A few years ago, Tina Cheuk, a project manager for the Understanding Language initiative at Stanford University, woke up one morning, printed out several new sets of standards, and started cutting.
"I was frustrated," she said in a phone interview yesterday. Looking at the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and math, along with the framework that would become the Next Generation Science Standards, she said, "I felt overwhelmed. And that was my full-time job looking at standards."
Cheuk, a former teacher, saw patterns in the standards and began organizing them accordingly. She focused on what she calls the "practice standards," which outline the skills demonstrated by proficient students. (She took them from the common core's Standards for Mathematical Practice; the descriptions of literate students' "capacities" in the language arts common standards; the guidelines for developing English-language-proficiency standards that correspond to the common core, developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers; and the NGSS' science and engineering practices.)
She came up with this Venn diagram, which shows how the practice standards overlap (you can also find it, with a key, here):
With the common standards, "there are changes in the content—it's deeper, more focused—but it's these practices I think that are going to move our students," Cheuk said. However, she offers the caveat that the language used in the above standards can mean different things in different disciplines. For instance, evidence in science class is not the same as evidence in language arts. "It's not perfect," she said of the diagram. "It's meant to start the conversation."
Read the full story in Education Week.
Tina Cheuk is a first year PhD student and Project Manager for Understanding Language in the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
