At this writing, 44 states and thousands of districts are crafting summer and fall plans to support system-wide transition to the Common Core Standards. A high priority in every plan is to ensure principals are prepared to successfully lead their schools through this transition, and to ensure principals are equipped to support teachers, students and parents through the matrix of changes that implementation of the new standards will bring.
Strong principal leadership of this initiative will be essential for achieving the desired result of the Common Core standards: College and career readiness for every child. Though states and districts may plan and facilitate the process, the real work of ensuring each and every child meets or exceeds the rigorous learning targets defined by the Common Core will be achieved at the school and at the classroom level, one teacher and one student at a time.
There are varying perspectives and models for dividing up the work of the impending Common Core transition. Once States and Districts have defined responsibility for Common Core tasks and have assigned those that will be addressed at each administrative level, principals should expect clear direction about the scope of the work they will personally drive. A targeted plan for developing school leadership capacity may be enhanced by initially asking “What do principals need to know and believe in order to vigorously lead the way in Common Core transition and implementation in the year to come?”
Within every implementation model, there are some key competencies and resources that building leaders will need to gain if they are to successfully lead their school communities into the new age of the Common Core:
- A clear understanding of the rationale behind the decision to adopt the Common Core. Great school leaders care deeply about the educational outcome of every one of their students. Believing there will be immediate and life-long benefits for students will inspire enthusiasm for leading this, sometimes difficult, work.
- Strategies and resources for developing teacher awareness about and teacher capacity for creating and deploying standards-based lesson plans.
- Deep understanding of the processes of unpacking the standards including facilitation of teacher collaboration around curriculum mapping, creating thematic units, constructing pacing guides, aligning lesson plans, and designing formative assessments.
- Systems for evaluating evidences of effective standards-based education, for incorporating a standards-based lens during classroom walk-throughs, teacher observations, and formal staff evaluations.
Perhaps most important, yet most straightforward to accomplish:
- Principals need to get to know the standards. A critical principal role in implementing the standards change process is to facilitate powerful conversations regarding what the new standards indicate students should know and be able to do by the time they enter and by the time they leave each grade level. To do this, principals need to become intimately familiar with the organization, scope, depth and purpose of the Common Core standards for both English Language Arts and Mathematics.
Downloading copies of the ELA and Mathematics standards, even printing and binding hard copies and ‘living with them’ for the time it takes to become grounded in these documents is essential to effective leadership of a successful Common Core launch. Gathering teams of teachers to create digital screen savers and/or poster-sized concept maps of the big ideas and the systems for organization of the general standards and the anchor (ELA) or post secondary readiness standards (Mathematics), that can then be posted in a shared staff site, is another valuable way to build shared schema around the Common Core framework in a relatively short timeframe.
Principals can then support their teachers in familiarizing themselves with the Common Core Standards. Teachers should be encouraged to fully comprehend and integrate into their students’ learning targets, the essentials from standards within their own grade level and/or content areas and (at least) the two adjacent grade levels. Teachers who are fully grounded in where their students focused last year and where they will be expected to go next year become proficient in extending lessons for those who exceed expectations and in supporting those students who do not yet meet expectations.
Creating a 2011 budget and timeline for summer professional development may be challenging in this current context of decreasing resources and simultaneously increasing accountability systems that educational leaders, at all levels, must manage. However, strategically framing the delivery systems and the content of effective professional development opportunities for building leaders and their teachers will be critical to the successful launch and sustainability of every state, district and school Common Core initiative.
Lisa Leith, PhD
Content Specialist: Common Core
School Improvement Network
For more from School Improvement Network on the Common Core, see https://conferences.schoolimprovement.com/common_core.html?common-core=3
