Common Core Standards for Sewanhaka District

A presentation on Common Core Learning Standards in mathematics and English was given at the board of education meeting Tuesday night by district coordinators Robert Pontecorvo (Mathematics) and Frank Geritano (English).

In the summer of 2011, New York State gave educators the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) and during the 2011-2012 year the state recommended teaching one unit based on the common core standards and that state exams will still follow the 2005 curriculum. This school year, the common core courses will begin and will be state tested in grades three through eight.

In mathematics, the Common Core Learning Standards are, “to make sense of problems and preserve in solving them, construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, use appropriate tools strategically and look for and make use of structure,” Pontecorvo said, to name a few.

The six conceptual standards of mathematics are number and quantity, algebra, functions, modeling, geometry and statistics and probability.

“A student taught under the Common Core needs to be able to bounce their understanding from one of these methods to the other, explain the interconnectivity between each and decide which method is better to use under what circumstances, all while being in the seventh-grade,” Pontecorvo said.

In English Language Arts (ELA), the Common Core Learning Standards are, “the culmination of an extended, broad-based effort to help ensure that all students are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school,” Geritano said, where the standards are divided into reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language.

The standards insist that instruction in those five specific areas be a shared responsibility within a school. Most of the required reading in college and workforce training programs is informational in structure and challenging in content.

“The Standards cultivates the development of three mutually reinforcing writing capacities:  writing to persuade, to explain, and to convey real or imagined experience,” Geritano said. “Students who are college and career ready in reading, writing, speaking, listening and language will demonstrate independence, build strong content knowledge, respond to varying demands of audience, task, purpose discipline and be able to comprehend as well as critique.”

In all, teachers and supervisors have been attending Common Core Phase-In and Implementation Staff Development, teachers in ELA and math will be teaching one model lesson each semester under the CCLS guidelines and curriculum writing in ELA and math will begin this school year and in the summer to phase in the CCLS for grades seven and eight.