Common-Core Work Must Include Teacher Development

Standards movement must embrace teacher professional learning

By Stephanie Hirsh

Now bearing the imprimatur of 46 states and the District of Columbia, the Common Core State Standards represent a major step forward for schools and the students they must prepare to graduate from high school ready for college and careers. Yet a fundamental contradiction underlies the progress: While we are promoting radical change in creating a coherent national framework for what students should know and the way they learn, we have not yet committed to offering teachers the deep learning they will need to transform the way they work.

Too much of today's professional learning is not up to the task of supporting the substantive changes required of teachers to meet these new standards for English/language arts and mathematics—and too many plans for supporting the transition to the common core read more like communication plans than serious road maps for preparing educators to teach the standards.

Gene Wilhoit, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers , one of the groups behind the common-core initiative, made this point directly to state leaders recently when he asked them: "What made you think you could transform teacher practice and student learning with traditional models of professional development?" To their credit, most states acknowledge the contradiction as they struggle with the scope of this undertaking in an ambitious time frame. Still, few states can say they are taking the steps to address the...