TL;DR

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.

Good Distractions

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.

Adjusted Expectation

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.

First Fruits

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.

Next Steps

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.