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NMSI Blog

Are Teachers Ready For Common Core?

Great new survey out by Edweek, albeit only for less than 600 respondents, on how we are preparing teachers for the Common Core state standards - you can see the infographic here. Bottom line - we need to get moving on implementation if we have any hope at all creating the potential gains in college readiness that common core can bring.  A big part of the problem is school districts don't know what they don't know. Many are assuming that they have high standards already so this will not really impact their classrooms which is just plain wrong.  If you have a rigorous math program in middle school but are not teaching some elements of statistics, your students are not going to perform well on the new common core assessments. 

Our NMSI teacher training team is currently up in Chicago working with the PARCC Educator Leader Cadre - training them on the latest released information from PARCC as well as how to bring common core to life in the classroom. We will soon be releasing that content as it is all open source as a part of the contract - and we hope more will use that content since, based upon the responses below, teachers need more resources. 
  • Have teachers been trained? 28% received a day or less, 59% less than 3 days and 41% 4 or more days.
  • To what extent have teachers incorporated common core into their teaching practice? 17% not at all or don't know, 61% incorporated into some areas but not others, 21% fully incorporated
  • Interesting that more teachers feel that they are very prepared to teach their students as a whole (20%) compared to how they feel about the school (9%), district (7%) and state (3%). 
None of this is surprising. We have training locations all around the country to help states, schools and districts get prepared for common core but there does not seem to be that much activity and dollars going towards the most critical element in implementation - the teacher.