The Common Core Standards were marketed as a great equalizer—if we provided standards-aligned lessons, then all students would be prepared for college and career. But the more I learn about effective reading instruction, the more I realize that the obsession with standards alignment may be pulling us away from the teaching our students actually need.
Near-Perfect Reviews, Imperfect Results
I felt something was off in the comprehension lesson plans in my school’s standards-aligned curriculum, but I wasn’t able to name the problem until rather recently.
On EdReports the curriculum got near-perfect scores for standards-alignment and usability. And it was recently well-reviewed by the Reading League. And yet, despite years of trying, the lessons we taught from the program routinely flopped. The verbal or written responses our students produced weren’t anywhere near the quality of the exemplars included in the program.
Racing to Grade Level, Missing What Matters
Like so many teachers, I had found the curriculum appealing. The read-alouds were from books that I found interesting. The challenging assignments were intended to push us. Sure, the targets were a stretch, but wasn’t that the point?
Example First Grade Learning Targets:
When my school partnered with a team of speech and language pathologists, I finally learned why our teaching kept falling flat. Our “rigorous” lesson plans weren’t just rigorous – they were skipping crucial steps in language development and comprehension.
As I learned about the scaffolds that help children to understand text-structure and to grow their language, I began to see how a hyper-focus on the standards resulted in inaccessible lessons.
In their rush to the standards, the instruction jumped over the prerequisites students needed to engage in discussion.
In one lesson, first graders are read a myth with no instruction about what to expect from the genre. They are then asked:
The lesson seems to expect that students will intuit that a myth allows its author to explain natural phenomena through personification. But time and time again, I’ve heard crickets in response to this question. Sometimes a few brave six year olds will hazard guesses that answer the question but miss the grade level standard:
“The author felt like writing something?”
“Maybe she was bored”
“I think her teacher said to write a story and so she did.”
The curriculum seems to prioritize alerting adults to the standard that’s targeted above ensuring that questions are comprehensible to students:
And other times, two huge ideas (like character motivation and a story’s moral) are crammed into one question:
A Recipe for Frustration
A researcher recently described the problem to me:
“It’s a recipe for frustration. If you wanted to run a marathon, you wouldn’t start your training plan by trying to run a marathon every day. You would build up to it, a little bit at a time. And seeing your improvement would motivate you to keep going as the expectations of the plan rise.”
But when teachers question the appropriateness of standards-aligned lessons, we’re told to raise our expectations for our students. When we say that we’ve tried teaching the plans as written but that the lessons fell flat, we’re told that we should have added more scaffolding.
Scaffolding takes precious time—time to plan, time to teach, and time we don’t often have. Without the help or often even the permission to properly adapt every lesson, we end up delivering instruction above our students’ heads.
A teacher at my school explained what happens:
“It’s the Matthew Teaching Effect. We perpetuate the achievement gap because our higher students benefit from the lessons and the ones most in need of our teaching get left further and further behind.”
If a program requires teachers to rewrite a majority of the lessons, isn’t that a sign that more field-testing was needed prior to it hitting the market? This problem of under-developed programs is wide-spread:
“Most curricula are designed to be successful in the adoption process, not the classroom.”
Kareem Weaver
What’s the Alternative?
Breaking Free from the Standards Trap
At my school, we’ve been trying to figure out an alternative to a curriculum that values the standards over student learning. We’ve now scrapped our Common Core-aligned curriculum for the primary grades, replacing it with lessons that were developed by the Language Reading Research Consortium funded by the Reading For Understanding initiative.
Texts Students Can Understand
The first thing we noticed in our new program is that the mentor texts are simpler, clearer examples of the text structures we’re teaching. And the units don’t mix genres, so students get the hang of mapping one text-type before moving on to another.
Sometimes Simple is Better
The lesson plans are shorter, taking up fewer pages of text, because they aren’t descriptions of idealized instruction, but rather softly-scripted lesson plans that offer clear guidance.
The lessons follow a reliable pattern:
Set (Hook)
I Do
We Do
You Do
Close
Tools That Actually Work
Rather than a variety of one-off worksheets and graphic organizers, the same tools are used over and over again so that students (and teachers) experience less confusion.
Building to Goals
Rather than targeting grade level standards in every lesson, we gradually increase the challenge as students show they are ready.
Class discussions are more focused, our students are better comprehending texts, and we’re hearing them use the language that we’ve taught.
Instruction is finally working and so kids are finally progressing towards grade level.
Trapped in a Marathon
Why do so many published programs include lessons that attempt a daily marathon, rather than gradually ratcheting instruction up towards the expectations of the Common Core?
I wonder if it’s that we’re now all aware of the Opportunity Myth:
Classrooms that served predominantly students from higher-income backgrounds spent twice as much time on grade-appropriate assignments and five times as much time with strong instruction, compared to classrooms with predominantly students from low-income backgrounds.
And we’re overcorrecting.
In an effort to prove that we have high expectations for our students, that we don’t suffer from implicit or explicit bias, we’re rushing to raise the bar for instruction without the plans we need in order to ensure students are successful.
But there’s hope in honesty. If we’re brave, we can say that we need better curricula, more professional development, and expert guidance to help us meet students where they are and to raise their performance.
We deserve lesson plans that are based on evidence and effective strategies, not on standards and wishful thinking. Equity isn’t about rushing to grade-level standards—it’s about providing the methodical teaching that the students in our classrooms deserve.
We find all of these factors with our tutoring students.
This is an excellent blog post. Who wrote it?
author: Margaret Goldberg
Thank you for this conversation. The comprehension question is a sticky one and I appreciate you taking it on. I feel the same way about the curriculum we are using – it runs a marathon on day one, with little or no training. Standards learning progression tools developed by our state have been helpful in this work.
This is a classic example of a “checkbox” curriculum, when they can say “yep, we cover that standard” by do so in a way that it is more like drive-by learning without any deep understanding.
This unit also has teachers teaching: nouns, verb, pronouns, past, present and future tense in 3 lessons, using a the same poem in all three lessons, for FIRST grade!
Our students deserve better than that! A deep understanding of these concepts (and others) is key. Districts and teachers should not be satisfied with a quick talk so we can say we can check the box and say we “taught” it.