McTighe and Wiggins on Implementing the Common Core Standards

From the Marshall Memo #453

In this privately circulated paper, backwards-design gurus Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins draw on their recent work with school districts to suggest five big ideas about how the Common Core State Standards translate to classroom practice. “We highlight potential misconceptions in working with the standards,” they say, “and offer recommendations for designing a coherent curriculum and assessment system for realizing their promise.” 

• Big Idea #1: The Common Core Standards need to be read carefully. “We already do all of this,” is a frequent reaction to the new standards. In fact, say McTighe and Wiggins, they contain significant departures from existing curriculum with the ultimate aim of preparing all students for college and career success. “Merely trying to retrofit the Standards to typical teaching and testing practices will undermine the effort,” they say. School leaders shouldn’t just hand grade-level expectations to each teacher; they need to convene staff and carefully read the “front matter” with an essential question in mind: What are the new distinctions in these Standards and what do they mean for our practice? 

For example, the ELA standards call for a better balance between informational and literary texts and stress the use of text-based evidence to support argumentation in writing and speaking. The math standards focus on a smaller set of conceptually larger ideas that spiral across the grades, versus “covering” numerous skills absent the big picture. “Failure to understand the Standards and adjust practices accordingly will likely result in the ‘same old, same old’ teaching with only superficial connections to the grade-level Standards,” say McTighe and Wiggins. 

• Big Idea #2: Standards are not curriculum. In other words, the Common Core State Standards are the what, not the how to; they specify outcomes in ELA and math without dictating teaching methods. It’s up to educators to design engaging, effective teaching methods and materials to get their students to the standards.

• Big Idea #3: Standards need to be “unpacked” to create a macro curriculum blueprint. McTighe and Wiggins suggest that states or districts break the standards into four broad categories (Massachusetts and Pennsylvania have already begun this process): 

(a) Long-term transfer goals – What we want students to be able to do when they confront new and sometimes complex problems inside and outside of school; 

(b) Overarching understandings – Important themes that students will encounter across the grades under a variety of topics – for example, in ELA: Writers don’t always say things directly or literally; sometimes they convey their ideas indirectly in metaphor, satire, or irony. In math, mathematicians create models to interpret and predict the behavior of real-world phenomena, and these models have limits and sometimes distort or misrepresent reality.

(c) Overarching essential questions – for example, in ELA: What is this text really about? What’s the theme, the main idea, the moral? How do you “read between the lines”?

(d) A set of recurring cornerstone tasks – These should be embedded in the curriculum and get students to apply their knowledge and skills in authentic and relevant contexts, using creativity, technology, and teamwork. “Like the game in athletics or the play in theater, teachers teach toward these tasks without apology,” say McTighe and Wiggins. 

• Big Idea #4: A coherent curriculum is mapped backwards from desired performances.
“The key to avoiding an overly discrete and fragmented curriculum is to design backward from complex performances that require content,” say McTighe and Wiggins. “Thus, the first question for curriculum writers is not: What will we teach and when should we teach it? Rather, the initial question for curriculum development must be goal focused: Having learned key content, what will students be able to do with it?... One could simply parcel out lists of discrete grade-level standards and topics along a calendar while completely ignoring the long-term goal of transfer… Such traditional scope-and-sequencing of curriculum reinforces a ‘coverage’ mentality and reveals a misconception: i.e., that teaching bits of content in a logical and specified order will somehow add up to the desired achievements called for in the Standards… To design a school curriculum backwards from the goal of autonomous transfer requires a deliberate and transparent plan for helping the student rely less and less on teacher hand-holding and scaffolds… Accordingly, we should see an increase, by design, in problem- and project-based learning, small-group inquiries, Socratic Seminars, and independent studies as learners progress through the curriculum across the grades.” McTighe and Wiggins also emphasize that the Common Core Standards don’t have to be taught in the sequence in which they are written. 

• Big Idea #5: The standards come to life through assessments. At their core, the new standards are a set of criteria for building and testing local assessments, say the authors. Appendix B and C in the ELA standards spell out the degree of text difficulty students must be able to handle, what criteria their writing must meet, and the kinds of performance tasks that will serve as evidence of mastery. Similarly, the mathematics standards set a clear goal – being able to solve real-world problems. The standards shouldn’t be tested one by one; rather, rich, complex performance tasks can assess a number of standards. These are the kinds of assessments currently being designed by the PARCC and Smarter Balanced consortia.

“From Common Core Standards to Curriculum: Five Big Ideas” by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins (September 2012)