Implementation and Resistance: A View of the Common Core from the Classroom

Beth Anderson will focus on the obstacles to implementing the new Common Core standards in the high school history classroom.  Dr. Anderson foresees a great deal of resistance to change, because not only will history teachers need to be convinced that these standards will be around long enough to make changes worthwhile, they will also need to be both trained out of their NCLB acquired multiple choice syndrome and explicitly shown why history teachers must address "language" standards-and this will be a bigger challenge than most administrators seem to want to acknowledge.  She will also discuss what she sees as a “distressingly large gap between what history teachers should be able to do in terms of teaching writing and primary source analysis and what they actually can do,” a gap that has been significantly widened with the focus on data and content standards over the last 10 years.  Her remarks will conclude by making some possible suggestions for the training and re-training of history teachers and raise questions she believes many history teachers will have about the new standards and their role in teaching them.