>> Dr. Teresa Ukrainetz: Today I wanted to familiarize you more with the Common Core State Standards. I would like us to think of it more as a tool and something that we can really be comfortable with. We should determine how we can use it to help us link our interventions to the classroom, without feeling like it is dictating our practices or affecting in negative ways how we deliver our interventions. When I looked at Common Core, I was quite delighted to find how well it fit with how I see best practice for intervention. It is a contextualized approach where we are using explicit skills, but embedded in purposeful activities and communicative activities. I was relieved to find that it had a model like that. I had not found that when I worked through some other state standards. When we were working with individual state standards, they seemed to really vary in quality and in logic, and it seemed like Common Core gave us a nice framework for working within a contextualized approach to intervention.
Objectives
My three objectives are:
- Explain the Common Core and its embedded language expectations across grades
- Use the Common Core to form intervention goals and objectives across grades
- Use the Common Core to plan contextualized and functional intervention activities
I cannot do this in detail within the hour. I will touch on these different topics and get you a little more familiar with the Common Core State Standards. I did a talk with Barb Ehren, Karen Erickson, and Penelope Hatch last year at ASHA on this matter. This was pretty much my part of the talk, with a little bit of expansion. Karen Erickson and Penelope Hatch did some really nice work looking at lower functioning students and how the Common Core helps them plan goals. Barb Ehren was focusing more on the high school end of it. I will dip into our performance across the grades today, but I will not be dealing with Karen and Penelope’s material with the lower functioning children.
Common Core State Standards
When I try to cite the Common Core in papers it is quite difficult, because the author is the National Governor’s Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. It is a really unwieldy set of authors for citing. Generally, you will see it abbreviated as C.C.S.S., but I am really averse to all of these acronyms that float around when there are better words to use. For me, it is just better to call it Common Core, rather than trying to use letters.
Common Core was released in June 2010 as a state-level initiative where two groups got together with some support from state governments. There was a little bit of funding from the federal level for setting up. There was some small aspect of this, a measurement system, for which they got a grant from the federal government. However, it really is a state initiative. It is not mandated by the federal government. It is not connected to No Child Left Behind or IDEA. By 2012, it had been adopted by all but five of the states. The latest map I have found, which is over a year old, shows the adoption by all of these states (Figure 1). I believe that Minnesota had adopted the writing standards, but not the math. There is some variation there.
