Common Core State Standards and Belchertown Curriculum and Adams Scholarship presentations

Last week's post was about the new PARCC assessments and the pilot that our students will participate in. The Massachusetts State Board of Education is scheduled to vote on the adoption of these assessments in October as the potential replacement to the current MCAS system in the next few years. As I mentioned in that post, they are designed to measure student learning on the Common Core State Standards.

What are the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and why the change from our former state standards?

The Common Core State Standards are a set of common curriculum standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics. Forty-five of the fifty states in the country, including Massachusetts, have adopted them as the basis for their state curriculum frameworks. They were developed to ensure that we are sufficiently preparing our students for college and career in the context of skills that are necessary for success in the twenty-first century. The Common Core State Standards web site describes the history of their development that was led by the National Governors Association for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Joining in the development were teachers, school administrators, post-secondary educators, parents, and experts. The standards:

• are aligned with college and work expectations;
• are clear, understandable and consistent;
• include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
• build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
• are informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
• are evidence-based.

One of the big changes from our former state standards is the clearer set of expectations by grade level versus a cluster of grades that teachers would then have to figure out how to sequence themselves. This clearer set of expectations has fueled our own curriculum development in Belchertown. Our English Language Arts and Mathematics curriculum guides have been fully aligned with the new Common Core. For more information on the Common Core State Standards, click here.

What are our next steps in Belchertown?

Our next steps are to ensure that all our educators become fully familiar with the standards and expectations for student learning and to translate that into content delivery with proven instructional strategies to ensure that our students achieve the highest levels of achievement possible in our classrooms.

New curriculum and news on our assessments, including the PARCC pilot, will be topics of conversation at our first Coffee and Conversation sessions with the Superintendent, scheduled for the next few upcoming weeks. More details to come on these in the next few days.

John and Abigail Adams Scholarships

I am pleased to announce that 65 members of the Class of 2014 are eligible for John and Abigail Adams Scholarships as a result of their performance on the MCAS! Ms. Vigneux, BHS Principal, and I will be presenting the award letters to the recipients on October 10th at BHS. I will post a photo from the event on my next blog post - stay tuned!

As always, if you have any questions about this post, please feel free to call me at 413.323.0423 or email me at superintendent@belchertown.org.

Best regards, Dr. Judith Houle, Superintendent of Schools