How the CCRS Math Standards Are Raising the Bar for Math Learning in Alabama

By Jackie Flowers
Instructional Partner
Discovery Middle School

I want to write about how the CCRS math standards are making a positive difference for the students and teachers in my Madison City middle school and across the state.

As an Instructional Partner at Discovery Middle, I am a co-learner, a resource broker, an instructional consultant, and a cognitive coach for teachers.

I help lead the professional development at Discovery MS, and I support our teachers with the implementation of the College- and Career-Ready Standards. Thanks to my participation in the state Instructional Partners Pilot project, I am blessed with the opportunity to not only go in and out of classrooms at my school but to visit other schools in Alabama and observe the teaching and learning going on there.

From my perspective as a former high school math teacher, I have seen an amazing increase in rigor and high expectations for students with the implementation of the Math CCRS. In the past, we discussed rigor with teachers, but the misconception continued to prevail among them that if you assigned more math problems then you attained a more rigorous curriculum.

That’s changed. With the implementation of the CCRS math standards, teachers are now seeing that the rigor is embedded within the curriculum itself. The comprehensive standards require us to focus on the depth of student understanding revolving around the mathematical concepts. Students are expected to explain, justify, model and defend their problem solving capabilities.

How CCRS improves the math classroom

Think of CCRS as a GPS system that guides our teachers and students to think deeper and go further with mathematical learning — and then to apply the mathematics to everyday problem solving as well as innovation.

In the past, our state math standards focused more on surface knowledge. While the standards  sometimes related that knowledge to the real world, they did not really push students to understand how to apply the mathematical knowledge in practical and innovative ways.

The previous state standards could be achieved by expecting students to rely mostly on rote memory and procedural solving of problems. They did not require students to really probe into the use of mathematics nor the mathematical relationships that underlay all math-related studies, including engineering and technology.

CCRS establishes Standards of Mathematical Practice

The College- and Career-Ready Standards include all the key content that students need to learn about mathematics. Importantly, they also establish Eight Standards for Mathematical Practice in Alabama classrooms. Students will:

  1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
  2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
  3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
  4. Model with mathematics.
  5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
  6. Attend to precision.
  7. Look for and make use of structure.
  8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

Why do we need these standards of practice? These are the standards that help students dive beneath the surface to deeper learning. (See this short video explanation.) And they actually help drive improvements in teaching.

The Eight Standards for Mathematical Practice place an emphasis on student demonstrations of learning. And that really requires the teacher to be able to probe the thought processes students go through as they look for the answers to mathematical problems. “Asking a student to understand something means asking a teacher to assess whether the student has understood it.” (Common Core Standards Initiative [CCSSI]), 2010, p. 4)

The previous state standards were satisfied, really, if the student could provide (or guess) the right answer: x=3. Under the CCRS, students and teachers are equally concerned with knowing “how did you get x=3 as the answer?”

These standards don’t dictate to us

I know that people might be reluctant to move to a set of “national” standards. But the Alabama College- and Career-Ready Standards for mathematics are OUR standards. They are built from a foundation offered by the Common Core Standards, yes. But in Alabama we have included state standards that go above and beyond the CCSS.

Really, we have the best of both. We have components in our standards tailored to Alabama’s particular needs. And we are also allowing our students to meet challenging benchmarks that are shared across the United States, so that we make sure our scholars are ready to compete on a global scale. The CCRS is the basis for moving student learning forward in Alabama.

Another benefit in blending state and national elements in our Alabama CCRS: today’s students have a lot of mobility. I teach in an area where we have a lot of military families who often find themselves moving from state to state. How great it will be for their children — our students — to have as little disruption to their learning and curriculum as possible. These students may attend several schools in several states before graduating. (And some will certainly return to Alabama to pursue college and careers.) It makes sense for them to go through school on a learning path marked by the same basic rigorous and viable math standards.

I stand by the implementation of the CCRS because I have already observed in my own school and district and in other schools across Alabama what these high expectations can do to improve mathematical learning for all students. Teachers have flexibility to be creative and innovative in our classrooms as we pursue these standards. They simply set forth the expectation that we will do our work professionally and well.

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