Hess Matrix Social Studies: Fill & Download for Free

This will not be the first time Doug Garnett and I have deeply disagreed over this particular issue.Now, it might be helpful to give a bit of context to these arguments. Doug’s background is business, not education. He’s never been in front of a classroom as an educational professional.My background, on the other hand, is education. I was a high school language arts teacher for six years. As an educator, I headed up CCSS integration in two different districts. I left education to become a lawyer, originally intending to focus on educational law and policy.Part of the problem with this question is defining exactly what you mean by “Is Common Core successful?” Successful at what?People like Doug assume that it means raising test scores. His entire argument railing against Common Core essentially boils down to an assumption that testing = bad, and CCSS = testing.This assumption comes from a fundamental misunderstanding surrounding how standards work and how they impact pedagogy, curriculum design, and assessment.[1][1][1][1][2][2][2][2]Read the ELA standards (or mathematics standards) for yourself. You will find no requirements that teachers use any specific instructional strategies. They demand no specific lesson plans. You will not find any reference whatsoever to standardized testing, contrary to Doug’s strident assertions.They require very little specific content knowledge. It’s almost all skill goals.To understand if the CCSS are successful, it’s important to look at where these standards came from and why they were designed they way they were.By 2008, business leaders and educational professionals were getting together after it became apparent No Child Left Behind was not working. They looked at why students were unable to compete in the 21st century marketplace.In English Language Arts, the subject I am trained in and taught, students suffered most in being able to read, comprehend, and analyze what we now call informational texts. Kids could read fictional novels just fine, but they could not translate that skill over to a stock report or a scientific manual. Other areas of skill deficiencies were identified in other content disciplines.These educational leaders found that individual state standards, mostly developed in the 1980’s and amended slightly for technology, were woefully outdated and largely contributed to this skill goal. Students in various parts of the country could be learning vastly different things. Students in Maryland were required to learn trigonometry; their neighbors in Virginia were not.Doug is correct in saying this:The organization behind it claims that having a consistent national set of standards are important to US education. They claim they will improve educational outcome and will help students who move between schools.Students moving between states could find themselves at an incredible academic disadvantage. Business leaders don’t like this because it both makes students less prepared for the marketplace and because it discourages cross-state migration for jobs, limiting opportunity to recruit talented workers. Teachers don’t like it because suddenly we have students in our rooms at vastly different skill and content levels.By 2008, researchers Jason Zimba and David Coleman had come up with a plan: "The standards must be made significantly fewer in number, significantly clearer in their meaning and relevance for college and work, and significantly higher in terms of the expectations for mastery of what is covered."This fewer, clearer, higher motto became the basis for developing a new set of skill and content model standards for states to consider.The Common Core Initiative expected maybe 10–12 states to sign on initially. They were utterly astounded when more than half the states signed on immediately. The Obama administration took note of these new standards and their impressive clarity and sense. They offered extra money to the states in the Race to the Top initiative to adopt new standards, but did not specify CCSS as required. By 2010, 45 states had directly adopted the new standards, and three more adopted a slightly modified version of them.How were the Standards implemented?Every individual district implemented the standards themselves. States provided assistance and training,When I headed up CCSS implementation and cross-disciplinary literacy efforts, we identified three key goals:Give real-world tasks to students that will provide them with useful skills when they leave our classrooms.Guide students into making cross-disciplinary connections with these real-world skills (e.g. how language arts is used in science, how science is used in math, how math is used in language arts, etc.)Help students develop awareness of how to consciously choose different strategies to solve a problem.We focused on a number of educational strategy innovations, such as explicit learning, where students are actively focused on specifically what they are supposed to be learning, how they are supposed to be learning it, and then benchmarking themselves as to whether or not they are learning it.I structured my lessons and assessments around Karin Hess’ Matrix of Cognitive Rigor.[3][3][3][3] Rather than just lessons that were short-term and lacking strategic thinking, I developed lessons that required adaptive creativity, long-term exploration, assumption of real-world roles, and personal connection to texts.We developed cross-disciplinary curriculum that incorporated science, mathematics, language arts, civics and social studies, and other core disciplines together, as joint instructors. Students approached large-scale problems applying different problem solving strategies from across these different disciplines. Students shared knowledge, taught each other what they learned from different explorations of different avenues, and found talents they didn’t know they previously had.Now, not every district did this, but many did. We did this because of the cross-disciplinary, real-world focus of the new standards.Now, are these standards working?Well, that heavily depends on who you talk to.Almost all of the horror stories I have heard have been because a teacher implemented a terrible instructional strategy, or because parents simply didn’t understand what their kid was doing as it’s not how they were taught.There are certainly places where implementation has not gone well. Old-school teachers have tried to keep old-school instructional strategies or old-school assessments, and do not teach new skills, rather trying to simply shoehorn their old lesson plans into the new curriculum.I personally saw tremendous growth out of my students. They were succeeding in learning and mastering the standards. They could and did demonstrate with ready evidence how they were doing so. They certainly took that knowledge into real world situations. I have heard from some of my first students, who are graduating from college and getting their first jobs. (I had a running joke that they owed me 10% of any jobs they got because of what they learned from me; so far 3 students have paid up with 10% of their first paychecks.) I would definitely tell you those standards are succeeding for them.There are plenty of people who agree that the standards are working where implemented well.[4][4][4][4] [5][5][5][5] [6][6][6][6]They absolutely are meeting the goal of making education more accessible for students.[7][7][7][7] But the resistance is much more ideological than pedagogical.[8][8][8][8]Thanks for the A2A.Footnotes[1] Inside the mammoth backlash to Common Core[1] Inside the mammoth backlash to Common Core[1] Inside the mammoth backlash to Common Core[1] Inside the mammoth backlash to Common Core[2] The Dad Who Wrote a Check Using “Common Core” Math Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About[2] The Dad Who Wrote a Check Using “Common Core” Math Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About[2] The Dad Who Wrote a Check Using “Common Core” Math Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About[2] The Dad Who Wrote a Check Using “Common Core” Math Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About[3] karin-hess[3] karin-hess[3] karin-hess[3] karin-hess[4] Survey: Common Core standards working well[4] Survey: Common Core standards working well[4] Survey: Common Core standards working well[4] Survey: Common Core standards working well[5] Myths vs. Facts | Common Core State Standards Initiative[5] Myths vs. Facts | Common Core State Standards Initiative[5] Myths vs. Facts | Common Core State Standards Initiative[5] Myths vs. Facts | Common Core State Standards Initiative[6] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/12/04/common-core-tests-are-working?src=usn_tw[6] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/12/04/common-core-tests-are-working?src=usn_tw[6] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/12/04/common-core-tests-are-working?src=usn_tw[6] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/12/04/common-core-tests-are-working?src=usn_tw[7] You’re wrong about Common Core math: Sorry, parents, but it makes more sense than you think[7] You’re wrong about Common Core math: Sorry, parents, but it makes more sense than you think[7] You’re wrong about Common Core math: Sorry, parents, but it makes more sense than you think[7] You’re wrong about Common Core math: Sorry, parents, but it makes more sense than you think[8] The Science Of The Common Core: Experts Weigh In On Its Developmental Appropriateness[8] The Science Of The Common Core: Experts Weigh In On Its Developmental Appropriateness[8] The Science Of The Common Core: Experts Weigh In On Its Developmental Appropriateness[8] The Science Of The Common Core: Experts Weigh In On Its Developmental Appropriateness