I’ve been meaning to put these up for a while. The tools page now has individual pdfs for each domain in K–8.

Here are my my slides for the NCTM presentation on the Common Core. Zalman Usiskin also presented, and I believe he is willing to send you his slides if you send him an email. You can watch a webcast here.

Here are the slides from the panel that Phil Daro and I gave at NCSM yesterday: Phil’s slides, my slides.

As part of our work with Illustrative Mathematics we have put the standards into TeX format in a database. A byproduct of this is a hyperlinked version of the Standards. You can navigate grade levels by clicking links on the bottom of each page, and within a grade level by clicking domain headings in the overview. There are few other goodies as well: for example, references to the tables link to them. If people find it useful I could add links to relevant glossary definitions as well, when I have the time.

I can say that I had nothing to do with the Common Core standards. (Not bitter.)

Big question: what is going to be possible to do this time that it wasn’t possible to do before?

There are echoes of the new math in some of what is going on now, and there are lessons to be learned from more recent reform efforts.

Project at Michigan that is focusing on coherence across grade levels. The New Math had its take on coherence; NCTM Curriculum and Evaluation Standards, PSSM, and Focal Points all had their take. When I was here in California in the 1980s, California had a progressive framework, followed in the 90s by a framework which many saw as a U-turn. Teachers saw a radical shift. In the 10 years I’ve been at Michigan, teachers have had three different sets of standards. Some teachers are numb to it.

On the content side, the big thing that Common Core brings is understanding to the expectations. Banned in Michigan and many other states, because of assessment. I’m not sure that 50 years after the New Math we are any closer to figuring out how to assess understanding. We also have the standards for mathematical practice, but still not in the content. (Good to call them standards.)

To the extent that the assessment can be seen as driving attention to the practice standards, the conversations with teachers will be a lot easier. Not sure that the outline of content is any better than any other we have had. New Math and PSSM had unintended consequences (back to basics, math wars respectively).

The important issue is scalability. Teacher education is a state driven enterprise. Now that everybody is adopting the same set of standards. That allows for collaboration across institutions and across state lines. That’s a very exciting project. AMTE can be at the forefront of doing that work.

I’m on a panel right now where Gladis Kersaint is reporting about a report of the four mathematics teaching organizations in the title. (I cannot resist the temptation to give this initiative the meta-acronym NANA, whose logo should be a big sheepdog shepherding us through the standards.) The report outlines 6 goals:

1. Clarify the meaning
2. Support stake holders
3. Prepare and support PK-16 teachers
4. Support the development of high quality formative and summative assessments
5. Promote research
6. Develop a governing structure

Big question on number 3: what do we need to do now?

• Assessment examples
• Capacity building and leadership development (interpreting the standards)
• Professional development materials (raise awareness, how to change what you are doing now)
• Dissemination efforts

Long term efforts:

• tools for teachers
• tools to help administrators recognize classroom implementation
• examples of student work
• think about professional development that is differentiated based on the needs of different teachers (novice, veteran, …)
• mathematics content courses that can help people understand how the mathematical practices can be implemented in content

Jason Zimba is working on a technical manual that will describe higher order structures in the Common Core standards, such as flows, streams, and ties. Here is an example of what is meant by a flow. What I like about this diagram is that it illustrates the way mathematical ideas are unified as the subject progresses. For example, the disparate ideas of whole number, fraction, decimal, integer, and rational number are unified in an understanding of the number system. Mathematics doesn’t branch out and get more complicated, it collates and compacts ideas into more powerful and denser ideas.