Schools To Start Using Standardized Curriculum
State Following New Standards
As school gets under way later this month for Rio Rancho children, parents can expect to see something a little different in the classrooms of younger students.
The Rio Rancho Public Schools district, like all other schools across the state, will be using the National Common Core Standards in math and English for kindergarten through third-grade students. The standards were mandated by the state, with full adoption for all grades expected to begin in the 2013-14 school year.
The standards ensure students in all states are taught and tested on the same academic standards. According to corestandards.org, 45 states have adopted the Common Core Standards.
A key component of Common Core is that teachers will cover fewer topics but will be able to go into greater depth.
LaJuana Coleman, the district’s executive director of
secondary curriculum and instruction, said parents will notice their students are doing a lot more collaborative work, such as working out complex word problems in a group setting as opposed to silently at their desks. She said more lectures will be followed by a project that allows students to use the skills they just learned. Also, teachers will be less reliant on textbooks.
“It’s more of a real-world approach,” she said. “We have, of course, classrooms that are doing this already, but it is now the standard.”
She said Common Core also will make it easier to write a curriculum that builds students’ knowledge from one grade level to the next, preventing students from repeating what they learned in previous years. Students across the district will learn the same thing at the same time of year. Teachers, she said, will even know exactly how many days they should spend on a certain topic or lesson. A student who may not be ready to move on will get extra help.
Before Common Core, the standards were more vague and would give a range of grades during which children could learn a standard. That could result in some students, for example, learning something in sixth grade and others learning the same thing in eighth grade, Coleman said.
“Teachers will be able to look and see exactly what a child should be doing in second grade at that time of year,” she said. “That piece existed before but not at the depth it does now.”
Late last month, a handful of Rio Rancho teachers began discussing and mapping out their lesson plans for the coming school year, using as a guide the benchmarks outlined in the Common Core Standards.
The change is getting positive reviews from both new and veteran teachers within the school district. Cielo Azul thirdgrade teacher Ben Steiner, who will start his third year of teaching, said he’s enthusiastic. Instead of focusing only on learning how to perform specific tasks, such as addition, multiplication or writing a sentence, Common Core teaches children to solve problems, fostering both creative and critical thinking skills, he said.
“Who has any idea what the job market will look like in 2025?” he said. “If we are going to prepare these kids for the future, we need to give them skills they can apply to different areas. The content they learn may be obsolete by the time they reach the job market.”
Barbara Smith, who will work with struggling math students in small g roups at Puesta del Sol Elementary and has been a teacher for 30 years, said the new standards are exciting because they give teachers an opportunity to be involved in writing the curriculum.
“Teachers have been saying for years they want to create lesson plans that are more meaningful for students,” she said. “Now we are able to take back some ownership by creating these new learning plans.”
Tanya Baker, a seventhgrade math teacher at Lincoln Middle School, said Common Core, by providing more opportunities for hands-on projects, will help answer the age-old questions of, “Why do I have to learn this and where will I ever use it?”
“It’s easier for students to make connections to their reality” she said. “It makes sense to them.”
Coleman said although the district will not use Common Core in the older grades until next year, they have already started training those teachers.
“If we do this right,” Coleman said, “there is a great opportunity for high student achievement.”