Week 2, January 15th 2020

A big part that stands out for me within the k-12 standards is the speaking and listening portion. This is an extremely important and valuable part of teaching that is not outwardly spoken about in a lot of teaching situations. This must be a difficult part of the common core to teach because kids do not often know that they are learning how to speak and listen. Most of the time, teachers will let their students know what they will be learning about, but in my experience, a teacher has never outwardly said that we are going to learn how to speak and listen. I also think it is interesting that this is included as a common core standard. I feel that it would be very hard to quantify or test a students speaking and listening ability. With standards like CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.1.1.A, "Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions (e.g., listening to others with care, speaking one at a time about the topics and texts under discussion)," the vague nature of the standard makes it extremely hard to know how to measure student knowledge. What is a good way to measure the ability of students speaking and listening skills?

In my experience, the only way teachers measured our speaking and listening skills was with in-class discussion. They would measure the number of times you talked, and not necessarily if it related to the topic, or what you said in general. For kids who don't feel comfortable talking in class, they would fail any of these standards. Common core seems to me as if it's trying to get people all over the country to know the same things, which could be a good thing for basic skills, but when you try to measure the worth of a child's knowledge by how they express it in a test or classroom setting with 30 other students, that is where the effectiveness of the standards come into question for me.