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Teachers learn core standards
By Ed Runyan
NILES
It won’t be implemented fully for more than a year, but 50 teachers and coaches at Warren City Schools spent several days recently learning about Ohio’s Common Core standards — a system for teaching in a consistent, rigorous and relevant way.
The 50 staff members will be among those who teach the rest of the school district’s teachers next year as the standards start being understood and implemented.
On the last day of the training sessions Tuesday, Melissa Watson, the district’s first-year executive director of teaching and learning, also reinforced themes that she and first-year superintendent Bruce Thomas have stressed since the start of the school year — the huge role teachers can play in the lives of students.
One of the quotes she projected onto a screen came from psychiatrist Carl Jung.
“One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”
From Lady Bird Johnson, wife of the president, was the quote “Children are apt to live up to what you believe in them.”
Though making the change to the Common Core standards, Warren City Schools needs to continue on its mission of always thinking about students in the following way, Watson said: “What would I want for this child if he or she were my own child?”
“Sometimes you have to take a risk like we’re asking the kids to take,” Watson said.
Melanie Hameed, a 10th-grade English teacher at Warren G. Harding High School, said she has arrived at an understanding of the Common Core standards going into effect for the 2013-14 school year as being like a backpack.
“It’s like filling a backpack that they will unpack when they get to the next level,” Hameed said of the content that students will learn in each grade from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Each student in every grade and in every school in the state will be taught so that he or she learns according to 10 core standards.
That way, Hameed will know what the students learned in ninth grade before she got them, and the 11th-grade teacher will know what they learned while Hameed had them, she said.
Furthermore, Hameed will know what other 10th- grade English teachers are teaching, and 10th-grade English teachers can share strategies.
Without common standards, there is “less joining together,” Hameed said.
Most of the states in nation have adopted Common Core standards.
The Ohio Parent-Teacher Association says Common Core standards are expected to provide every American child with “clear, consistent K-12 academic standards” that help parents know what to expect from teachers and to help teachers know what to teach.
“The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers,” the Ohio PTA says.