By Alex White
Executive Opinion Editor
In response to the Common Core State Curriculum Standards California adopted on March 7 of last year, Mira Costa will begin its transition to new standards to teach their students.
The Common Core State Standards define a specific set of guidelines for math and English. Costa will implement the standards by the 2014-15 school year. Department Chair Pam Jenning is leading these changes in the English Department.
“There is a movement to adopt standards with national consistency, so California decided to adopt this new system,” Jenning said.
With the Common Core system also comes new methods for standardized testing that will enable students’ test scores to be compared nationally. California will introduce the new standardized test for 2014-15.
“Our students excelled on the STAR test and will continue to do so with the implementation of the new test,” Jenning said.
The Common Core Standards deal with providing a “clear, specific set of guidelines” that are the same for all students in the nation. According to Costa math teacher Linda Gesualdi, the school’s current curriculum is essentially the same as the new Common Core Standards. However, there are some slight differences.
“The basis of the Core Curriculum changes is that we will be going for more depth and less breadth,” Gesualdi said. “They are also adding more critical thinking to their assessments.”
Manhattan Beach Unified School District teachers will be attending workshops next year that will give them more specific ideas about implementing the new set of standards. These workshops will come over the course of the next year and will attempt to answer some of the seemingly vague issues about the new system.
“We need more workshops about the Core Curriculum in order to get more information because there are too many unanswered questions,” Gesualdi said.
For English, the Common Core Standards deal mainly with reading, writing and speaking, as well as comprehension. In mathematics, standards in terms of topics are nearly identical to the past standards, covering algebra, functions, graphing and statistics.
“Common Core has reduced the number of overall standards, but has given them a different emphasis,” Jenning said. “In English there is a little more emphasis on non-fiction. However, in our department, we already integrate a great deal of non-fiction in our curriculum at the present.”
In any case, most teachers are confident that what they are doing now will very closely resemble what will be happening in classrooms in the future.
“We’ll find ways to incorporate what we are already teaching to satisfy Common Core since our program is already particularly strong,” Jenning said.
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