Our students deserve to learn at global level
Before Google and the Internet, there was The Commercial Appeal’s Metro desk.
People in search of obscure bits of information — federal judges’ salaries, Civil War dates, whatever happened to so-and-so — would call the newspaper.
Editors spent a lot of time digging up odd facts by scouring old clip files, thumbing through World Book encyclopedias, or polling Jeopardy!-friendly colleagues.
Fortunately, for you and for our editors, information is much easier to come by these days.
Thanks to Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” just about any fact is a click or two away. The world is literally at our fingertips.
That’s why the new, less rote and more rigorous Common Core education standards are so important — and so scary to so many.
Education used to be local. Now it has to be global.
Last week, Oklahoma became the third state to secede from Common Core, following Indiana and South Carolina. Missouri and North Carolina are about to follow suit.
Most of the opposition seems to be focusing on the fact that Common Core standards were developed nationally rather than locally.
“We want to educate South Carolina children on South Carolina standards, not anyone else’s standards.” Gov. Nikki Haley, 42, told reporters.
“We are very capable as Oklahomans of developing our own Oklahoma standards,” Gov. Mary Fallin, 59, said last week.
Of course they are. But if Oklahoma can develop its own K-12 education standards, why not Oklahoma City? And why not Prairie Queen Elementary in OKC? And why not Prairie Queen’s third-grade teachers
Tennessee legislators have wisely and courageously resisted secessionist fears and retained the current Common Core standards.
Those standards aren’t federal government stan- dards. They’re not even U. S. standards. They’re 21st-century standards.
And here in the 21st century, in a globally competitive, digitally connected world run by algorithms, analytics and other really complicated things, knowledge is easy.
Comprehension, application, analysis, problemsolving — those and other higher-order, critical thinking skills are getting more complicated and more vital.
“Our students are not prepared to write and think at a college level or find success in 21st-century careers,” said Casie Jones, an instructional coach for Shelby County Schools who is leading Common Core training sessions this week.
“We encourage our children to dream but do not provide them with the tools to achieve these dreams.”
The point of Common Core is to equip 21st-century dreamers — to shift teaching and learning from the lowest gears on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning (knowledge and comprehension) to the higher gears (application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation).
It’s not a new concept. The best teachers have always taught that way. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think,” the late anthropologist Margaret Mead said decades ago.
But, after two decades of “drill, baby, drill” standardized testing, higher-order teaching and learning is going to require major instructional shifts — for student and teachers.
That’s why Shelby County and other school systems across the state are spending so much time retraining teachers (see accompanying story by education reporter Jane Roberts).
Instead of asking students to rememberandrecallfacts for tests, Common Core is asking them to describe, explain and demonstrate. Instead of asking teachers to list, label, state or define, Common Core is asking them to help students analyze, evaluate, apply and solve. Instead of asking schools to teach children how to take and pass tests, Common Core is asking them to teach children how to create, design and develop to meet 21st-century tests.
“We’ve got to make them think, not just recite or recall,” Dr. Susan Dold, an SCS instructional supervisor, recently told a gathering of teachers at Hickory Ridge Elementary.
In a world moving at the speed of Google, is that too much to ask? Contact David Waters at 901-5292377 or waters@commercialappeal.com.