Common Core Standards: Implications for instruction

By Valerie Strauss

This was written by Jack Farrell, a retired teacher of Advanced Placement English, a teacher researcher, and currently president of the school board in Mammoth Lakes, CA. Farrell has done extensive classroom observation as a consultant teacher and is an enthusiastic supporter of the Common Core Standards. He maintains his own blog and website where he writes about current instructional issues related to the new standards.

By Jack Farrell
Forty-three states have already adopted the new Common Core Standards as part of their application for “Race to the Top” funds. Many, however, have pushed actual implementation far down the road as the adoption of new standards requires a huge commitment of time and funds, from writing new frameworks, adopting new textbooks to rolling out extensive staff development.

In California, alone, the new math standards will not be operational until 2014 and the new English/Language Arts standards not until 2016. Since California did not win Race to the Top funds, I feel that the impetus to push additional educational reform in California has already substantially waned.

This a mistake, since the new Common Core Standards are not just another set of high standards, like those already adopted in California and Massachusetts. These are the first standards that focus on how students learn, not just on what they learn.

The movement toward a set of national standards can be traced back to research conducted by The ACT, the college entrance test often compared to the SAT.

The ACT researchers found through their research, published as “Reading Between the Lines,” that our typical high school graduates, even though fully qualified for college by their grades and either SAT or ACT scores, were still demonstrably unprepared for the reading demands of either the college classroom or the typical workplace.

The ACT researchers examined three levels of reading demands: simple text, more difficult text and complex text. When they examined their aggregate reading scores and correlated them with college success, the lines for simple and more difficult text rose in parallel fashion. However, the line for complex text remained fairly flat until it reached the most accomplished readers, those with scores of 34-36 (on a 36 point scale) where the benchmark score was 21, the score point above which becomes a predictor of college success. Since complex text is a staple of the university and the modern workplace, students’ inability to independently and proficiently negotiate it gave rise to these new text-based standards.

Here is a quick example of the difference between current middle school social science standards and the new common core. From the current California Social Science Content Standards:


Historical Interpretation, Grades 6-8
1. Students explain the central issues and problems from the past, placing people and events in a matrix of time and place.
2. Students understand and distinguish cause, effect, sequence, and correlation in historical events, including the long-and short-term causal relations.
3. Students explain the sources of historical continuity and how the combination of ideas and events explains the emergence of new patterns.

It is certainly possible to certify the above standards as rigorous. Proficient students would indeed possess exemplary content knowledge.

However, the ACT research has cast a troubling light on the rigor of these standards.

How a student comes to mastery on a standard is as important, or should be, as the fact of mastery itself. The above standards can be taught through direct, explicit instruction, supported by bullets on power point slides and streaming video. This is the most common way social science is currently taught in California classrooms. Social science textbooks are considered support in most modern classrooms. Many students consider skimming to be reading and scanning for information in a textbook the way most of us skim the internet is the primary way modern textbooks are accessed by today’s students.

Below are four 6-8th grade History/Social Science standards from the new common core. While it is true that currently the new standards are not as detailed as the California standards, the most obvious difference is the expectation of students working with, and learning from, text, independently and proficiently:


3. Identify key steps in a text’s description of a process related to history/social studies (e.g., how a bill becomes law, how interest rates are raised or lowered).
4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies.
5. Describe how a text presents information (e.g., sequentially, comparatively, causally).
10. By the end of grade 8, read and comprehend history/social studies texts in the grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently. [Emphasis mine]


These standards make it clear that the burden for presenting the content has moved from teacher to writer, and that the student’s ability to navigate complex text independently is at the core of his learning.

The introduction to the Common Core Standards also describes what is not covered by the standards: “The Standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach.”

Perhaps this statement was meant to alleviate the fears of teachers who very much resent being told how to do their jobs. However, changing classroom behavior and the way instruction is delivered is at the heart of the ACT Research. Current pedagogical practices, wherein teaching is talking and learning is listening, do not adequately prepare students for the rigor of college or career.

Whenever I visit California classrooms, it is remarkably easy to see the California Standards for the Teaching Profession in evidence.

*Teachers have the responsibility to engage students and in high functioning classrooms, students are demonstrably engaged (Standard 1).
*Teachers and students cooperate to produce well-managed classrooms (Standard 2).
*Teachers know what they’re talking about and there is significant evidence of transference of this knowledge (Standard 3).
*In the best classrooms, this is a highly efficient content delivery system and the pace and depth of instruction is evidence of significant planning, both short-term and long-range (Standard 4).
*Teachers are assessing machines, continually checking for understanding and teaching recursively to bring all students along (Standard 5).

The biggest challenge in the adoption of these new standards will be in supervision and instruction. I have made it a point to collect evidence of these new standards in today’s practice and I can find little evidence these standards are already in place.

For these standards to be in place, everything we know about instruction -- what we use to prepare our teachers in their university programs, what our teacher candidates experience in their student teaching assignments and the practices we advocate in our new- teacher induction programs -- must change.

Those who content that these new standards are high in rhetoric only, that tomorrow’s assessments will differ little from today’s, that the Common Core Standards do not represent real reform, have not read the standards carefully, nor have they examined the research behind the standards.

Moving from an essentially teacher-centered oral education with visual and text-based support, to a text-based writer-centered education with oral and visual support, may sound like a simple shift in emphasis.

But hundreds of hours of classroom observation convince me that such a shift will be monumental pedagogically. If the way students learn does not change to align with the new standards, there is little chance these new standards can enter the classroom.

I invite all teachers, students, parents and community members to examine these new standards and, not only support the transition to these standards, but actively encourage their implementation. You can examine these standards at: http://www.corestandards.org/ and also at links to your own state departments of education.