify educators’ Common Core needs and then design programs, products, and services to meet those needs.
So what are your colleagues saying about the standards?
We’ve compiled the findings and our own recommendations in a free report, “Fulfilling the Promise of the Common Core State Standards: Moving from Adoption to Implementation to Sustainability.” Some of the greatest concerns we heard from our state summits were over Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers’ (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced’s summative and end-of-course assessments, the availability of effective professional development offerings, and the time to plan and collaborate. Based on this feedback and more, three of the major recommendations we made for education leaders are to transform principals into instructional leaders, to vet instructional resources for quality and alignment with the standards, and to create opportunities for educators to learn from each other.
You’ll find the full report on our EduCore™ site. Since we launched this online resource, we’ve been thrilled to have more than 45,000 visitors. We’ve also improved portions of the tool, created a webinar to instruct users on how to engage with the free EduCore resources, and gotten some help from authors Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins to explain, “From Common Core to Curriculum: Five Big Ideas.”
Once you’ve read the report, we hope you’ll continue the conversation about Common Core with us on social media. Join us on Twitter and look for the #commoncore or #CCSS hashtags to see what others are saying. You can also find some Common Core resources on our dedicated Pinterest board. As always, feel free to leave comments about the report, concerns about the standards, or implementation successes in the comments section.
