To PARCC or not to PARCC

If our students are going to succeed on assessments with content and formats they’ve never seen, on a novel online interface, then we need to assist them by providing strategies and experiences throughout the year that they can apply on testing day. Take for example the English assessments. Students need to know three new and very challenging genres: the Narrative Task, which includes literary and informational text; the Research Simulation Task, which requires students to analyze three pieces of informational text, of which one may be multimedia; and the Literary Analysis Task, which in the past was only taught in high school honors or advanced placement courses.

For the upcoming school year, districts should train all of their instructors on very explicit PARCC concepts and implement targeted PARCC lesson plans. Standards Solution has 20 reading, 20 writing, and 20 reading PARCC lessons plans with unique content for every lesson (540 in all) on every grade level, grades 3-11. During the next school year districts should consider how they can begin integrating the PARCC concepts into existing practice. Two years from now, districts should be integrating PARCC concepts into daily instruction. For students to succeed on PARCC, administrators need to move their entire district to one place. That’s a difficult task without a specific plan in place that uses high quality resources. 

To assure a rigorous and thorough understanding of PARCC, Standards Solution has developed numerous workshops: workshops that introduce the assessments’ major components and specs; workshops that provide an in-depth understanding of the ELA and math assessments (each conducted over a full day); and workshops that hone in on specific elements, such as Creating Quality Literary Analysis Tasks and Preparing Students for PARCC’s End-of-Year Mathematics Tests. But workshops alone cannot fill the bill. We provide assistance in the classroom with demonstration lessons (covering all aspects of the Common Core and PARCC), student product reviews, and targeted in-class support.

When we work with districts we provide them with access to our online software systems. There’s the Improved Instruction System with its 50,000 Common Core items, lesson plans, and workshops, and our Assessment Analyzer which houses our online assessments and our online formative assessments with technology-enhanced items and prescriptive lesson plans. 

But even with all of these resources, a workshop is a “tell me,” a demonstration lesson is a “show me,” and a student product review and in-class support is a “keep coming back until I make these concepts my own.” I think that we are different from other professional development companies. We do not want to work with a district on the same goal for more than three years. We want to assure that the district will be successful in the long term without us. Instead of “lean on my perspective,” we embrace the “teaching a person how to fish” philosophy. 

Victoria Pagonis

Founder and President
Standards Solution