Core Curriculum

I am the middle school science representative for our district's curriculum team and I was first introduced to these new core standards this past spring. I did not really learn many details about them specifically and with the end of the school year winding down I did not spend the time to research them further on my own. This week's reading, however, have given me an opportunity to look into them further.

Schools today have a lot of pressure on them for their students scoring high on standardized tests. We follow our state standard's as much as possible and try to teach as much content as we can each school year. When students take our state tests, we bite our nails and are nervous about how they do. When the scores finally come back, we finally breathe and give a sigh of relief that we made AYP. However, what about those students who did not do so well? Were they not taught the content or did they simply not understand some questions?

In our state, we have the ability to pull up individual student's scores and questions. If Jane missed question 10 and 90% of the other students got it correct, we need to know why she missed it. By reading the question and her response we can figure out if she guessed or basically did not understand the question. Our tests assume that all students have the skills to read and understand what each question is asking. However, that is not the case. For example, I took a quiz today in a workshop that was part of a behavior conference I am attending this week. There were only 5 questions, but I only fully understood 2 of the questions. I simply did not understand the wording and some vocabulary. This really got me thinking about how we need to be teaching students how to effectively read. Yes, it will take more work on our part as teachers to implement reading skills into our lessons, but we need to remember our teaching goals. My primary goal is to teach students how to think and problem solve. Looking over the 10 science standards from the core curriculum site for each level, all have something to do with my goal.

One trouble point in implementing these literacy standards is resources. I currently do not teach out of a text. I do some reading strategies with my 7th and 8th graders, but I know I need to do A LOT more. My colleague and I have gone through the process of getting new books for our 7th graders but have not heard back whether they can be ordered or not. Other schools may be in the same situation; they know how expensive and time consuming it is to photocopy particular readings.