Introduction
have relied on these four questions for their work in the past, however, will find that the CCSS require several shifts in thinking and behavior. In the past, teams learned together but often relied on the wisdom of experienced teachers to understand the state standards and their meaning. With the Common Core, everyone is inexperienced in his or her understanding of what these standards mean and in the implications of implementation. Chapter 2 extends this discussion by looking at the issue of change. Despite the fact that many teachers recognize the value of the CCSS and look forward to having a more coherent and aligned set of standards to work with, this transition is a significant change for everyone at the school and district levels. However, this change is manageable when accommodations are made for your team to have time to work and learn together and when they have appropriate support. In this chapter, we provide descriptions of what those accommodations might be. We’ve designed the second part, Getting on the Same Page, to help you familiarize yourself with the CCSS. How can your team most effectively learn what implications the standards will have for your work? We help you explore the ways that your team will answer the first critical question collaborative teams ask themselves: What do we want our students to learn? Chapter 3 begins with the process of understanding how the CCSS are designed and the information that your team needs to develop common understanding—collective clarity—of their meaning and the implications for instruction and assessment. We explain the process that your team can use to identify your essential or power standards and include some specific suggestions for making this process practical. Teams using the four critical questions of a PLC know that the answer to question one is more complex than just saying we want our students to know the standards. These teams identify essential or power standards which reflect the most important content that all students must know. For example, in the Common Core ELA, we know that standard one in every grade level in reading is essential for all students. They must be able to read closely, answer text-dependent questions, and cite the place in the text where they got their answer. In chapter 4, we help teams learn even more specifically about what the CCSS will mean for instruction and assessments through the process of unwrapping the standards into learning targets. We explain this process and make suggestions about how this might be different from what you have done with state standards. Chapter 5 looks at the process of scaling the learning targets. The scaling process will help your team identify what proficiency will look like for each learning target, ensuring that all teachers on the team have the same expectations for their students. Scaling also helps you lay out both the simpler and the more complex content for each target so that you can discuss how to help students who are experiencing difficulty or those who can benefit from additional challenge. The third part, Planning for Learning, provides strategies your team can use to cement the shift from teaching to learning, the concept that PLCs are built on. We’ll explore how your team can most effectively answer the second critical question collaborative teams ask: How will we know if our students are learning? This part begins with chapter 6, which explores ways your team can approach curriculum pacing and mapping with the CCSS to effectively put learning targets together to create coherent units of instruction. Chapter 7 tackles the issue of how assessment practices must change when teams work with the Common Core. The CCSS are rigorous; they require more complex texts, more analysis, and more problem solving than many previous state standards. The assessments to support them will require more than just multiple-choice questions. In this chapter, we provide information and resources about other types of assessment items that can provide the information teams need to make good decisions about what to do next for their students. With the use of performance tasks and constructed-response questions,
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