The Structure is the Standards

Phil Daro, Bill McCallum, Jason Zimba

A Grecian urn

You have just purchased an expensive Grecian urn and asked the dealer to ship it to your house. He picks up a hammer, shatters it into pieces, and explains that he will send one piece a day in an envelope for the next year. You object; he says “don’t worry, I’ll make sure that you get every single piece, and the markings are clear, so you’ll be able to glue them all back together. I’ve got it covered.” Absurd, no? But this is the way many school systems require teachers to deliver mathematics to their students; one piece (i.e. one standard) at a time. They promise their customers (the taxpayers) that by the end of the year they will have “covered” the standards.

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New initiative on implementing the standards, achievethecore.org

Student Achievement Partners has launched a major new initiative to help with implementation of the Common Core State Standards in both Mathematics and English Language Arts. Their website, achievethecore.org, already has some good resources, and no doubt will grow. Student Achievement Partners is a non-profit whose founding partners are David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, two of the lead writers for ELA, and Jason Zimba, one of the lead writers for Mathematics. The other two lead writers for Mathematics, myself and Phil Daro, are advisors for the project.

Examples of structure in the content standards

Here is a draft of a document by Jason Zimba describing structures in the content standards: CCSS Atlas (in docx format, here is a pdf of the same document). It incorporates some of Jason’s writings that I have posted before (e.g. the stuff about pinnacles, and the graphic of flows leading to algebra), but has a lot of new material as well. Well worth reading for those thinking about assessment and curriculum based on the standards.

[Edited 2011/7/09 to add pdf file.
Documents Edited 2011/12/01]