Implementing the
Common Core Standards
A West Virginia
Status Report
Office of Instruction
West Virginia Department of Education
Status Report
• Adopted by WVBOE – May 2010
– Decision made to place CCSS into the existing WV framework
– 85 member work group assembled to begin the work
– Implementation of Next Generation Standards Stakeholder group
formed
• Implementation Schedule Adopted – January 2011
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To align content with the SMARTER Balance Assessment in 2014
Fall 2011 - Kindergarten implemented
Fall 2012 – First grade implemented
Fall 2013 – Second grade implemented
Fall 2014 – Third through twelfth grade implemented
Professional development scaled to match this schedule
Why is This Important for Students,
Teachers and Parents?
• Ensures consistent expectations
regardless of a student’s zip code
• Provides educators, parents and
students with clear, focused
guideposts
Points of Interest
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CCSS adopted by 47 states so far
Not a national curriculum
Fewer and deeper – increased opportunity for mastery
Movement of some content to more directly align with
developmental levels of students
Embedded literacy in all areas
Math and English/language arts only at this point
Work being done on other content areas
Member of the CCSSO State Collaborative on
Assessment and Student Standards for Implementing
CCSS
http://www.corestandards.org/
http://wvde.state.wv.us/teach21/
Criteria for the Standards
• Fewer, clearer and higher
• Aligned with college and work expectations
• Include rigorous content and application of
knowledge through high-order skills
• Build upon strengths and lessons of current state
standards
• Internationally benchmarked, so that all students
are prepared to succeed in our global economy
and society
• Based on evidence and research
Developing Cognition, Making Connections
The standards do address content.
However, it is often overlooked that the
standards identify the cognitive processes
and learning strategies students need in
order to acquire and retain curriculum
content
Standards for Mathematical Practice
• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving
them
• Reason abstractly and quantitatively
• Construct viable arguments and critique the
reasoning of others
• Model with mathematics
• Use appropriate tools strategically
• Attend to precision
• Look for and make use of structure
• Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning
English Language Arts Standards
• Analyze how and why individuals, events and ideas develop
and interact over the course of a text
• Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats
and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in
words
• Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts
independently and proficiently
• Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning,
revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach
• Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish
writing and to interact and collaborate with others
• Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects
based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of
the subject under investigation
Key Cognitive Strategies
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Problem formulation
Research
Interpretation
Communication
Precision and Accuracy
Key Cognitive Strategies
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Problem formulation
Research
Interpretation
Communication
Precision and Accuracy
We should view content
acquisition as a means to an
end; not an end in itself.
Curriculum
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Interesting problems
Investigations
Debates
Simulations
Games
Socratic questioning
Presentations
Projects
English Language Arts
&
Literacy in History/Social Studies,
Science, and Technical Subjects
ELA Standards Advances
The standards devote as much attention
on what students read, in terms of
complexity, quality, and range, as they
do on how students read. As students
progress through the grades, they must
both develop their comprehension
skills and apply them to increasingly
complex texts.
ELA Standards Advances
Balance of literature and informational texts
NAEP Alignment in Reading
Distribution of Literary and Informational Passages by
Grade in the 2009 NAEP Reading Framework
Grade
Literary
Informational
4
50%
50%
8
45%
55%
12
30%
70%
ELA Standards Advances
In order to prepare students for the
challenges of college and career
texts, the standards require a
rich reading of literature as well
as extensive reading of
informational text in science,
history/social studies and other
disciplines.
ELA Standards Advances
The CCR standards define broad
competencies in reading, writing,
speaking, listening and language
while the K-12 standards lend further
specificity by defining a
developmentally appropriate
progression of skills and
understandings.
ELA Standards Advances
The standards also require that
students systematically
develop knowledge of
literature and informational
text, as well as knowledge in
other disciplines through
reading, writing, speaking,
and listening in history/social
studies and science.
Organizations such as the Alliance
for Excellent Education, ACT Inc.
and the National Governors
Association emphasize the need
for high schools to do a better job
of helping students gain vital
mathematics skills by the time
they graduate.
Where are we?
Multiple reports have documented the need for high
school graduates who enter the workforce directly to be
better prepared mathematically.
A 2005 report from the National Association of
Manufacturers found that less than 20 percent of
employers felt they were able to find sufficient numbers of
qualified candidates for manufacturing jobs, and 51%
listed mathematics and science as deficiencies of public
education in preparing students for the workplace.
HSTW Survey results
• More than 75 percent of those taking a remedial
course in college took such a course in mathematics.
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Eighty-seven percent of students taking four or more
mathematics credits in high school did not need
remedial mathematics in college.
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Sixty percent of students wished their high schools
had placed more emphasis on mathematics.
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Thirty percent of career/technical students wished that
their career/technical teachers had placed more
emphasis on how mathematics is used in specific
career areas.
Mathematics is often taught in
isolation from other academic and
career/technical subjects. Students
do not see the connections to their
lives and futures, and too many
become disengaged and either fail
or achieve at levels insufficient for
success after high school.
In the mathematics classroom, students
must be helped to understand why they are
studying the mathematics content and how
it is important to their lives and future work.
Career and Tech Ed can be a great partner
to the mathematics teacher and curriculum.
The status quo is not working: High school
mathematics is largely broken, effectively
serving only a small percentage of the age
cohort, on average, and fundamentally unable
to respond to the calls for college and career
readiness for all. Too few high schools take full
responsibility for providing ALL students the
reasoning and sense-making opportunities
necessary to develop mathematical proficiency
at the college- and career-ready level.
The reality is that all students need
to learn essential mathematics,
knowledge and skills. It is just as
important for those hoping to enter a
well-paying, high-growth career field
right after high school as it is for
those bound for college.
The Surprising Science of Motivation
Daniel Pink ted.com
Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose
Management
Autonomy
Self-Direction
Engagement
Given where we are and where we need to be,
• Mathematics programs and courses should
promote “integrated understandings” of
mathematics, where geometry, number,
algebra, and data analysis are mutually
supporting .
All teachers must take responsibility for all
students and must collaborate with a common
goal: reaching more students more of the time
Given where we are and where we need to be,
All students must have access to the “regular
curriculum,” and some students should receive
additional support (scaffolded instruction,
differentiated instruction)
Teacher collaboration should focus on quality
instruction that builds on what students ARE thinking
and pushes them to the next level
The practice of re-teaching needs to be replaced by
new habits, such as “using previous mathematics in
service of new ideas”
High School Mathematics must:
• incorporate real-life, authentic investigations.
• require the use of higher-order thinking (analysis,
application, evaluation, synthesis, predictions and
comparisons).
• include performance tasks — such as oral
presentations, projects and problems — that take
multiple class periods to accomplish and result in a
product or performance that can be graded.
• incorporate technology to do research, present data
and analyze problem solutions.
High School Mathematics must:
• include individual and group work and
projects.
• include literacy strategies to help students
read and comprehend the language of
mathematics.
• target the “habits of success” that help
students become independent learners,
such as time and materials management ,
accessing resources and working well with
others.
John Ewing (Director of Math for
America) points out that the current
status of high school mathematics is
not a crisis but rather a long-term
structural problem requiring
fundamental long-term changes to
address the changing needs of
society and the world.
Insanity
Doing the same thing
over and over again and
expecting different results
Albert Einstein
The West Virginia Response
Common State Standards
Three Phase Plan
1. Study, develop an understanding of, and place
the Common Core Standards for English and
Mathematics into the WV Framework (2010-2011)
2. Alignment of Common Core Standards for
English and Mathematics with current
instructional materials, identify gaps and create
digital resources to fill gaps (2011-2012)
3. Alignment of all Teach 21 resources to the
Common Core Standards (2012-2013)