WCSU Non-negotiables vs. Common Core in the current state

A few years back, the WCSU Math Steering Committee spent a significant amount of time and effort articulating student achievement non-negotiable skills for each grade level.  The driving idea is that the Common Core States Standards, although significantly more focused and coherent than past standards, are still too wide. To focus our curricula, we needed to pick skills (informed by CCSS) at each grade level that all students must be able to know, understand and do at the deepest (or highest, depending on your perspective) levels of math knowing.  Monitoring student progress in relation to these skills forms the backbone of our multi-tiered system of support for math.

After we articulated those skills and began to use them to guide our curricula we saw that it wasn't clear what it meant to be able to know, understand and do those skills.  So, we had to define levels of knowing for each non-negotiable.

First, we developed a general rubric (click here) to guide this work.  Then we began applying the rubric to each of our non-negotiables.  It took us an entire day to do this for just the kindergarten non-negotiables.  The process is arduous, but very enriching.  Completing this work for all grade levels k-9 is the Math Steering Committee's top priority right now.

In the later part of the October 13 in-service, we will spend some time orienting teachers with the levels of math knowing.  To serve the purpose of this post, I will just point out our primary goal for math in WCSU at this time is to get all students to the application and communications level of knowing for our WCSU non-negotiables as described in the levels of math knowing.

However, our students come to us with significant gaps.  Even those students who understand the "how" of a concept scratch their heads when asked to explain why or to demonstrate visually.  To teach for depth, we need to address these gaps in our core instruction and in our interventions.

This is a big job, and it will require keen, consistent focus on our non-negotiable skills.

 

When we rolled out the non-negotiables, Jen wrote up an introduction (linked here) explaining what the non-negotiables are, and how we will use them.  In it, she wrote that the non-negotiables should be 60-70% of what we teach, and that teachers will spend the rest of the time filling out their curricula using the CCSS for their respective grade level.  It is important to realize that we are not there yet.  Jen's document describes where we want to be, how we want to use the non-negotiables going forward once we reach equilibrium.

Right now, by and large the remaining 30-40% of our instructional time is spent focusing on pre-requisite gaps that our students need filled before they can access non-negotiables on grade level.  Our practices will evolve as we progress, and eventually we will be able to teach more skills at a deep level.  We will never accomplish this if we "rubber neck" scrambling to cover the Common Core State  Standards without focusing on depth.    For now, we need to focus on the non-negotiable skills.

What is your takeaway?  What questions do you have?  Please comment below...