As you’ve hopefully already discovered, Education Week recently published a special report on the Common Core State Standards for mathematics. The full report, which includes stories about the “new” approach to teaching fractions, how to help English-learners keep up with the increased language demands, and changes to education schools’ teacher-preparation programs in that subject, is available here.
Unlike much previous reporting on the common core, this report does a deep dive into the standards themselves—what they say, what that means, and how teachers and students are adjusting.
My colleague Arianna Prothero, of the Charters & Choice blog fame, interviewed me about the report, entitled “Making Sense of the Math: The Common Core in Practice.” In this short audio post, we discuss the major differences between the common core and previous state standards, as well as a few other interesting tidbits I learned in my reporting (including a mental-math-friendly way to do double-digit addition that I found myself using at the grocery store yesterday).
Thanks for listening.