Common Core, simply another set of standards

There is nothing new about standards in education, first-grade teacher Karen Hamrick said. Common Core is simply another set of standards, and standards are a guide to what teachers should be teaching. Hamrick teaches in the Bentonville School District.

Arkansas adopted Common Core in 2010 and started implementing it in 2011, according to the Department of Education website, www.arkansased.org/. By the 2013-14 school year, the standards were in place in all grades.

"The Common Core State Standards define the knowledge and skills students should have to ensure readiness for college and careers. These standards were developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators and other experts to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our students for college and the workforce," the website explains.

There's a difference between standards and curriculum, second-grade teacher Diane Snieski pointed out, and sometimes parents don't understand that. The standards don't tell a teacher how to teach, just what to teach.

Unlike the Arkansas state standards it replaced, Common Core has been adopted by most states throughout the nation, making it easier on children who move during their school career.

Not all parents are happy about the change, third-grade teacher Rob Brew confirmed.

"They don't understand the work their children are bringing home," he explained. "The way their child is being taught is different from the way they were taught."

Common Core standards do make a difference in what is taught and most of the differences are in the math, Brew said, but that doesn't mean that his students have stopped learning to add, subtract, multiply and divide. All of the basics are part of Common Core, although some may come later in a student's career, others are earlier.

The math standards try to ensure that students know how math operations work, Brew added. But every student is still expected to know the basics. For example, Common Core states every third-grader should be fluent in multiplication by the end of the school year. It takes a combination of memorization and understanding to achieve that goal, he said. So there will always be repetition in math class.

"There are lots of strategies that can be used to find the answer of a math problem," Brew said.

For example, four times 87 is the same as four plus four 87 times.

"Sometimes we're more interested in the process than the answer," Brew said.

Once the problem has been solved, the next step is to work on efficiency; to find the easiest way to solve the problem. Adding four plus 4 over and over, isn't very efficient. Since Common Core also encourages students to work in groups, students end up teaching each other the best strategy.

In Snieski's second-grade class, she often calls on students to solve the problem on the white board in the front of the class and explain the process they used. Midway through the school year, she knows what method each of her students are likely to adopt, so she usually has two or three different methods demonstrated.

Usually, her math problems begin as word problems: a person saw some deer on the right side of the road but didn't know how many. On the left side, he saw 81 deer and he knew there was a total of 105. How many deer were on the right.

The problem could be set up as 105 minus 81 = ? or it could be set up as X plus 81 = 105. Her students understand how X works in an equation, she said.

They may use a number chart and start at 81 and go up by tens: (81), 91, 101; and then ones (101), 102, 103, 104, 105 and then add the 10s (20) and the ones (4) for an answer of 24.

Or they may know to subtract 81 from 105. As long as they can explain why it works, any technique is acceptable, she said. Later they also will move on to a more efficient system. She believes her students are learning flexible thinking and that will help them succeed as they progress to high school and college.

"We want kids to understand why they are doing what they are doing," Brew said, "that makes a smoother transition with concepts building on each other."

But when a student tells a parent they solve a two digit addition problem by looking at the "tens" first, parents get confused. By the time the students reach third grade, Brew sometimes has to ask parents to not help with homework.

Snieski just tells them to let her know if they don't understand, then she invites them into her classroom to watch a math lesson.

Parents tend to be more concerned about math homework, Hamrick and Brew agreed, but Common Core also affected reading teachers.

"There are fewer standards, so we can go more in depth," Hamrick said.

During literacy periods, students are more likely to be reading nonfiction under Common Core, Hamrick said. Nonfiction is often more difficult for students, especially if there are graphs and subheadings. But it's an essential skill for students in order to be successful in the upper grades.

"It can be visually confusing," she said, about nonfiction texts.

She teaches her students to read nonfiction differently from fiction. They can look for the specific information they want, rather than reading everything. She's teaching very young students strategies that adults use all the time without thinking.

Snieski assigned a report to her second-graders to research and then write, but she let them choose their own topics and use a class set of iPads for the research.

"They were the best nonfiction reports I ever had," she said. Students chose topics that ranged from how to make a bracelet out of elastics to Yeti, the snow monster.

Because speaking is also an important standard under Common Core, each student presented their report to the class.

Common Core encourages more speaking and more discussion, Hamrick said.

There are also different types of writing that even first-graders can begin to learn. She just finished teaching a unit on persuasive writing. First-graders, she said, can be very persuasive.

Some people object to Common Core because of the standardized testing, but Snieski said that's not a new thing either. Standardized tests started long before Common Core.

The teachers at Cooper are more interested in students' success than in the politics of the standards.