Lecturing to students and requiring them to spit back information has fueled a passive learning environment. Under the Common Core, students take a more active role in their own learning.
I am a public school teacher, but I am also a mother, and it is reassuring to know my kindergartener walked into a classroom driven by the Common Core. The Common Core’s emphasis on critical thinking will not just benefit my children, but all children.
Some of the criticism of the Common Core has included references to Big Brother and to a “grand plan” by the federal government to indoctrinate our children. This criticism fails to recognize that the new standards promote and encourage an essential means to preserving our democracy: critical thinking.
The Center on International Education Benchmarking documents that the highest-performing global education systems are set apart, in part, because of their national standards. Communities still have the freedom to determine how to shape the local district-level curriculum (e.g., the textbooks they choose and the novels they read).
The Common Core was conceived to make sure that all children, no matter what state they live in, learn the same important skills that will ensure they can compete for 21st century jobs.
When Ohio’s math and reading standards are compared to other states, most experts say Ohio falls in the middle. We’re not especially demanding; we’re not especially lax. Massachusetts, on the other hand, is credited with having high standards.
Don’t we — as parents, as a state and as a country — want every child aiming high? I don’t want to be forced to move to Massachusetts to make that happen for my children. The federal government’s “grand plan” in this regard is simply to maintain the same high level of expectations for every child, no matter where he or she attends school.
With the Common Core, my work is to engage students, ensuring that every child is thinking, participating, inquiring, working with others, extrapolating and discovering.
Formerly, when teaching “1984,” I could have gotten away with simply directly teaching and testing students about the book’s plot, characters and allegorical message.
In contrast, under the Common Core, my students aren't expected to simply comprehend the threat "Big Brother" represents to freedom. They have to connect this piece of literature to the decisions we're confronting today about, say, the National Security Administration's surveillance programs. They also have to analyze Orwell's purpose and the historical context within which it was written.
Under the Common Core, it’s not enough to know the characters and to be able to regurgitate literary terms and their meaning; students have to analyze and make inferences.
The new standards call for higher levels of student engagement. Lecturing to students and requiring them to spit back information has fueled a passive learning environment. Under the Common Core, students take a more active role in their own learning.
Teachers have been struggling to facilitate critical thinking opportunities for their students. For kids to do well on state-mandated tests, we, as teachers, spent a lot of class time checking off boxes and looking for right answers. We often had to march from one topic to the other, hoping that everyone learned a little about a lot.
The quantity-over-quality problem was a direct result of the rigid nature of the former Ohio state content standards and standardized tests. Under the previous standards, I felt limited in many regards. The new standards are broad enough to allow for creative license, but explicit enough to prevent diverse interpretation.
Of course, enforcing any rigid framework about curriculum inherently has the potential to limit teachers' creative capacity. By contrast, without a framework, there would be a tremendous amount of inconsistency and unpredictability in our education system. The Common Core presents a sound compromise between these two extremes.
Our world is exploding with new knowledge. As teachers, we can’t upload all that’s important into our students’ heads. Rather, our job is to make sure that young people can understand knowledge, analyze, apply and communicate it.
Many teachers have already been facilitating critical thinking in the classroom. But too often that has just happened in advanced classes. The Common Core expects more from all students – because if we engage them and expect more, they all will do more.
If nothing else, the new standards have provoked positive, constructive conversations about teaching. We are finally asking the right question: How do we develop critical thinkers?
The “Common Core” won’t solve all of our problems in education.
But because of it, our children will be better thinkers and our classrooms will be more demanding places for every child.
Elizabeth Cameron is a teacher at Centerville High School.
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