School may still be out for students, but many principals and teachers are hard at work learning this July and August. The summer is a time many schools are using to focus on adjusting their practice to the new Common Core standards and collaboratively plan.
On a recent July morning, we swung by a session at ACE Charter Schools in East San Jose to see how their team is preparing for the coming school year.
Leaders from across the ACE charter network were gathered in a room, heads down, scribbling away at a math problem.
“Before we get the answer, let’s talk about how you solved it,” said Jesse Robinson, a math curriculum expert who was leading the session. “What are the concepts students will need to solve it? What are the skills?”
Robinson’s training was part of a week-long session in which ACE principals and department heads continued to revise the network’s curriculum to fit with the shifts required by the Common Core standards.
“Common Core demands that students understand the concepts behind the math in addition to the procedures,” says Robinson. “This requires a lot more from teachers. They need to understand the math deeply. And in order for leaders to support teachers, they need to understand the math, too.”
Last year, teachers took their own approaches to course planning, says Jarrett Poston, Assistant Principal at ACE Charter Middle School and one of the trainees. That worked sometimes, but there was no alignment—students were learning different material in different classrooms, causing problems when they moved on to the next grade. ACE is using the summer to train teachers deeply on math. They’ll be using a Common Core-aligned curriculum called Engage NY, which is free online and has become popular with educators across the country.
Poston expects the alignment will lead to improvement in student learning outcomes, and also in teacher satisfaction and retention.
Erica Garcia is a teacher and department head at ACE Empower Academy. She likes that the new standards are challenging school leaders to think about math. She says this time during the summer is essential to ensure that everyone is on the same page. “When the teachers come back, we need to focus on other things, like school culture,” says Garcia. “We need to really understand this so we can teach it to them [the teachers].”
Read our Parent’s Guide to Common Core.