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Archive for the ‘Standards and curriculum’ Category

Memos: Curriculum for Literacy

Posted in Reading proficiency, Standards and curriculum on February 12, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

A trio of one-page memos from the Lead for Literacy series examines the importance of using curriculum that is rigorous, cohesive, engaging and builds knowledge as well as decoding skills. The series was produced by HGSE’s Language Diversity and Literacy Development Research Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

As the first memo — The Importance of Using a Literacy Curriculum –  notes, “It’s a big job to design cohesive, rigorous literacy instruction, especially instruction that promotes language and knowledge building. Yet many teachers are expected to both design and deliver literacy instruction day‐after‐day, and month after month, throughout the school year.”  It offers a rationale for using a comprehensive literacy curriculum:

  • “A curriculum provides content and pedagogical strategies educators need to help children meet standards.”
  • “A high-quality curriculum is a resource that creates a platform for supporting good teaching.”
  • “A curriculum is a tool for institutionalizing professional knowledge and effective practices across classrooms.”
  • “A curriculum is a tool for building the kind of instructional cohesion children need to accumulate skills and knowledge over time.”

The second memo — Selecting a Comprehensive Literacy Curriculum – recommends selecting a curriculum through a “team‐based process that is informed by … the needs of the setting’s children and adults, and a pilot phase that enables thorough review.” The memo notes the importance of choosing a literacy curriculum with: (more…)

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“Reading to Learn” Embedded in “Learning to Read”

Posted in Reading proficiency, Research, Standards and curriculum on January 8, 2013 | 4 Comments »

Photo:Caroline Silber for Strategies for Children

A shorthand saying holds that until third grade children are learning to read, and after third grade they are reading to learn. Research, however, shows that it’s not that simple. Children’s background knowledge – their understanding of how the world works – is the key ingredient of learning to read with comprehension as well as fluency. And building background knowledge begins in early childhood.

This is what Nonie Lesaux, a literacy expert at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told us in 2010 when we commissioned her to write “Turning the Page: Refocusing Massachusetts for Reading Success.”

And it’s embedded in the Common Core State Standards’ approach to literacy, “in which,” Education Week reports, “fluency and comprehension skills evolve together throughout every grade and subject in a student’s academic life, from the first time a toddler gums a board book to the moment a medical student reads data from a brain scan.” (more…)

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At the December EEC Board Meeting

Posted in Dept. of Early Education and Care, Standards and curriculum on December 18, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

At  last week’s meeting in Worcester, the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care was updated on an ongoing 18-month study of the alignment of five sets of early childhood standards, my colleagues Amy O’Leary and Emily Levine report. The study looks at Massachusetts infant-toddler standards, preschool standards, kindergarten standards, the early childhood portions of state English and math standards that incorporate the Common Core State Standards, and the Head Start Child Development Early Learning Framework. For a sense of the complexity of the issue, consider one “dilemma” the presenters noted – that the national Common Core standards and Head Start framework are not themselves well-aligned. (PowerPoint: Early Childhood Standards Alignment)

Sharon Lynn Kagan and Jeanne L. Reid of Teachers College Columbia University and Catherine Scott-Little of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro are analyzing the alignment of various standards and the alignment of standards with the three assessment tools being used in Massachusetts.  At the board meeting, Kagan and Reid presented an analysis of the content of infant-toddler, preschool and kindergarten standards and an analysis of the alignment of older toddler, preschool and kindergarten standards with Head Start’s preschool standards. They presented findings on balance, coverage and depth, and difficulty. Here is their summary:

  • Massachusetts standards contain “many examples of good alignment across the age levels,” but fewer between the Head Start framework and preschool standards.

(more…)

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Community College Lab School Trains Early Educators

Posted in Assessments, Early educators, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, Standards and curriculum on November 26, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Charlene Mara

WORCESTER – It’s hokey pokey time at the Children’s School in  Quinsigamond Community College’s Child Study Center. Twenty preschoolers stand in a circle and put their right hands in and shake them all about. The adults in the room include three classroom teachers and four college students of early education. The students’ professor is observing through a window in the corridor when Charlene Mara, faculty coordinator of Quinsigamond’s early childhood program, and I stop by to watch.

The Quinsigamond program is a lab school, where students apply what they learn in their college classroom upstairs to the early education classroom downstairs. For one semester, they observe veteran early educators, who serve as mentors and model the best practices that the college students studied. In the second semester, students practice what they learned. At day’s end, the early educators join the students and faculty to discuss how they applied theories of child development and classroom management to their practice. The program, Mara tells me, is one of the few associate degree lab school programs, intertwining the academic with experience-based practice. It is also accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

On the day that I visit, the topic is group time. How did the early educators successfully transition children to circle time? How did they use strategic positioning? How did they introduce a new topic? What were children learning in circle time? How did the early educators guide the children from sitting to standing for hokey pokey? How does the hokey pokey meet the pre-kindergarten curriculum standards that Massachusetts aligned with the Common Core State Standards?

“This is the glue,” Mara says. “When we’re working on something with the students upstairs in the college classroom, that’s what the focus is down here in the Children’s School. (more…)

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Can the Common Core Standards Boost Literacy?

Posted in Cognitive development, K-12, Language development, Reading proficiency, Standards and curriculum, tagged , , , , on October 25, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

The journal Future of Children, a collaboration of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution,  has published an issue – Literacy Challenges for the Twenty-First Century – that’s chock full of thought-provoking articles.  An accompanying policy brief examines the relationship between standards and literacy development. (I’ll write later about some of the individual articles in the journal.)

Massachusetts is among the 45 states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards, which the authors of the policy brief strongly support. “Standards are an important part – but only one part – of solving the literacy problem,” they write. “Even the best possible standards cannot raise student literacy unless they are part of a larger strategy. Excellent standards are a first step.”

The policy brief is written by Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution; Richard Murnane, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Isabel Sawhill, co-director of the Center on Children and Families; and Catherine Snow, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The authors enumerate key elements of a successful strategy to boost children’s literacy. Improving the quality teaching, they write, is “the single most important element in any strategy aiming to boost student literacy and close the literacy gap.”  They suggest redirecting federal funds to create “a competitive grant program that encourages school systems to design and implement programs to improve teaching and learning in high-poverty schools.” They also call for:

  • Adoption by states of assessments now being designed to accompany the Common Core.
  • A common system for reporting results that will provide schools, parents and communities with detailed knowledge about how their students are performing relative to the Common Core and to other communities.
  • A better curriculum that is aligned with the Common Core.

“The more demanding Common Core standards in literacy, based on reading comprehension, conceptual knowledge, and vocabulary as well as accurate and fluent reading, combined with accurate assessments of these skills will reveal how far disadvantaged children lag behind on these more advanced literacy skills,” the authors write. “Rather than wait for the expanded literacy gap to be revealed, U.S. policymakers and educators should begin now to shrink the gap.”

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In Quotes

Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Quotes, Standards and curriculum on March 30, 2012 | 1 Comment »

“We have to be careful that those [Common Core State] standards, particularly as they extend downward, appropriately recognize these important social, communication, and self-regulation skills that are really as critical for kids’ learning in those early and later years as whether they know the alphabet.”

Robert Pianta, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, December 2011

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Aligning Early Education with the Common Core

Posted in Pre-K to 3, Standards and curriculum on February 23, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

Across the country, early educators face questions about how best to align early childhood programs with the academic rigor of the Common Core State Standards adopted by 46 states (including Massachusetts) and the District of Columbia. The answer, experts say, lies in developmentally appropriate practice and understanding what research tells us about how young children learn.

“We have to be careful that those standards, particularly as they extend downward, appropriately recognize these important social, communication, and self-regulation skills that are really as critical for kids’ learning in those early and later years as whether they know the alphabet,” Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, tells Education Week.

For young children, this means play and art and hands-on activities. It means fostering social and emotional development and executive function as well as laying the foundation for literacy, numeracy, science and other academic areas.

“With young children, art and physical movement aren’t a frill,” Gillian D. McNamee, professor of teacher education at Chicago’s Erikson Institute, tells Ed Week. “They are the disciplines that offer resources for the expression and the development of ideas.”

According to a 2007 review of states’ policies published in the journal Early Childhood Research & Practice, all states have preschool guidelines that cover multiple developmental domains. (more…)

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Questions about Common Core and Youngest Learners

Posted in K-12, Pre-K to 3, Standards and curriculum on December 21, 2011 | 4 Comments »

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

Samuel J. Meisels, president of the Chicago-based Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development, has raised some provocative questions about the Common Core State Standards.  By working backward from college and career readiness, he argues, the K-12 standards in English and math give short shrift to early childhood and the developmental needs of the youngest learners, from birth to grade three. And they miss half of early childhood by starting at kindergarten.

Massachusetts is one of 45 states that have adopted the standards. A year ago the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education adopted curriculum frameworks that include the Common Core and aligned standards for pre-kindergarten.

“Early childhood education — concerned with children from birth to the end of third grade — seems nearly an afterthought in the [Common Core] standards,” Meisels writes in the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog. “Not only do they end (or begin) at kindergarten, ignoring more than half of the early childhood age range, they simply don’t fit what we know about young children’s learning and development.”

Standards, Meisels notes, are important. (more…)

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Frameworks Include Pre-K and Common Core Standards

Posted in Assessments, Dept. of Early Education and Care, Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education, Pre-K to 3, Standards and curriculum on December 22, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Photo: Michele McDonald for Strategies for Children

It’s official. Massachusetts has new curriculum frameworks that include pre-kindergarten and incorporate the Common Core State Standards approved in July. The final step came yesterday, when the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education approved the pre-k standards as part of broader frameworks in English language arts and mathematics.  Last week, the Board of Early Education and Care (EEC) approved the aligned pre-kindergarten standards. (more…)

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MA to Consider Pre-K in Common Core Standards

Posted in Standards and curriculum on July 21, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Today the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE) recognized early education in its approval of the Common Core Standards. The motion the board unanimously approved directs Commissioner Mitchell Chester to “reconvene the Curriculum Framework Review Panels for English Language Arts and Mathematics and the panels that he convened to review the Common Core Standards, and direct them to consider specific standards and other features to strengthen and augment the Common Core Standards.” States are permitted modest leeway to customize the common standards. Among the items listed in both English and math in the motion the ESE board approved was this: “pre-k standards such as those contained in the working draft of the revised Massachusetts standards.” The panels will meet over the summer, and the board will consider the customized standards in the fall, according to an ESE news release. We will keep you posted about further developments.

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