Common Core Daily Planning Made Easy

Common Core has made it so that teachers must focus on the standards almost 100% of the time. Gone are the days where teachers can plan their lessons the way they want and then add the standards in later.

The Instructional Coach for our district came up with this neat little form that has made my daily planning so much easier:

It's really nice because I can create a document for the entire unit and it has everything I need. My favorite part of the objective and assessment. This keeps me accountable for daily formative assessments, such as exit slips, and helps me figure out if the students are actually understanding the standard/objective for the day.

I can't imagine planning without it any more...

Ice Cream in the Classroom!

With the Common Core (not so) slowly taking over, I've found it very helpful to implement strategies, such as exit slips, in my room as formative assessments. It's really easy to tell if a student has mastered a particular standard when I only have to focus on one a day.

In my English I class, we're reading The Odyssey and yesterday we finished the Cyclops Adventure. The standard for the day was:

I can cite thorough textual evidence to back up my analysis and inferences about the text.

I was trying to think of an interesting way to introduce an exit slip to test that theory - and beyond reading a ton of really boring summaries, I was lost.

Then, very luckily, for both myself and my students, a colleague sent me this Buzzfeed List. It totally saved the day! "6 Ice Cream Flavors Inspired by your Favorite Books!"  How perfect is that?!

I had the students create an ice cream flavor based on the Cyclops story. They had to name it, explain what the flavor was, AND explain the significance of their choices. Below are some of the more clever names:

The best parts of this activity, at least in my opinion, are these:

• I could VERY quickly discover whether or not the students understood the material.
• The activity took exactly 4 minutes at the end of class.
• The kids got to be creative and seemed to really enjoy it.

Course Mason

I just got home from a PD about this amazing new Common Core resource... It's a website called Course Mason and it was designed by a local assistant superintendent.  It has all the big essentials in one place - Standards, Essential Questions, Resources, everything!  The best part is - it's free!  If you read my previous post, this is basically an electronic version of the Big Binder!

Here are some pictures of what I worked on today, so you can see what this program offers:

When you log in, it sets you up with your different courses/classes -- I'm lucky enough to just have 2 preps, but you can create as many as you need.

The entire thing is really easy to navigate -- huge buttons at the top and sides in order to find everything that you need.

The first thing you're asked to do is choose which standards you need to apply to your course... this site has all the Common Core standards and they're adding more every day.  When I spoke to the developer, he said his goal tonight was the add the Next-Gen Science Standards. The picture above is from RL 9-10.

Next is to input your units and figure out what time frame you're working with. It's pretty nice to pace everything so you don't run out of time or spend an extra week or so on something you don't need to.

Assign the standards to the unit you've chosen.  I think it's much, much easier to work in everything when it's in small doses, as opposed to 70+ standards, looking at them, thinking "HO-LY crap. What am I going to do?"

Once all that is done... and it takes time, you can start creating assessments, like good backwards planners. If you use this program, it forces you to really work with the standards first, instead of trying to twist the standards to fit what you already teach... you can start designing the different units.

Assessments first... you lay them out on what days you think they are going to take place. They can be changed (nothing is set in stone, especially since nothing works that way in education, anyway).

Assign your standards to the units...

And then the MAGIC!  This site already breaks the standards down for you!  No more having to bend over backwards trying to figure out what exactly they're asking you to do.  You could even use the "I can" statements from my previous post and make it even easier!

It prompts you to put in essential questions and big ideas...

And finally, you can see your unit (broken down into weeks), as well as where the assessments are supposed to happen.  They're expanding this every day.  Some teachers focused on one unit today and uploaded PowerPoints, YouTube videos, and day-by-day plans. They're ENTIRE unit, from start to finish, is uploaded here in one place.

I didn't do that - hence my units look pretty bare.  I focused on getting assessments uploaded. I can plan the day-to-day stuff later and during the year. It's not like pep rallies or mock ACTs are scheduled that far in advance anyway.

Common Core "I Can" Statements

The CCSS are not exactly written in people-friendly language. It takes hours to deconstruct the skills and concepts in each standard into something a teacher can actually work with.  Many companies have published flip charts and various other resources that have that already done for you, but here's the thing. I'm cheap. I don't want to spend money on something if I don't have to.

So, here is the resource I have found that has saved my life.  It's a breakdown of the ELA CCSS...

9-10 Grade Span

11-12 Grade Span

Don't spend money if you can get the exact same thing here!

The Binder That's Saving my Life

With Common Core taking over American education, almost every teacher I know is up in arms.  The old guard is half freaking out because of the differences it will cause in the way they teach, and half apathetic because they don't necessary believe it will last very long -- NCLB, after all, was deemed awful in less than 10 years.

Anyway, I belong to the new guard and am completely focused on making sure my curriculum and activities are completely aligned and that my students will be able to complete those skills outlined in the standards.  Luckily for me, my school district employs an Instructional Coach... and SHE IS AMAZING.  She loves organization just as much as I do and created binders like this for each English Teacher for each core course (English I, English II, English III).

Here is the cover... pretty, pretty

She made tabs for everything we need for complete Common Core organization.  School calendar, Quarter Outlook, Quarter Breakdowns of Standards and Texts, as well as tabs for aligned assessments.

This is what the "Quarter Outlook" looks like.  We teach based on a particular theme each quarter, so it gives space for the theme and then the titles we will be teaching based on those themes.  I put the number of weeks that text should take... just to make sure my pacing doesn't get too off.

The next thing she had us do was break down the CCSS into the 4 quarters.  We didn't assign them anywhere beyond just which quarter we will hit them.  Breaking the standards into smaller chunks has been a lifesaver so far in planning for alignment.

Finally, we divided the standards into each unit for the quarters.  This fancy little graphic organizer helps us divide up the Concepts (the fun ELA stuff we all get excited about), Skills (how the students will show those concepts -- AKA verbs), and the Blooms level of each.  Breaking these down helped me to understand the standards better AND make sure there is a range of Bloom's levels in each unit.

Sorry for the sideways picture... I'm not as computer literate as I pretend to be.

Here are some "detail" pictures of those organizers...

Finally, the last couple tabs.  All the assessments I design that are aligned correctly will go here.  This will aid in backwards planning, since the end goal will already be designed and easily accessible.  Plus, it's just best practice.

This whole idea is pretty easily adaptable... and like I said... it's saving my life and my sanity.