Common Core State Standards – Implications for Speech-Language Pathologists

 This text-based course is a transcript of the seminar, “Common Core State Standards – Implications for Speech-Language Pathologists” presented by Lissa Power-deFur, Ph.D., CCC-SLP.>> Lissa Power-deFur:  I am delighted to be back with SpeechPathology.com.  I see we have about 50 people participating and I hope that I will be able to assist you in getting a little bit of a better feeling for what is going on with these standards.  I am happy to answer your questions throughout the session.  I have kind of a full hour, but I will be glancing over at the Q&A and if I do not see that your question is something I am going to talk about in the future, I will definitely make sure to take time and answer it. My purpose today is to talk about the standards to enable you to leave with these understandings.  Hopefully you should understand the purpose and expectations of the Common Core State Standards.  You should be able to identify if your state has adopted it.  We will look at some illustrative language and get a flavor for what the language expectations are, and then hopefully you will be able to leave with some ideas about how you might be able to integrate relevant Common Core State Standards into your intervention in the schools. Where Do the Standards Come From?Why don’t we start out by finding out how many of you are doing something with the standards now?  That they are influencing your life on a daily basis.  If you would click the thumbs up if they are influencing your life on a daily basis.  A lot of you are finding that it is impacting you, but the majority of you are not.  Hopefully this will help you prepare for what is coming down the road.  This is an amazing initiative and it has made such an impact on the role of educator, special educators, and related services personnel in two short years.  These were introduced in June 2010 and they are a product of the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governor’s Association.  They are not a product of the U.S. Department of Education and that is a key feature.  We are not moving to the concept of national standards or national goals impacted or imposed upon us by the federal government.  Rather these are state standards that have kind of bottomed up from the states. Of course, you know what the National Governor’s Association is, but let’s go over the Chief State School Officers.  Those are the state superintendents, the directors of public instruction, or the superintendent of public instruction.  Many states have different names for them, but they are the Chief K-12 Academic Officer in each state.  In my state, Virginia, that person has to be an educator, someone who meets the standards to be a superintendent.  I know in other states they can be politicians, and so it is informative that a group that is a mixture of educators and politicians came together to say we need to come up with some standards. You will notice that I have the website highlighted for you here: http://www.corestandards.org.  If you have not gone to that website, I hope that you will go there and download the standards.  You also can go to your iPad App Store and download the standards there.  Either place is a great resource for you.  I have them in a notebook that I downloaded off the CoreStandards.org page and then I have them on my iPad as well.Why Were the Standards Created?Why did these two large entities come together to create standards that look like they are having a huge impact?  Well education leaders identified the need to have literate, globally competitive persons in the 21st century.  What does that mean?  As we look at their work, we see that they are talking about people who are critical readers.  Not just readers, but readers who can look at the information presented and decide on the relevance of it to their lives and be good reviewers like we are, for example, in evidence-based practice.  They are thoughtfully engaged with literary and information texts.  So we are looking at both nonliterary and literary reading materials.  They have cogent reasoning skills.  They use evidence for deliberation and they are engaged in responsible citizenship. The mission of the standards was to provide a clear and consistent understanding for everyone of what students are expected to learn, and I think they do a great job of that.  The more time you spend looking at the standards, the more clear it is going to be that, for example, “all third graders need to know this and some of my students on my case load are going to struggle with that.”  This takes us to #2 on the mission: it enables parents, teachers and related service personnel to know what they need to do to help students.  By looking at what is expected for a student at the end of kindergarten, third, seventh, or twelfth grade, it helps us to identify what we need to do to enable the students to be successful. The standards are designed to be robust, strong, rigorous standards and they are designed to be relevant to the real world around us.  They looked at what knowledge and skills were needed to be successful in college and careers.  So you see that there is an influence of career technical information as well as college readiness.  Clearly there is the issue of being successful competitors in the global economy.  I think that educators and policy makers are becoming concerned perhaps that students in the U.S. are not competing as well with students in other countries and certain areas.  We certainly see that as we look at some of the math and science standards that are reported around the country. If you look at the information that you have downloaded on your iPad, for example, they have a really nice section on college and career readiness that explains to...