By MARK SARDELLA
WAKEFIELD — Educators and administrators from the Wakefield School Department and the Boston school system last night presented a forum called “Teaching and Learning with Common Core.” Held in The Savings Bank Theatre at Wakefield Memorial High School, the speakers attempted to help parents and community members to better understand the Common Core Standards and offered an inside look at instructional strategies that teachers are now using with students in the classroom.
School Superintendent Dr. Stephen Zrike said that the Wakefield School System has done a lot of work to prepare for the now three-year-old standards. He said that the purpose of last night’s forum was not to sell the standards but was part of the schools’ attempt to help parents learn to better support their children by helping parents to understand the shifts currently happening in public schools.
Zrike called the move to the Common Core Standards “one of the most significant shifts in the last 20 years” in public schools.
Wendy Phillips, Grade 5-12 Math Curriculum Coordinator for the Wakefield public schools, presented an overview of Common Core math standards. She said that the committee that came up with the Common Core Standards included public school and college educators, parents and people from the business world.
Phillips showed several videos that she said exemplified the new practice standards in which students are seen using concrete objects or pictures to help them organize or solve problems
Kristin Liberti, a grade 4 teacher at the Walton School, discussed how math is being taught differently under Common Core’s “enVisionMATH.”
Liberti began by discussing math curriculum before Common Core, which she called a “spiral curriculum,” in which learning is spread over time rather than being concentrated in shorter periods. Teachers would frontload students with all of the information that they would need to solve a given problem, Phillips explained, and offer explicit instruction on how to solve several problems. Once the teacher felt that students grasped the concept, students would complete independent or group work before all students were assigned the same homework.
With Common Core’s enVisionMATH, Liberti said, teachers pose a challenging problem that students are asked to solve on their own or in small groups. After students share their strategies, the teacher facilitates a classroom discussion about the mathematics of the activity.
Liberti said that visual learning (incorporating videos), guided practice, independent practice and problem solving presented as word problems were all part of envision in the classroom. A “Quick Check” at the end of each lesson allows teachers to asses which students understood the concept and which student need more help.
Erin Roy, an eighth grade math teacher at the Galvin Middle School, took the audience through what an actual eighth grade math lesson might look like using the enVisionMATH system. She presented several problems depicted visually and gave audience members a chance to solve them as a student might.
Roy said that she liked this conceptual approach rather than traditional algebra, which relied heavily on memorization. She said that with the traditional method, if an unexpected variable were introduced, students often had no idea what to do.
Liz McDonald provided an overview of the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts curriculum. She has worked in Boston public schools for 20 years, first as a classroom teacher and currently as a literacy coach. She has also taught at Boston College for the last 12 years. McDonald consulted with Wakefield Public Schools as they made the transition to the Common Core Standards.
McDonald talked about three major shifts from the previous standards to the current standards. These include a greater reliance on non-fiction texts, using complex texts in the classroom and asking students to speak and write about the text using evidence that is grounded in the text.
For English language Arts, McDonald said that the Common Core State Standards are broken into four main content categories: Reading, writing, speaking and listening and language.
McDonald asked Kristen Liberti to discuss how this is applied in the classroom. She explained the concept of “close reading”: as “careful and purposeful reading and rereading of a text to uncover layers of meaning that lead to deeper comprehension.”
In close reading, she said, teachers want students to begin to figure out the meaning of new words on their own through the context of the text and to think critically on their own. Liberti discussed several examples of texts that have been used in classroom and how the concept of close reading is applied.
McDonald returned to explain that standards are guides for teachers to plan curriculum and to know what to expect from students. She discussed the PARCC Assessments, which she said will be broken down into Performance Based Assessment and end-of-the-year assessment. She talked about what will be expected of students at these assessments.
At the end of the presentation attendees broke into smaller groups to ask questions and discuss specific aspects of the Common Core Standards.
