Lafayette County Schools Embrace Common Core State Standards

As Lafayette Middle school wraps up its first year of fully implementing Common Core, expectation and enthusiasm are high among teachers and administrators.

Melissa Johnson strives to use a varied, interesting curriculum to teach social studies at Lafayette Middle School. Rather than simply read about Pangea, her students created their own picture of what the landmass may have looked like.

The impending switch to Common Core State Standards as the primary assessment of Mississippi public schools has been one of the hottest topics of debate in the realms of both education and politics so far in 2014.

Although the standards were adopted by the state board of education in 2010, many schools are just now beginning to fully implement them. Melissa Johnson, a social studies teacher at Lafayette Middle School, is finishing up her second year of teaching with the Common Core standards in mind.

“When I first saw the standards for Common Core I thought, ‘If I’ve been doing my job correctly, then this isn’t new,’” Johnson said. To her, the standards are not a rigid curriculum as the opposition often argues.

“It’s the unspoken curriculum that I think, speaking for the middle school, a lot of teachers were practicing in their classrooms,” Johnson said. “It changed from something that was understood to being a requirement.”

LMS assistant principal Joseph Adams is also supportive of the way his school is implementing the standards, at first slowly and now with full force. Last year, the school pushed to facilitate the qualities of teaching Common Core, and the 2013-2014 school year has seen full application of the standards.

“The thing is, these are standards; it’s not a curriculum,” Adams said. “They’re not telling you how to teach it; they’re telling you the things students need to be prepared for by the time they get out of high school beginning with tenth grade, ninth, and on down to kindergarten.”

One way that Johnson altered her teaching style to become more compatible with Common Core was to rearrange her classroom, allowing students to sit in groups, rather then individually.

“I arrange the seats in these pods so that the students are working independently as far as from the teacher, but they are also working collaboratively as a group to solve problems,” Johnson said.

Desks in Johnson's classroom are arranged into groups as opposed to traditional rows in order to give her students a chance to better communicate with one another as they learn to articulate their thoughts, one of Common Core's primary goals.

Because Common Core State Standards are expected to be more difficult than the previously used Mississippi standards, Lafayette chose to incorporate the standards in the elementary schools first and slowly work into upper schools in order to maintain a narrow learning gap.

“Our current third graders will be prepared wonderfully by they time we get them in sixth grade, but the gap comes when we’re doing Common Core and our fourth, fifth, and current sixth graders haven’t had that type of training,” Johnson said.

Adams sees the rise in expectation of students as a positive of Common Core.

“You always here that phrase ‘a mile long and an inch deep’ about those [old standards], and what we’re going for here is an inch long and a mile deep,” Adams said.

With continued enthusiasm from teachers and administrators, as well as public support from local lawmakers, Common Core is proving to be an asset to Lafayette County schools, perhaps a picture of what the rest of the state will grow to look like.