Resources | Standards Matter

In these attached files (below) are the articles of the collection “Standards Matter,” on the rationale and explication and discussion of the Reading and Writing Common Core Standards.

One chapter, Chapter Two, “What Our Students Can Do: One Model,” describes a student project that incorporates strong learning of almost all of the twenty Reading and Writing Common Core Standards.

The last chapter, “A Sea Change,” compares the changes that schools are currently undertaking as the type of changes brought to other professions, such as the transformations initiated by Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Marc Zuckerberg, and the current new discoveries in the area of stem cell research.

Such discoveries change these areas to make people’s professional world different.  “Ducks become rabbits,” states Thomas Kuhn, the creator of the term “paradigm shift.”  This is the type of change happening in schools today.   Kuhn’s outlining of what happens to scientists in the change process to adapt to new understandings in the field is similar to what we see in schools and with school people today.  Some who operate under a new system to address new understandings readily adopt with a change in their thinking and actions.  Some, long schooled and experienced in the older way of how school works, may have trouble adapting to the new belief system and ways of acting in the new paradigm.

Converts come to the new belief system and actions in different ways, states Kuhn.  Eventually a new system becomes accepted as the new way of understanding and working.  The paradigm shift is made to the new system.

Standards Matter Feb 27