Late last month educators from across northwestern Maryland arrived at Mountain Ridge High School in Frostburg, MD. on a mission: to figure out how to apply the common core standards to their classroom and to their schools. This gathering is the first of many “educator effectiveness academies” for teachers and principals, which officials say will be the largest teacher professional-development program ever held in the state. Every public school from this region, 1,450 total, have been asked to send a team of educators to one of the three day workshops that will continue over the next two summers. The state is expecting to spend $12.5 million of its Race to the Top award on the academies over three years. To conclude the professional development plan, Maryland officials say they will provide follow-up support by having schools complete “transition” plans to describe how they will make their colleagues comfortable with the standards.
Educators attending the academy voiced both their support and concern of the new standards. Matthew Marsh, an English teacher, predicts that the standards could result in students’ arriving in his class with a better set of skills acquired in earlier grades, but worries that the standards will de-emphasize a rich study of literature. Another teacher asked during a question-and-answer session, “How Maryland could be developing a system for evaluating teachers using test scores, when the state is still trying to explain its standards to teachers, and hasn’t developed the exams that will be based on those standards” The state officials response was, “I wish I had an answer for that.”
What is Baltimore City doing to prepare for the use of the Common Core Standards? As part of the early childhood cohort, we were able to catch a glimpse of what the Department of Early Learning had began writing for the district at last summers New Teacher Institute, but haven’t heard anything since. Should Baltimore introduce the curriculum by sending teams to workshops as Northern Maryland has done? And also what are you thoughts on using the core standards?
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/07/13/36maryland_ep.h30.html?tkn=SZYFpeW3f7%2B4kwTkDPDHUY%2BIvXiqKp7lalQX&cmp=clp-edweek
2 comments:
Dom,
It seems that Baltimore schools will eventually get their chance to send three teachers and a principal from each school to one of these Common Core Academies over the next three years. After all, this great initiative is using part of Maryland's Race to the Top award, which of course Baltimore schools are entitled to. I do think that getting a jump-start on further educating teachers who are implementing the standards is a great idea. This will only improve competency in the classroom, which will improve student achievement. I also feel that funds allocated for professional development is wisely spent. Providing teachers with tools and skills will only improve our effectiveness. The degree to how meaningful the sessions are is also important. As we know, it may be hit or miss on whether some PD sessions actually improved your teaching.
After working this past week on incorporating standards from the MD VSC and Common Core Curriculum into my first ELA unit for the coming year, I found most standards in the VSC were incorporated already into the broader standards of the Common Core Curriculum. The process of evaluating the two standards together heightened my understanding of the VSC. While this is a tedious process, I wonder if something could be said for keeping both sets or using the VSC as a supplementary guide to the Common Core. I do believe that Baltimore City will be sending representatives (like Marco suggests) to PD days. However, I found the most interesting aspect of the article to be a comment that suggested that Maryland was still trying to sort through their state standards. Are states prepared to tackle the Common Core Curriculum? Can we begin to the process the CCC if we have not yet gotten our own standards down? As a state or city, have we really taught our teachers how to use the VSC and how to best align lessons with our standards?
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