CCSSM Grade 7 Concepts and Skills List
Earlier this year I described my schedule, assumptions, goals, and game plan as they all relate to my school’s transition to CCSSM. Here’s an update on that process.
I haven’t spent as much time on this task as I originally intended in the first twelve weeks of school. I originally thought about 95% of my prep time would be devoted to the CCSSM transition project. Instead, about 60% of that time has been dedicated to helping teachers integrate technology into their classrooms in meaningful ways.
The emphasis has been on students using technology to create and collaborate, rather than students watching teachers use technology, or students using technology simply to receive/consume content.
It’s been an enjoyable experience, one in which I’ve learned a lot as we make mid-stream adjustments to our in-house technology training plan. We recently put together a “Technology Leadership Team” with teachers from various grade levels and disciplines throughout our K-12 school. With this team in place, I have an opportunity to shift a bit more of my attention back to the CCSSM transition.
My original goal was to transition our entire 7-12 math program to Common Core next year. After some wise words from the other member of the math department, and an okay from our superintendent, we’ve decided to transition middle school in 2014-2015 and high school in 2015-2016.
It’s only a tiny piece of the whole puzzle, but this week I finished writing a CCSSM Grade 7 Concepts and Skills List.
If you open up the document, you’ll find a number of comments I’ve written in the margin describing my rationale for certain things, my uncertainty about others, and my game plan for (in many cases) weaving content throughout the course (rather than forcing a set of topics—e.g., geometry—to stay confined to a particular time period).
I hope you’ll add your own comments and questions. Let me know if you want a duplicate copy of the document so you can put your own spin on sequence, emphasis, etc.
In the next couple of weeks I plan to do the same thing for our CCSSM Grade 8 course. At that point I’ll turn my attention to writing brief, SBG-style assessments for each topic on the lists.
Further down the to-do list: Performance assessments for the big ideas in each course (we’ll probably start with one per quarter) and rich anchor tasks/lessons for each unit.
Much further down the to-do list: Individual lessons/activities/tasks/practice to fill out each unit.
And beyond that… The same process for our high school courses.
]]>Whether the second of these two reasons will actually play out, I don’t know. But the value I’ll derive from the first (reflecting and planning publicly) is reason enough to proceed, so here goes.
Our school has seven academic periods during the normal 8 am to 3 pm day. A full teaching load is six classes, plus one period to prepare. In recent years I’ve elected to work during my prep for a slight pay increase (diapers are expensive!).
This year my schedule is filled with five classes and two periods we’re calling “Program Development.” During these two periods (2nd and 7th) my task is to redesign our 7-12 mathematics program to align with the CCSSM content and practice standards. That’s a lot of planning time each day, but it’s a fairly monumental task, especially considering that we’re transitioning to an integrated course sequence for grades 9-12.
This could get out of hand (lengthwise) rather quickly, so I’ll jump right in with the bullets to share some of my assumptions:
I’m calling these assumptions because that’s what they are, at least in part. It might be better to call them semi-researched opinions/positions. In any case, I hope some of you will push back and play devil’s advocate, especially on the second point above. If you think it would make more sense (in my small school environment) to roll out the transition one, two, or three courses/grade levels at a time, please share!
By June 2014 I want our course offerings to include:
Two notes:
While aligning our courses to the CCSSM content standards will be an important task, I consider it even more crucial that we infuse all of our 7-12 courses with the eight Standards for Mathematical Practice. I want our courses to help students grow in their ability to make sense and persevere, reason, argue and critique, model with mathematics, etc. The content itself is important, but it’s the habits of mind that will last.
It’s rather easy for my to become overwhelmed by the magnitude of this whole undertaking. But I also get incredibly excited when I think about chipping away at specific tasks in transforming our program, my courses, my teaching, etc.
With those two ideas in mind, I believe it will be helpful to break down the entire project into a sequence of smaller, more manageable tasks. In theory, this will keep me sane, on track, and encouraged. (We’ll see whether that’s the case.)
I also hope that by planning in this way it will be easier to share resources with others (in both a “give” and “take” sense), and that I’ll have more opportunities to collaborate. For example, if I ask on Twitter, “Who wants to help me develop a CCSSM-aligned course sequence for grades 7-12 with integrated courses for high school,” I’ll probably hear nothing but crickets. However, if instead I ask, “Who wants to help me create a concepts and skills list for, say, an integrated course for Grade 9,” I might have a few more takers.
So with that background, here is my plan of action, laid out more or less in the order I’ll proceed:
Note: I see myself reading more of this blog and these books in the near future.
If you need to tackle any of those smaller projects and you’d like to join forces for a bit (whether we collaborate through Dropbox, Google Drive, Hangouts, or some other tool), I’d love to have some help and/or lend a hand with your transition.
Drop me a line in the comments, or send me a note on Twitter (@mjfenton) if you’re interested.
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