Product And Program Appropriateness Of The School Of Western Governors University

This paper will demonstrate the pre-service teachers’ understanding of mathematical practices as part of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics. It will address two specific standards for Mathematical Practices, describing the essence of both and providing a description of how teachers facilitate these practices and how students are engaged in the practices.

Shepard, L. A. (2006, Creating coherent formative and summative assessment practices. Orbit, 36, 41-44. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/213738810?accountid=8194

Respond to the prompts below (no more than 4 single-spaced pages, including prompts) by typing your responses within the brackets following each prompt. Do not delete or alter the prompts. Pages exceeding the maximum will not be scored.

Second-grade students will need to be able to solve problems that involve the addition and subtraction operations. Just about each of the major clusters in the Focus Document works with addition and subtraction. This informs me that when teaching, I will need to provide the students with a wide variety of math that will help students become successful in the addition and subtraction operations so students will be successful when they reach third-grade. The Focus Document also informs me that I will need to spend some time teaching students about working with time and money. I will also need to be able to help students represent and interpret the data. The Focus Document is a great tool that helps me understand what the students should be learning in the math class. This document also informs me on the information that students need to know before reaching the next grade level. If I am observing students in second grade that have meet the require fluencies for second grade, then I know that these students will more than likely be successful by the time third grade arrives.

When many people think of elementary education, they think of reading small passages and learning the difference between addition and subtraction in easy, creative ways. Now, with the new Common Core State Standards implemented, today’s kids will have more things to worry about. They are asked more challenging questions and expected to have more rigorous answers. This does not set a steady learning pace for the average child.

The “Common Core” is a proposed set of newly design methods in academic standards in today’s subjects like Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and English / Language Arts courses. In about forty-eight states, this new academic implementation has replaced the old teaching methods to show a gain in the ability for students to be on the same path in every state. The primary focus for Common Core is to measure a fair and accurate way for student achievement for graduation regardless of the child’s state they live in. Well, at first the adopted Common Core standards demonstrated little to no problems once established however, today it has become widely controversial. This research paper will demonstrate this issue

“Class, today we will work in our practice workbooks. Please complete drills nine and eleven.” One can almost hear the groans of exhausted students echo across the classroom as another day of drills and memorization passes. Unfortunately, endless drills, mountains of workbook pages, and dry, tedious lessons have become the norm in today’s classrooms across Mississippi. However, there is a bright light in the distance known as the Common Core State Standards. Common Core State Standards, which was released in 2010, is a government implemented program aimed at improving public education nationwide (“Common Core Glossary” 1). Though the standards set by Common Core will benefit the nation as a whole, Common Core will also benefit students

For over two decades, New York State has been refining and fine tuning the learning standards that teachers use for their students daily. It is no surprise that countries were education is a “high-performing ability”, pinpoint their success to curriculum that is strictly focused and coherent for one goal; to improve the achievement of students as whole. The challenge of “creating a sequence of topics and performances that are logical and reflect the sequential or hierarchical nature of the content from which the subject derives” was one presented to teachers amongst others. Such standards needed to be coherent and must evolve from the previous ones to deeper structures in which students would be challenged by higher-level thinking (NYS Common Core Learning Standards in Mathematics, 2010, p.1). This paper examines the New York State Teaching and Learning Standards and follows the shift to the New York State P-12 Common Core Learning Standards and its continuous growth from here on.

The Common Core Standards is broadly written and allows teachers creativity and flexibility during instruction. In 2000, completing Algebra I was the standard, today the standard is completing Algebra II, but evidence shows that students need more competency in data analysis and statistics. The Common Core Standards believe that students’ abilities must be more conceptual and less procedural. (Phillips & Wong, 2010) The math layout uses a technology –based program to track math and cognitive skills to provide a clear understanding for teachers what students need to know to be college ready. The literacy layout recognizes literacy as a spine; it holds everything together. With the branches of learning connecting to it, the foundation recognizes that all core content teachers are responsible for teaching literacy (Phillips & Wong, 2010). The strategy with literacy is to secure performance expectations at three separate levels of demand rather than by grade level. The partner for developing the math and literacy tool and the assessment work is the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST). CRESST is designing two frameworks. The first is content and skills in the Common Core Standards and the other, core cognitive

The seventh grade curriculum has four major expectations. Students should be able to develop an understanding of and apply proportional relationships. They should understand operations with rational numbers and working with expressions and equations. They should be able to solve problems involving scale drawings and geometric constructions. Students should be able to draw inferences about populations based on samples. Each of these expectations clearly reflect Columbia County goals for seventh grade math students. They are compartmentalized into seven major units that last anywhere from three to six weeks depending on the amount of standards and expectations per section.

According to Duguay, A., Massoud, L., Tabaku, L., Himmel, J., & Sugarman, J. (2013, September), “As educators have examined the standards more deeply, concerns have arisen about their implementation in classrooms with diverse groups of students, including English learners”. Not only this, but the concept of math also has its visible adversities. According to Robertson, K. (2009), “Although it is easy to assume that many English language learners (ELLs) will excel in math because math is a "universal language" and students may have had prior educational experience that included mathematical instruction, that assumption can lead educators astray”. Many teachers are struggling with the, “increasingly rigorous grade-level content instruction; by content area teachers, many of whom are newly incorporating language development techniques in their subject area classes” (Duguay, A., Massoud, L., Tabaku, L., Himmel, J., & Sugarman, J. (2013, September)). The common core may be the stepping for detailed curriculum, but it is seeming that, it “cannot be tailored to all of the diverse populations of our nation” (Liebtag, E. (2013)). The expectations of the common core exacerbate the academics for ELL students. According to, HAKUTA, K., SANTOS, M., & FANG, Z. (2013), “when ELs are isolated for direct language instruction,

Survey results again revealed that teachers were making gains in content knowledge, pedagogy, and perception of their abilities to impact their students’ learning and gains toward being successful with their secondary mathematics requirements. The Organization also conducted pre- and post-tests on the rising ninth graders who participated in Summer II. Student results reflected significant gains in student’s proficiency with middle school mathematics content that is foundational for success in first-year algebra.

First and foremost, this program has activities for learning that are directly aligned with the Common Core Standards. It also has the ability to connect to several state standards that may not be aligned with the Common Core. This is extremely important for general education, special education, and English Language Learner educators as it is imperative to demonstrate that all activities that are being used in the classroom directly relate to the standards that are upheld by the state. There are often times where it can be difficult to meet state standards with students who have interrupted formal education or are newcomers who are just beginning to learn the English language. Therefore, this program is great to show that we are reaching the needs of our diverse learners while also meeting the high-standards that we uphold in our classrooms.

After numerous walk-throughs and classroom observations it was observed that at Neal Elementary mathematics teachers do not have an understanding of fact fluency and do not provide opportunities for students to develop fact fluency in their classroom learning experiences. From these observations, the assumption made is that many teachers lack the understanding of what fluency means and how to build fluency within students. After talking with teachers, they refer to fact fluency as timed tests and many of the students on our campus often practice in this manner. These tests typically take the form consisting of a page with thirty equations. I have observed many of our students feeling discouraged, especially the ones who have learned inefficient

Section C states that “teachers use the curriculum framework in their planning to ensure there is ample attention to important learning goals and to enhance the coherence of the classroom experience for children” (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009). With this lesson plan, I followed the VA SOL 1.1 (a) First Grade Curriculum Framework in Mathematics. This lesson plan allows students to count from 0 to ten, while the center activities allow them to count from 0 to 100 and write the corresponding