Sunshine State Standards vs the Common Core Standards.

     Standards..... that magical word that is so encompassing of the whole of education in our modern era.  It's certainly a hot topic both where I am studying and where I am speaking to current teachers in the schools.  Everyone I've spoken to on any level has told me about the emphasis on teaching to the standards that has taken hold at every school in the county.  I can only speak for my area, but it's a big deal to the teachers I know.  They tell me their whole job hangs on how well they are able to teach to the standards and how well their class does overall on the standards tests.  As someone who has only been pursuing an education degree for around a year, it's honestly been a lot coming at me very quickly.  Simply through making mock lesson plans and experimenting with implementing standards have I begun to be familiar with all of the expectations.  Not only is it a lot to cover in the classroom, but it's a lot to prepare for daily, and the content is more concentrated than our previous standards used to be.  
     
     At the same point I understand the need to have national standards.  I am an example of how a lack of national standards held me back.  I started school in Connecticut and continued there for my first 4 years of school.  For the 5th grade my family moved to Florida and I was ahead for my age (by Florida standards) in all of my classes but was not advanced forward into the next grade and I was not placed in a gifted program.  As a result of the standards not being closely aligned I feel that I was not properly challenged again until the beginning of the 9th grade.  I feel that I lost years of my academic career because the standards were not aligned to promote me adequately.  

     As I started my own research online on how to adopt common core standards in my future classroom and how to evaluate resources for content I turned to a website called TeacherChannel.org and did a simple search for common core standards to see what was available.  After watching a few videos I came across a video on a program called the Equip Rubric that was developed for use by teachers to gauge how well a lesson or unit aligns with the common core standards.  This rubric can be used by individual teachers to review the content they will use in the classroom or there are lesson plans on a separate website that have been evaluated by a panel of professionals that have been judged exemplary and can be used freely in the classroom.  To see the video please visit Strengthening Lessons for the Common Core on TeacherChannel.org.  It only runs for 6 minutes and it is a good glimpse into what an effective teacher should look for in his or her lesson plans.   

     As I continued to investigate further into the Equip Rubric program I found the website Achieve.org which is affiliated with the Equip Rubric Program.  I was very impressed with their objective statement which was elegantly worded.  Their objective has two main points.  The first is to increase the supply of high quality lessons and units aligned to the CCSS that are available to elementary, middle, and high school teachers as soon as possible.  The second is to build the capacity of educators to evaluate and improve the quality of instructional materials for use in their classrooms and schools.  If you have a lesson plan or unit that you would like to submit for review by the panels, this is the place to do it.  There is a tab for submitting material as well as instructions and guidelines on this site as well.  This site also has training materials and grade level examples of what common core lesson plans should look like.  This website appears to be an excellent resource and is one that I plan on visiting again in the future.  If you would like to visit the website, click on this link to access all features of the program.  Achieve.org.

     To take my own understanding one step deeper I reviewed a lesson that I had attempted myself as a class project for my Classroom Management course.  I had chosen to focus on a second grade standard of teaching point of view in a storyline.  Both the lesson plan that I had used and the lesson plan that the panel had reviewed had both come from CPALMS.org which gave me confidence in the plan I had chosen right from the start.  As I read on I found that many of the elements that I had used, which I had developed while studying at the University of Central Florida, were also components of the exemplary lesson plan.  Use of the scale system as well as use of a graphic organizer and written prompt for a summative assessment were used in both lessons.  Emphasis on illustrations was present in both lessons.  An understanding of thoughts and feelings and how they influence actions were expected of students in both lesson plans.  By giving the lesson a little more time (3 hours total) and by incorporating more standards that the one standard I was going for, the lesson plan became exemplary.  It also had very many accommodations for EL/ESE students.  If you would like to take a look at the exemplary lesson, here is a link to that specific lesson, based on 3rd grade standards.  
3rd grade, point of view lesson plan aligned with standards

     As a bonus link for anyone interested, I found this website informative for those who are still beginning embracing common core standards,  It covers what the previous Florida standards were before our new Common Core set and the differences between the two grade level to grade level.  For a glimpse of the changes head to Excel In Ed