Common Core and Literacy Strategies: English Language Arts > Module 1 > Reading: Building on the Common Core
Building on the Common Core
David T. Conley
The Common Core State Standards could transform education—if educators
translate them into new curriculum and instruction to get students college- and
career-ready.
A potential sea change is under way in
U.S. education. With stunning rapidity,
47 states and the District of Columbia
have signed on to replace their state
content standards with the recently
developed Common Core State
Standards. Even more remarkable in
some respects, 45 states have joined
the two assessment consortia working
to replace their existing tests with new
assessments aligned with the
standards.
These developments create the
opportunity for U.S. schools to move
beyond test-prep instruction that
fosters shallow learning—a practice
that seems to have reached epidemic
proportions in recent years.
Implemented correctly, the common
standards and assessments can vault
education over the barrier of low-level
test preparation and toward the goal of
world-class learning outcomes for all
students. Implemented poorly,
however, the standards and
assessments could result in
accountability on steroids, stifling
meaningful school improvement
nationwide.
That's why all states that adopt the
Common Core State Standards, as
well as educators who will be affected
by these standards, should make it a
top priority to ensure that the new
standards and assessments are used
to focus instruction on developing key
cognitive strategies and skills that
students need for college and careers.
Overview of the Standards
and Assessments
The Common Core State Standards,
released in June 2010, were
developed under the sponsorship of
the National Governors Association
and the Council of Chief State School
Officers.1 Thus, states controlled the
process and content of the initiative.
The standards focus on two areas:
English language arts and
mathematics. In high school, however,
the English language arts standards
for reading, writing, speaking and
listening, and language are also
translated to literacy standards in
history and social studies, science,
and technical subjects. The
expectation is that students will
develop literacy skills specific to these
subject areas in addition to what they
Source: From ―Building on the Common Core,‖ by D. T. Conley, 2011, Educational Leadership, 68(7), pp.
23–26. Copyright 2011 by ASCD. Reprinted with permission.
Common Core and Literacy Strategies: English Language Arts > Module 1 > Reading: Building on the Common Core
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learn in their language arts
classes.The stated goal of the
standards is to specify key knowledge
and skills in a format that makes it
clear what teachers and assessments
need to focus on. Another goal is to
raise the achievement bar to a level
comparable to those of the best
education systems in the world. The
standards developers also hope that
creating national consistency in
expectations will lead to better uses of
student learning data, higher-quality
curriculum materials, teacherpreparation programs aligned with key
content standards, and research
results that identify what works.
The U.S. Department of Education
is funding the development of common
assessments to measure student
learning of the standards in more
complex and multidimensional ways
than current tests do. Two consortia of
states have received grants totaling
approximately $350 million to design
these assessments. Both of the
consortia have proposed designs that
include more frequent, real-time,
formative measures to provide
feedback on how well students are
progressing throughout the school
year. In addition, each consortium's
plan includes items designed to
capture evidence of deeper, more
complex learning, such as online
simulations, performance tasks, and
projectlike assignments.
Developing Cognition,
Making Connections
Much debate has taken place about
the specific curriculum content the
Common Core State Standards should
include. Although the standards do
address content, often overlooked in
these debates is the fact that the
standards identify the cognitive
processes and learning strategies
students need in order to acquire and
retain curriculum content (see
"Cognitive Strategies in the Common
Core State Standards"). The ideal
result of standards implementation will
be to move classroom teaching away
from a focus on worksheets, drill-andmemorize activities, and elaborate
test-coaching programs, and toward
an engaging, challenging curriculum
that supports content acquisition
through a range of instructional modes
and techniques, including many that
develop student cognitive strategies.
It is actually more difficult for
students to retain the myriad bits of
content they encounter during the
school year when they are taught
through test-prep. The brain functions
by organizing related pieces of
information into databases, or
schema. Through nonroutine uses of
the content in these databases, the
brain creates the richer, deeper, and
more complex connections necessary
for understanding. Without these
connections, isolated bits of
information may not get incorporated
into the larger schema and thus may
not be retained.
The brain ruthlessly determines
what is worth holding onto and what is
not, and it discards that which it
deems not worth keeping. Complex,
nonroutine uses of information signal
to the brain that something is
important and needs to be integrated
Common Core and Literacy Strategies: English Language Arts > Module 1 > Reading: Building on the Common Core
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more fully into the brain's cognitive
structures.
The Common Core State
Standards are designed to develop
these larger cognitive structures by
identifying key knowledge and skills,
organizing these elements
sequentially and progressively, and
then infusing more cognitive
complexity into the knowledgeacquisition process. It is essential that
the common assessments and the
curriculums that support the standards
recognize the importance of complex,
challenging, nonroutine applications of
knowledge.
How the Standards Can
Support College and Career
Readiness
What does it look like to translate
standards into cognitively complex
tasks and assignments aligned with
college and career readiness? How
should educators be thinking about
developing the Common Core State
Standards in ways that elicit deeper
learning? One way is to look at the
expectations students will encounter in
college and careers and work
backward from there.
In the past decade, my colleagues
at the Educational Policy Improvement
Center and I have analyzed the
content of thousands of entry-level
college courses and the expectations
of the faculty who teach these
courses.2 One of our most consistent
and important conclusions is that
courses at two- and four-year
postsecondary institutions expect
students to be proficient in a range of
key cognitive strategies. Although
students certainly benefit from general
content knowledge in key disciplines,
such as English and mathematics, this
knowledge is not sufficient if they lack
proficiency with these strategies.3
Key Cognitive Strategies
Our research has led us to identify five
key cognitive strategies (see fig. 1
online at
www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/books/el_20
1103_conley_figure1.pdf):
Problem formulation. Having
students formulate a problem before
leaping directly to a solution causes
them to first generate plausible
hypotheses and potential strategies for
solving the problem. This act of
reflection gets students to entertain
the universe of possibilities and makes
them aware of the strategies they
need to employ to solve the problem.
Research. With a strategy in hand,
students can then collect the
information necessary to solve the
problem. This should involve data or
information collection—in other words,
research. Even in this information-rich
age, students need considerable
training in identifying relevant
resources. They need to be able to
collect the information from a wider
range of sources than what they will
encounter through a simple Google
search or a visit to Wikipedia.
Interpretation. With information in
hand, students need techniques for
interpreting what they have gathered.
Depending on the nature of the
problem, these techniques can include
pro-and-con lists; tables, grids, and
matrices; outlines of key points; lists of
Common Core and Literacy Strategies: English Language Arts > Module 1 > Reading: Building on the Common Core
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consistencies and contradictions in the
data; and findings organized by key
aspects of the problem. Evaluation, a
judging process in which rules of
relevance are applied systematically to
the collected data, is a skill developed
over time through multiple
opportunities for practice.
Communication. Students need to
learn how to organize the output of
their research and interpretation and
then construct an argument or
presentation that derives directly from
carefully collected, analyzed, and
organized information. Communication
of this type requires multiple steps and
iterations, not one draft dashed off and
never revisited. Careful consideration
of audience and the conventions of the
subject area also guide
communication strategies.
Precision and Accuracy. Through
each step, learners need to exercise
precision and accuracy consistent with
the rules of the discipline within which
the problem is embedded. For
example, science requires accurate
observation and measurement.
English language has rules for
grammar and syntax as well as for
word selection. Mathematics rules
specify how equations and formulas
are written; the order of operations;
placement of exponents; and
numerous other specifications that are
crucial to the accuracy of the solution.
Precision and accuracy skills do not
come naturally; students have to be
encouraged to develop them
systematically and strategically.
The Novice-Expert Continuum
We should think of students as moving
from novice to expert in their strategic
thinking as the result of frequent
practice on progressively more
complex tasks, assignments, and
activities. As learners progress
through the steps from novice to
expert, they become less dependent
on following rules literally and more
able to make decisions within a larger
framework. The expert thinker can see
the whole when presented with only a
subset of the pieces, whereas the
novice needs to have all the pieces in
place first before acting. The expert
operates with a likely outcome in mind
and is constantly testing assumptions
on the way to a conclusion. The
novice must proceed step by step in a
literal and linear fashion.
The novice-expert continuum is
important to keep in mind when
constructing assessment systems
because it allows for the construction
of a vertical scale that sequences
growth in strategic thinking across
multiple grade levels. As learners
develop their knowledge schema and
gain more experience drawing
knowledge from their schema, their
performance progresses.
Assessments that measure this
progression in complex, nonroutine
ways allow for the development of
instructional programs that contain
progressively more complex cognitive
expectations. Common assessments
and curricular systems can potentially
use this novice-expert continuum to
chart student progress toward the
higher levels of cognitive functioning
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within a content area at each
successive grade level.
Making the New Standards
and Assessments Work
As educators design and implement
curriculum aligned to the new
standards and assessments, they can
focus and organize their programs of
instruction toward the goal of
preparing more students for college
and careers by adhering to several
overarching principles.
Content mastery is not sufficient.
As frustrating as it may be to hear,
simply getting students to recall some
facts or answer questions correctly on
a test does not make them ready for
college and careers—nor is it likely to
guarantee high performance on the
common assessments. We should
view content acquisition as a means to
an end, not an end in itself. If students
do not have numerous opportunities to
use content knowledge to solve
interesting problems, grapple with key
questions and issues of the discipline,
and examine social issues, they will be
unlikely to perform well on the
common assessments.
Instruction needs to engage
students in challenging applications of
key content knowledge. Teachers and
curriculum designers need to avoid the
temptation to focus on test-prep
activities that require little engagement
in learning. To reach the new levels
envisioned in the common standards
and assessments, students must
actively participate in their own
learning. Curriculum that includes
interesting problems, investigations,
debates, simulations, games, Socratic
questioning, presentations, projects,
and other forms of learning that
demand engagement will help
maximize retention of key content and
concepts.
To succeed with key content and
key cognitive strategies, students
need proficiency in a range of
academic learning skills and
behaviors. These behaviors include
goal setting; study skills, both
individually and in groups; selfreflection and the ability to gauge the
quality of one's work; persistence with
difficult tasks; a belief that effort
trumps aptitude; and timemanagement skills. These behaviors
may not be tested directly on the
common assessments, but without
them, students are unlikely to be able
to undertake complex learning tasks or
take control of their own learning.
Keeping Our Eyes on the
Goal
As educators begin to translate the
Common Core State Standards into
practice, they have a new opportunity
to think about what is important. The
standards lay out a road map of major
ideas, concepts, knowledge, and
skills. The common assessments will
measure a wider range of student
learning than current tests do. If
schools take advantage of this
opportunity—redesigning curriculum
and instruction in ways that fully
engage students in cognitively
challenging tasks—the result will be
students who are better prepared to
succeed in college and careers.
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Cognitive Strategies in the Common Core State Standards
The Common Core State Standards (www.corestandards.org) require
students to develop and employ key cognitive strategies.
The Standards for Mathematical Practice (described in an introduction to
the mathematics content standards) specify the following "varieties of
expertise that mathematics educators at all levels should seek to develop in
their students" (www.corestandards.org/thestandards/mathematics/introduction/standards-for-mathematical-practice):
Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
Model with mathematics.
Use appropriate tools strategically.
Attend to precision.
Look for and make use of structure.
Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.
The English/Language Arts Standards specify that students should
develop the following cognitively complex skills:
Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and
interact over the course of a text.
Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media,
including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.
Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts
independently and proficiently.
Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing,
rewriting, or trying a new approach.
Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing
and to interact and collaborate with others.
Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on
focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under
investigation.
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Endnotes
1
For more information about the Common Core State Standards, see www.corestandards.org.
See Conley, D. (2005). College knowledge: What it really takes for students to succeed and what we can
do to get them ready. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; and Conley, D. (2010). College and career ready:
Helping all students succeed beyond high school. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
3
The Educational Policy Improvement Center has developed the College-Ready Performance Assessment
System (C-PAS), a means to teach and assess student proficiency with key cognitive strategies. C-PAS
uses complex performance tasks aligned to Common Core State Standards to gauge student readiness for
college and careers. More information about C-PAS is available at www.collegecareerready.org.
2
David T. Conley is professor of educational policy and leadership and director of the
Center for Educational Policy Research in the College of Education at the University
of Oregon; david_conley@epiconline.org. He is CEO of the Educational Policy
Improvement Center and was co-chair of the Validation Committee for the Common
Core State Standards.