Common Core

Common Core trustee Carol Jago  is on a roll.  Not only did she recently write (in the Washington Post) the smartest thing we’ve read about the literary vs. informational text “debate,” but now she’s published a New York Times piece that provides any educator with an excellent lesson in how to write the sort of  “text-dependent questions” that are at the heart of Common Core State Standards implementation.

Carol is first and foremost a teacher, as well as past president of the National Council of Teachers of English and current chair of the College Board’s English Academic Advisory committee.  In her NYT piece she took Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem, “One Today,” as her anchor text, providing educators with helpful background information on the history of the Inaugural poem, as well as on the genre of the “occasional poem.”  But her most valuable guidance is the marquee illustration she provided of how to write a series of text-dependent questions (TDQs) that encourage students to mine a text at a level of rigor that meets the expectations of the new Common Core State Standards.

The value of Carol’s piece extends far beyond its utility as a single lesson plan.  The ELA field is hungry for examples of how to create great TDQs, and Carol’s work here should be studied widely.  Well-written TDQs are a first step toward driving students’ understanding of essential details in a text and in honing their ability to make logical inferences.  These questions can help to ensure that students read a text closely and understand (especially in the case of a poem) how form contributes to meaning.  TDQs are the spine of Common Core’s forthcoming “Curriculum Maps in United States and World History,” and of the next generation of our ELA maps.

Lynne Munson

Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, and Yong Zhao, associate dean for global education at the University of Oregon’s College of Education, agree that labor markets continue to go global and that it is unclear what new jobs could emerge for today’s students, raising the question of how best to educate students today. In a Washington Post blog, however, Tucker challenges Zhao’s claim that “standards mean standardization…[which] lead to an inability to produce creative solutions.”

Tucker, instead, argues that “without broad agreement on a well-designed and internationally benchmarked system of standards, we have no hope of producing a nation of students who have the kind of skills, knowledge and creative capacities the nation so desperately needs.” And, he’s right. Standards are just that –just standards. Any set of standards–no matter their quality–can fail to improve instruction if they are not taught through high quality content. Curriculum, then, seals the marriage between great standards and great content.

Helping grow creative thinking young people is the job of a rich curriculum tied to standards that benchmark learning. The quality of texts selected, both literary and informational, the examination and analysis of works of art, the challenge and appropriateness of student assignments all blend together to produce rigorous learning with stimulating materials so students can gain knowledge while thinking about big ideas and universal themes. That is where creativity, innovation – “play” as Tucker and Zhao agree – will come from.

Providing such a solid school experience ensures that whatever jobs surface during the rest of this century, students will be prepared to apply the knowledge they absorbed and the thinking they developed in school to succeed in the global workplace.

Barbara Pape