The So-Called “Instructional Shifts” of the Common Core and What They Mean

Long-winded Introduction/Preamble

The San Luis Coastal Unified School District is in the central coast area of California. It includes schools in San Luis Obispo and the nearby towns of Morro Bay and Los Osos. The district, under the direction of the current superintendent, follows the trend of  teaching that adheres to constructivist-oriented approaches; i.e., inquiry type lessons, with teachers facilitating rather than teaching. The math text used starting in middle school through sophmore year in high school is CPM, an inquiry-based program.

The district is so much beholden to this philosophy that part of the interview procedure for teaching jobs entails giving a mini-lesson to students, which is in turn rated according to criteria in the Danielson Framework.  The Danielson Framework is (according to their website) “a research-based set of components of instruction, aligned to the INTASC standards, and grounded in a constructivist view of learning and teaching.”

In other…