Common Core: Getting There Globally | Asia Society Skip to main content

Unsupported Browser Detected.
It seems the web browser you're using doesn't support some of the features of this site. For the best experience, we recommend using a modern browser that supports the features of this website. We recommend Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Edge

  • Back to asiasociety.org
  • Professional Development
    • Online Courses
    • Events
  • Educator Resources
    • About Global Competence
    • Teaching for Global Understanding
    • Improve Your Chinese Language Teaching
    • Career and Technical Education
    • Global CTE Toolkit
    • Students CTE Toolkit
    • Secondary CTE Toolkit
    • Postsecondary CTE Toolkit
  • Our Ideas
    • Publications
    • Recent Articles
    • What is Global Competence?
  • Asia Society at Home
    • Asia Society Kids Booklists
    • Cooking with STEAM
    • At-Home Adventures Through Asia
    • Global Learning
    • Teaching Resources Hub
  • Education For Equity
    • Discussion Series: Teaching Truth to Power
    • Addressing Racism Through Global Competence
    • Staff Picks
    • #OwnVoices Virtual Reading Room
    • Raising Global Citizens
    • Spotlight on Asian Americans
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Where We Work
    • Our Initiatives
    • Results and Opportunities
    • News and Events
    • Institutional Independence Policy
Search
Center for Global Education
  • Professional Development
    • Online Courses
    • Events
  • Educator Resources
    • About Global Competence
    • Teaching for Global Understanding
    • Improve Your Chinese Language Teaching
    • Career and Technical Education
    • Global CTE Toolkit
    • Students CTE Toolkit
    • Secondary CTE Toolkit
    • Postsecondary CTE Toolkit
  • Our Ideas
    • Publications
    • Recent Articles
    • What is Global Competence?
  • Asia Society at Home
    • Asia Society Kids Booklists
    • Cooking with STEAM
    • At-Home Adventures Through Asia
    • Global Learning
    • Teaching Resources Hub
  • Education For Equity
    • Discussion Series: Teaching Truth to Power
    • Addressing Racism Through Global Competence
    • Staff Picks
    • #OwnVoices Virtual Reading Room
    • Raising Global Citizens
    • Spotlight on Asian Americans
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Where We Work
    • Our Initiatives
    • Results and Opportunities
    • News and Events
    • Institutional Independence Policy

Common Core: Getting There Globally

Exploring the globe

by Elizabeth Howald

Eighty-seven percent of K-12 students in the U.S. live in states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards. Though this widespread approval is no small feat in a country that has long resisted national learning standards, the Common Core cannot truly be called a success until the standards are effectively implemented.

With Common Core assessments coming online in 2014–2015, educators have had to grapple with tough questions on a tight timeline: What does a lesson that is aligned to the Common Core look like in practice? Must the standards’ emphasis on skills come at the expense of important content knowledge? And what is a complex informational text anyway?

Thankfully, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Common Core State Standards Initiative—along with numerous other organizations and institutions—have published resources to help educators understand the fundamentals of the Common Core and to unpack its terminology. State departments of education have created instructional materials and model lessons, and publishing companies have scrambled to revamp texts and to offer programs that align with Common Core standards.

While these resources provide much-needed answers to the questions outlined above, they largely overlook one critical aspect of the standards: the Common Core’s support for learning about diverse histories and cultures.

The authors of the Common Core State Standards clearly view global awareness as an essential feature of college and career readiness. The standards explicitly call for students to learn about global histories and cultures through literature and informational texts from across genres, eras, and world regions. Despite this endorsement of global learning, many Common Core resources lack an international dimension. In fact, when a participant at a recent conference on curriculum development spoke with five exhibitors about their Common Core offerings, she discovered that not one of them had a program that includes a global dimension.

To overlook the global aspect of the Common Core would constitute not only a failure in implementing the standards, but also in preparing students for successful college, career, and life experiences. To thrive in today’s global society, students need to communicate and collaborate across cultures and regions. Thus, as educators and institutions transition from a theoretical understanding of the Common Core to its practical application, it is imperative that they emphasize global learning and awareness.

For many educators, the idea of teaching global literature is not new. Teachers might have already incorporated global folktales, myths, poetry, plays, or works of fiction into their teaching. However, the mandate to integrate informational texts and literary nonfiction can be more daunting. Luckily, the Common Core definition of “informational text” is broad, including (but not limited to) biographies, memoir, technical texts, graphs and charts, speeches, essays, opinion pieces, and digital sources such as blogs.

With a little strategic thinking and the help of the Internet, educators can find global resources for teaching world histories, cultures, and current events in ways that support Common Core objectives. For example, in addition to reading an American literary classic like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried when learning about the Vietnam War, ELA or history students could read oral history interviews from Vietnamese soldiers and civilians to learn about their perspectives on the war. Alternatively, they could examine Ho Chi Minh’s speeches to explore both his style of speaking and his changing views on Communism and Vietnam’s struggle for independence. For speaking or writing standards, teachers could have students debate how the U.S. should have responded to Ho Chi Minh, or ask them to identify Vietnamese motivations for fighting.

Because the Common Core applies to secondary teachers of many subjects, it opens up opportunities to work together across departments. In one example we have witnessed, an ELA and history teacher worked together to craft interdisciplinary curriculum about Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell’s essay about being a police officer in Burma. The history teacher paired it with informational texts explaining the complexities of colonialism in Burma. From a different angle, the English teacher had students “storyboard” its structural elements, show how Orwell's choices of words helped to shape meaning and tone in the essay, and compare how Orwell and modern graphic novelist Guy Delisle (Burma Chronicles) both created a sense of detachment from the Burmese.

Global resources have a place in elementary classrooms as well. Examining Japanese railway maps and watching videos of Japanese trains would provide students with insight into Japanese cultural values of order, efficiency, and punctuality. Writing narrative or informational paragraphs about the videos would reinforce student learning and develop writing skills, while drawing comparisons between public transportation systems in the U.S. and Japan would build critical thinking and analytical skills.

These teaching ideas—along with many more—are explained in detail at Primary Source World, an online collection of activities built around global primary sources and aligned with Common Core reading and writing standards. You can also find global resources in “Reading Nonfiction: A Global Approach to the Common Core,” an online resource guide that contains recommended global texts for various grade levels as well as links to online databases, articles, and teaching strategies.

The resources and ideas mentioned here are a good starting point for thinking about the practical application of Common Core objectives, but they are just a first step towards implementing the standards. Educators will need to participate in Common-Core-focused professional development; to reevaluate their approach to teaching fiction and nonfiction; to challenge their students to interact and engage in more cognitively demanding ways; and, maybe most important, to ensure that the hard work being done in classrooms is adequately preparing students to succeed in our increasingly interconnected world. This will require educators to integrate global education into their curriculum and to use global resources that help students build essential analytical and cross-cultural communication skills. These tasks will not always be easy, but they are necessary steps if our students are to become productive, responsible, and successful world citizens.

Common Core Resources

  • Common Core State Standards Initiative 
  • Partnership for 21st Century Skills Common Core Toolkit
  • Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers 
  • Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium

Teaching Resources

  • Primary Source Nonfiction Resource Guide
  • Primary Source Regional Guides
  • Primary Source World
  • World Digital Library
  • Online Newspapers

Elizabeth Howald is a program director at Primary Source, a nonprofit organization in Watertown, Massachusetts, dedicated to deepening teachers’ knowledge of world histories and cultures.

Related Content

  • An elementary school Japanese language class. (Sarah Lovrien/Asia Society)
    China Learning Initiatives

    World Language Teachers Find Familiar Ground with the Common Core

    Heather Clydesdale on how the pedagogical approaches that world language teachers have been using for years bear striking similarities to the Common Core.
  • China Learning Initiatives

    Language Learning in the Age of the Common Core

    How collaboration around Common Core ideas makes education more meaningful and interesting.
  • Holding a light bulb (tumpikuja/istockphoto)
    article

    Students as Professionals

    The business world develops engaged and innovative employees by building achievement and performance—and how schools can do the same.
  • (artvea/istockphoto)
    article

    The Key to Successful Expanded Learning Programs Is Mastery

    Learning isn't limited to the school day. Expand your thinking on expanded learning time.
  • Globe in a lightbulb. (photocanal25/istockphoto)

    Why We Need Competency-Based Education

    An alternative to standardized tests—and why it makes sense for the global innovation age.

Read

  • series

    Efficiency in Communication

    Students compare different communication methods in this short lesson on efficiency in communication.
  • series

    Create a Language

    Students create their own language in this lesson as a way to understand how languages are constructed.
  • series

    The Many Ways the World Communicates

    A short activity that stretches student understanding of what language truly is.

Watch

  • Education

    Global Ed Explorer

    An affordable and engaging way to give educators access to the Center for Global Education’s renowned global competence content.
    Watch Now
  • Education
     /  Hong Kong

    Developing Global Mindsets for Hong Kong’s Future (Complete)

    A distinguished panel of educators and supporters of education discusses the importance and key challenges in developing international perspectives among the territory's youngsters.
    Watch Now
  • Education
     /  New York

    Transforming 21st Century Education Systems (Complete)

    A high-level dialogue on how to transform primary and secondary education systems to foster global competence.
    Watch Now
  • Education

    Asia Society Presents the Center for Global Education

    Introducing a new initiative will transform education to prepare young people for a global 21st century.
    Watch Now
  • Education
     /  New York

    Introducing the Center for Global Education (Complete)

    Asia Society kicks off its initiative to impart critical skills to students whose lives are defined by an increasingly interconnected world.
    Watch Now
About
  • Mission & History
  • Our People
  • Become a Member
  • Career Opportunities
  • Corporate Involvement
visit us
  • Hong Kong
  • New York
  • Texas
global network
  • Australia
  • France
  • India
  • Japan
  • Korea
  • Northern California
  • Philippines
  • Southern California
  • Switzerland
  • Washington, D.C.
resources
  • Arts
  • Asia Society Magazine
  • ChinaFile
  • Current Affairs
  • Education
  • For Kids
  • Policy
  • Video
shop
  • AsiaStore
initiatives
  • Arts & Museum Summit
  • Asia 21 Young Leaders
  • Asia Arts Game Changer Awards
  • Asia Game Changer Awards
  • Asia Society Museum: The Asia Arts & Museum Network
  • Asia Society Policy Institute
  • Asian Women Empowered
  • Center for Global Education
  • Center on U.S.-China Relations
  • China Learning Initiatives
  • Coal + Ice
  • Creative Voices of Muslim Asia
  • Global Cities Education Network
  • Global Talent Initiatives
  • U.S.-Asia Entertainment Summit
  • U.S.-China Dialogue
  • U.S.-China Museum Summit
Connect
Email Signup For the media
Asia Society logo
©2022 Asia Society | Privacy Statement | Accessibility | Terms & Conditions | Sitemap | Contact

Asia Society takes no institutional position on policy issues and has no affiliation with any government.
The views expressed by Asia Society staff, fellows, experts, report authors, program speakers, board members, and other affiliates are solely their own. Learn more.

 

 

  • Visit Us
  • Hong Kong
  • New York
  • Texas
  • Global Network
  • Australia
  • France
  • India
  • Japan
  • Korea
  • Northern California
  • Philippines
  • Southern California
  • Switzerland
  • Washington, DC