Understanding Common Core Standards
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What Is It? Common Core is a new international benchmark curriculum being implemented in public schools across the United States, including Modesto. The main purpose of Common Core is to ensure that every student graduating from our educational system has mastered the fundamental standards in English and Math for each grade. The standards are clear and concise to ensure that parents, teachers, and students have a clear understanding of the expectations in reading, writing, speaking and listening, language, and mathematics in school. The curriculum consists of innovative teaching and learning styles that work to equip our students with the skills that they need to succeed. How Does It Work? The Common Core system resembles a giant staircase, spanning from kindergarten to twelfth grade. In the system, each step represents a grade level. As each student passes through a grade in school, the Common Core system ensures that they will have mastered the skills that are set out by the standard for that grade. This system allows students to take responsibility for their own achievement in order to create a generation of curious, skillful, and resourceful young adults. Why Is It Necessary? Students from all across the country and the world are being taught at different paces: their staircases are different sizes and shapes, and yet they are competing for the same post-graduation opportunities. This is creating an immense achievement gap between students who are all competing in the same college and job market. Common Core Standards ensure that every student who graduates out of the program is on equal footing to enter the post-graduation world. The system works to create a unified staircase for every single student to travel up in order to ensure that they achieve the skills necessary to decrease that achievement gap. How Are My Children Assessed? Students will be evaluated with both formative, meaning assessments throughout the year to track progress, and summative, meaning assessments at year's end to measure student achievement compared to peer group norms, assessments. These assessments will take the form of standardized tests, writing assignments, projects, presentations, and more. While each teacher will be able to keep their own sense of integrity in terms of the way that they run their classroom, their assessments and lesson plans will align with the benchmarks set out by Common Core. What Can I Expect For My Children? Students will be encouraged to learn differently, and challenged to take learning to new levels. Teachers will hold more rigorous academic expectations for their students, ensuring that they are guided to success. Our students' analytical skills will be honed and their minds will be stretched. Teachers will work to ensure that students don't just work to keep busy, but that they care; they will point their students in the right direction, and then allow them to come to a conclusion on their own; students will be taught the skills to research, analyze, and problem solve on their own. The classroom will be a place of intrinsic motivation rather than simply instruction. Overall, the Common Core Standards will ready our children to take on the world. |
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