K-5 Common Core standards in-progress!

EssayTagger's free Common Core Rubric Creation Tool has been very well received by teachers. But I initially only adapted the 6-12 standards. I'm finally gearing up for K-5!

Our free Common Core Rubric Creation Tool is quite popular. It's been used to create over 7,500 Common Core-aligned rubrics in just its first year! And easily half of our customer support emails are from people who want us to incorporate the K-5 standards.

Well, I hear you and I am working on it!! Check out the work-in-progress.


Want to help? 
I'd love some collaborators! This is difficult! Use the support widget on the website, respond in the comments below, or find me on Twitter (@KeithMukai) if you want to contribute!


Some background
For those of you that don't know, the innovative aspect of the tool is that it breaks down each standard into its assessable sub-components:

This solves the problem that teachers face when they look at the standards; the dang things are just too vague, cover too much ground, or just aren't assessable.

It was also a crap-ton of work for me! Those assessable sub-components aren't part of the official CCSS specification; I had to stare at each standard and find a concise way to translate the standard into its assessable sub-components. That's not easy. And I'm not necessarily going to get everything right.

So I also made the tool flexible so that if you don't like my terminology or the way I've done it, you can edit the labels or even add totally new subcomponents as you see fit.

You then end up with a rubric grid that you can further customize, add additional CCSS-aligned rubric elements, add non-CCSS-aligned rubric elements (e.g. "Class Citizenship" or anything else not captured by the CCSS). You can also add performance descriptors (the traditional rubric text we're used to seeing) in each grid cell. You can share your rubric online (post a link, Twitter, email, etc), print it, or download it as an Excel CSV file.

And, of course, since this tool is part of EssayTagger, you can apply your rubric to an EssayTagger assignment and produce Common Core-aligned results data as you grade!

The Common Core Rubric Creation Tool is free for anyone to try and there's no registration or sign in required.

That being said, I certainly would not be disappointed if you decided to go deeper into the EssayTagger world and create a free trial account in order to see what life is like when you grade essays in our system. And as I always have to point out: EssayTagger is NOT an auto-grader. You make all the evaluations, you provide all the feedback. We just make it easier and more efficient for you to do so!

Where we're headed: school-wide data unification

EssayTagger was initially developed as a tool to help individual teachers. Now we're taking aim at unifying all writing assessment data across an entire school or district. Here's why this is valuable and here's how we'll do it.

The problem: Disparate writing assessments
In a typical school there's a wide array of teachers who assess writing throughout the year. And with the increasing emphasis on "reading and writing across the curriculum," those numbers are growing. English and Social Studies teachers are busy as ever grading essays, but now there are Math teachers who are assigning reflection paragraphs. PE teachers are assigning sportsmanship essays.

Unfortunately writing assessments are almost always isolated within the confines of each individual classroom. The History teacher knows that his students are struggling with using evidence in their writing, but he has no idea that his students' English teacher is frustrated with the same problem. There simply aren't any lines of communication across departments to share this information and collaborate on a solution.

But the worst offenders are the district writing assessments. Many schools will do a school-wide writing assessment that is scored on a standardized rubric which is then coded into a database so that administrators can pore over the results. These district writing assessments exist outside of the normal curriculum (e.g. in the middle of the Huck Finn unit the sophomores will be asked to write about texting while driving). Worse, the students rarely ever see the results and almost never receive any feedback. They're writing into a black hole. And, oddly enough, teachers often don't even see the results. They might see some bullet points on an institute day slideshow or get the data second-hand from their department head.

Disparate writing assessments are pure silliness.


Writing--and assessing--across the curriculum
We've bought into the value of writing across the curriculum and now it's time to unify assessment data across the curriculum.

Every writing assessment tells us more about each student and our school's overall trends. Assessment data shouldn't be cloistered within the walls of each classroom, but rather should be contributing to a rich web of highly interconnected data. This is the "web-ification" of the school structure; teachers need to think of themselves as part of a network instead of individual sovereign islands.

When Bobby's English teacher grades his essay, his History teacher should be able to see the results down to each individual skill being assessed. The district writing assessments should add to this pool of information and provide more insight to all of Bobby's teachers. The Culinary Arts teacher should know what strengths and weaknesses to expect when she assigns a research paper on launching your own restaurant. The school's writing center or peer tutors could benefit from a detailed skills profile for  each student that comes for help.

How to get your administrators excited about EssayTagger

You (hopefully) want EssayTagger at your school. And we would both rather see schools and districts pay for the licenses.

To that end, we've developed a new slideshow presentation aimed specifically at administrators. It gives a quick overview of how EssayTagger works and then dives deep into what administrators care about most: data and Common Core!

View the slideshow

Share the slideshow with your administrator and encourage them to send any questions my way (all of my contact info is provided at the end of the presentation).

We see a trifecta of benefits for teachers, administrators, and -- of course -- students. If we can get administrators excited and onboard, we can all be happy campers!

Latest Update: Common Core progression-tracking!

Grades and GPAs are just rough estimates. It's more important to keep track of which skills your students have mastered. That's where Common Core-aligned progression tracking comes in. It's a big deal.

Most of us have had this skeptical suspicion: Am I aligning my curriculum to Common Core just because some bureaucrats said I have to?

If that were all that was behind Common Core, then it would absolutely be a waste of our time.

But curriculum alignment is just stage 1. Here's the full picture:

1. Align curriculum to Common Core
2. Assess within Common Core
3. Report and track student data within Common Core
4. Develop and share remediation strategies tied to Common Core

Only at this high-level view does it all start to come together. The overarching goal is to enable apples-to-apples comparisons that can then be used to drive stage 4 where every teacher in America is creating interchangeable exercises and materials.

Let's be more concrete. EssayTagger is focused on stages 1-3, culminating in our Common Core-aligned progression tracking that was just released:

Latest Update: Language and Speaking & Listening Common Core standards added!

Based on teachers' feedback, I've added the Language and Speaking & Listening standards to our Common Core Rubric Creation Tool.

The Language standards are necessarily quite mechanical (e.g. L.9-10.2a is the semicolon) and as such are often more suited to drill-and-skill type exercises and assessments, though certainly an instructor could construct an essay rubric that included a few specific mechanical elements.

The Speaking & Listening standards are, not surprisingly, even further afield from EssayTagger's emphasis on essay assessment. However, the Common Core Rubric Creation Tool isn't limited to just EssayTagger use and teachers did request that this standard be included. And, if you're a little creative, there actually are ways to make the Speaking & Listening standards work within EssayTagger (e.g. evaluating students' self-assessments after delivering a speech).

Both of these Common Core standards were added to the tool as a direct result of teacher requests. I had intentionally passed them up when I originally released the tool.

We are incredibly receptive to instructor feedback so keep the comments coming!

Announcing: Free Common Core Rubric Creation Tool!

We're super-proud to announce the release of our new tool that helps teachers create Common Core-aligned rubrics! Open to the public, totally free.

EssayTagger's Common Core Rubric Creation Tool

http://www.essaytagger.com/commoncore

You are ahead of the curve and are working hard to align your curriculum to Common Core. But assessing and tracking your students' progress within Common Core is difficult -- and nigh impossible to do for essays.

I spent the whole dang summer wrestling with the standards, trying to figure out how to incorporate them into real-world, practical writing rubrics.

My initial approach was to try to coax the actual text of the standards into a more rubric-friendly format. But teachers shouldn't have to waste their time adapting the W.8.1a text just to be able to include "Thesis" on their rubrics.

Instead just evaluate "Thesis" like you normally would but add, "Oh, and by the way, 'Thesis' is part of W.8.1a." This is where the tool comes in to help you.

Making Common Core work, pt2: The big picture

Teachers and administrators need to understand the big picture of where Common Core is headed. Here's your quick preview.

The long view

At a surface level the Common Core standards specify what students should know or be able to do. We're focused on how to integrate that into our classrooms. That part is straightforward and obvious.

But the big picture is much bigger than this. 

Establishing a common set of target skills is just step one. The Common Core standards are not a goal unto themselves but merely a means to an end. The real goals lay beyond. One of the major ones, not surprisingly, is all about data.

Knowing a student's GPA doesn't convey enough information. Knowing that she got a B- in Sophomore English isn't enough. But knowing that she's struggling with W.9-10.1d is useful.

The standards create a common reference point for learning targets that are otherwise ad hoc, disorganized, or nonexistent. Forget leaving notes to next year's teachers that "Johnny is weak on fractions" or that "Sarah struggles with citations." That world is coming to an end. Too much information is lost that way, too much time is wasted on reassessing students' abilities at the beginning of each year.

Instead teachers will have standardized reporting tools that use the Common Core framework to track a student's entire educational record on a skill-by-skill progression level. 

Common Core isn't just about what to teach, it's about tracking what has been learned.

Making Common Core work, pt1: Why it's awkward

Forget "aligning" with Common Core; how the heck do you even begin to use Common Core?!

This multi-part series will explore some possibilities for making Common Core relevant and actually useful in real-world classrooms.

I've been engaged in a number of great discussions lately about how best to incorporate the Common Core English/Language Arts (CC ELA) standards into the classroom. My vision for how to work with these standards is evolving quickly and I wanted to share my thoughts to stimulate further discussions.

And very soon I will be implementing some form of Common Core integration with EssayTagger. I'd rather have the idea be well-thrashed out before I build a half-baked solution.

But first we have to understand the Common Core ELA beast for what it is.


Basic tensions
Common Core is inevitable. It'll be on us faster than any of us are ready for and we best get prepared ASAP. Gripe and moan and cry all you want, it ain't gonna change a thing.

Worse: The language of the Common Core standards is not classroom-friendly or, more accurately, it is not student-friendly.

Worse(er) (hee hee! Relax!): The Common Core standards are not directly compatible with how we classroom teachers work with our students and provide feedback.

This all being said, the Common Core ELA standards are not bad. They are actually quite reasonable. They're just not a great fit; the administrators' standards-based data-tracking world does not align smoothly with classroom reality. Shocker.


Common Core - A closer look
Let's stop talking and dive in.

New Rubric: Common Core Explanatory / Informative Writing (9-10) rubric

The first of many rubrics distilled from the Common Core State Standards.

Update 9/21/12:
In the six months since this post was originally published, my view of how to integrate with Common Core has evolved a considerable amount. This post is now old news. I've built a free, publicly-accessible tool to help teachers create their own customized Common Core-aligned rubrics. It's going to make life SO much easier for all of us!

Read about this new approach or jump straight to the EssayTagger Common Core Rubric Creation Tool

Check it out and let me know what you think!


Original Post:
The Common Core State Standards. Oof.

You've heard all the talk. You suspect they might get in your way and make your life a living hell. Just thinking about them makes you want to curl up on the couch in the fetal position and take a nap (my default reaction to moderately stressful things).

I'm not here to sell you on its merits or argue that there is a lack thereof. I'm here to make your life a little bit easier when you find yourself held accountable to the Common Core standards when teaching writing.