Power standards

[Bill McCallum]

This question was asked over in the Tools section, I’m reposting it here:

Good Morning Everyone!

I am the math and gifted curriculum coordinator at a public PreK-12 school in Hartford, CT. We have been having conversations surrounding “power standards” in order to better plan for our students. I am of the impression that identifying power standards is an obsolete process because they seem to be built into the CCSS via the clusters. Can you shed some light on this idea please! Is there a way to identify the power standards in the CCSS? If so, where should we begin?

I guess finding power standards means finding some sort of prioritization of the standards. I agree that it is more appropriate to do this at the cluster level than at the standard level. Clusters are coherent groupings of standards that go together around the same idea, and breaking out one standard from a cluster is usually going to interfere with that coherence. Among the clusters in a given grade level, one can identify some that are more central to focus of that grade level. Both the PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessment consortia have published frameworks describing the major, additional, and supporting clusters in each grade level. You can find links to them here.

The cluster headings provide an important framing for the standards within them. For example, the cluster heading “Understand place value” in 2.NBT lends meaning to the standard within the cluster 2.NBT.2, “Count within 1000; skip-count by 5s, 10s, and 100s.” It makes it clear that the purpose of the skip counting is to build place value understanding (which explains why skip counting by 2 is not present).

You might also find it useful to read The Structure is the Standards and Jason Zimba’s examples of structures in the standards.

[harrelli]

Could you please provide more clarification as to why the clusters are identified as “Major, Supporting, and Additional”? I provide professional development trainings for teachers in our school district and I would like to be able to help explain this to them with confidence as we develop curriculum maps and pacing guides.

Thank you,

[Anonymous]

The effort of sorting clusters into major, minor, and additional was done by the PARCC assessment consortium. They explain their reasoning, rationale, as well as Do’s and Don’ts in this document: http://www.parcconline.org/printpdf/219. Specifically starting on the bottom of page 2 – Content Emphasis by Cluster.

[Bill McCallum]

Yes, this is not a classification made by the standards themselves, although I do think PARCC did a pretty good job of interpreting the standards with this classification, and I would add that SBAC classifies the standards the same way (except that they merge the supporting and additional categories).

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