Can't Differentiate with the Common Core.

 

 

The nation is turning curricula matters over to the common core. As a former public school teacher, I understand how common core came about and why it is here. I can grasp the idea of why these were developed and the concept of them. The CCSS were developed to allow instructors and administrators to know what they should be teaching when. It was designed to help the teacher know what to teach and the parents know what their child should learn. The idea that you could go anywhere in the nation and walk into multiple same grade classrooms in multiple areas and find the same skills and concepts being taught to the same level is a great concept...a great thought. What it never takes into effect is children who are disabled, children from other cultures, children who need alternative paths of learning and instruction, etc.

 

Children are expected to be cookie cutters for the same design of instruction. We all learn different. We all learn at different rates.

 

What has gotten to me recently is that the classes I instruct as a distance education professor almost all focus on some aspect of differentiation in instruction. One of the classes has differentiation in the title of the class. The topic occurs in almost all methodology classes and the like. If the colleges are teaching instructional methodology that is differentiated...and the schools are being made to transition to total common core...

 

Do you see the disconnect? 

 

The training is teaching to differentiate to meet the needs of students. The element the teachers are sent out to is to teach to the standard, to teach all students to learn the same.

 

One cannot teach a differentiated instructional model when everything is made to be common.