Common-core anxiety sweeps the land, and professional developers of curriculum and assessment smell dollars. Flashy brochures promise that once that purchase order is signed, every child will pass the new tests. For a pittance more, they'll make the lion lie down with the lamb.
District administrators would be wise to lay down their pens. There's a valuable resource right in front of their eyes. It requires no lengthening of the school day, no elimination of art and music, and no endorsement of checks to third-party developers. It's so familiar we no longer notice it. It's called the history/social studies curriculum.
Read a paper by Sam Wineburg on History Assessments for the Common Core here.
One would assume that the Common Core State Standards' emphasis on nonfiction would spur a flurry of interest around a subject area jam-packed with relevant texts. But the opposite has occurred. The entire discussion around the curriculum of nonfiction and "informational texts" has focused on English/language arts, a bizarre turn when history's essence is its claim to be true, to be nonfiction. Listening to some, one would conclude that the purpose behind the writing of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail" was to teach students the difference between assonance and alliteration.
See more about the Stanford History of Education Group here.
The lack of attention to historical texts may stem from the belief that social studies teachers already have a text—that 1,000-page behemoth known as a history textbook. But those who embrace this view need a lesson in "close reading." And they should start with the common standards themselves: Students must learn to "integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats," to "assess the strengths and limitations of sources," to attend to and interrogate "the date and origin" of information, and to evaluate authors' claims by "corroborating or challenging them with other information." Teaching students to contend with this complexity by using the homogenized prose of the textbook is like training swimmers to survive a raging sea but never letting them out of a wading pool. That approach sets them up to drown.
Read the full article at Education Week here.
See Sam Wineburg's faculty page here.
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