Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories exploring the statewide implementation of Common Core standards in North Carolina, and what it means for teachers and students.
Laura Hunter’s U.S. History students at South Brunswick High School have read President George Washington’s farewell address to the nation.
They’ve read a set letters from Abigail Adams to John Adams and his responses to her, and a series of papers by Alexander Hamilton.
They reviewed primary-source material from early factory life to paint a picture of what labor looked like in the north.
At home, Hunter’s kindergarten-aged son’s homework had him searching for different letters of the alphabet in various places throughout their home.
Back in Hunter’s classroom, there’s no teacher desk, and gone are the days of the rows of student desks.
Instead, students’ desks are set up in groups, and Hunter is among them.
Hunter, Brunswick County’s Teacher of the Year, isn’t just teaching U.S. History to her students.
History is the vehicle. Hunter is teaching her students to think.
This is the Common Core.
For the first time in more than 30 years, a new statewide curriculum change has been implemented in North Carolina, but the Common Core was not designed by government bureaucrats.
It was designed within the educational community, leading many educators to embrace the change in a time when teachers have become traumatized from a barrage of testing requirements and government mandates, Hunter said.
Common Core was implemented in grades kindergarten through second last year, but this year marks the full statewide implementation in kindergarten through 12th grades.
“The people who have coped the most seamlessly in this transition have been the kids, because they live in a world that is multi-dimensional and highly engaging already. The people who have had the hardest time in making this transition have been the adults that are involved in this process. I think teachers are doing an excellent job of adjusting to a world that is not a chalk-and-talk world,” Hunter said.
The hardest adjustment has come from the public.
“I think parents and the community have a preconceived notion of what instruction looks like, feels like, sounds like in school. And because we are making lots of really good instructional changes that are really brain-based and research-based, we know that this is really better for kinds,” Hunter said.
The Common Core classroom looks different than what most people remember from the educational experience, and there’s a reason for it.
“I work right along with my students. There is no place in my classroom that is off limits to my kids, because this is our collaborative space. They have to own their learning experience. That means it needs to start right here in my classroom from day one. They build. They own it. They direct it. I’m here to provide the scaffolding so they learn how to think. And that’s what you see when you look around my classroom,” Hunter said.
Part of that challenge is defining how people think.
“Thinking has been for a long time a very vague thing that is very hard to define. But thinking is a visual event. You can look around my classroom and you can see thinking has become very visible in my space. That is in science, in math, in English, in social studies, in broadcasting, in horticulture. That is where this all comes together. We are all unified in this one common goal, which is kids need to become thinkers in order to become active participants of the 21st century world,” Hunter said.
