Why? Because these things are the core of 21st century skills. I think the Common Core literacy standards essentially boil down to this: we need to focus on increasing the quality and quantity of reading, writing, speaking, and argumentative thinking that our students do. Thankfully, the 80/20 rule is likely true of the CCSS there are a select few of those college and career readiness goals that will garner the lion's share of the long-term benefit for our kids. In actuality, if I were to seek to develop every single one of the Common Core skills for my 9th grade ELA and history students, I'd be trying to help my students master over 100 skills.Įven if you're not in a Common Core state, the same is likely true for your own literacy standards - 100+ goals.įorgive me for a lack of optimism here, but if the future of education in America depends on teachers being able to help students own and master 100+ literacy goals per year, I think we're in trouble. The Common Core are among the best lists of literacy standards we've yet seen in the USA, but there are still far too many of them: 32 college and career readiness anchor standards, with each of those standards containing several skills of its own. The 80/20 rule and the problem of Common Core implementation Let's take a look at two examples of how Teaching the Core, thus far, has sought to bring the Pareto Principle to bear on our issues. I think we have a wretched habit in education of over-complicating the most powerful 20% of educational practices. This is a crime we all commit together: teachers, administrators, literacy coaches, authors, consultants, you name it.Īt the risk of being labeled a reductionist, I've aggressively sought on this blog to boil our problems down to their roots and develop similarly boiled down solutions. So what does the 80/20 rule have to do with educators? In teacherspeak, the Pareto Principle would be written like this: 80% of student achievement results flow from 20% of the work we do with students. 80% of all stock market gains are realized by 20% of the investors and 20% of an individual portfolio.80% of company profits come from 20% of the products and customers.80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes. 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.Learning guru Tim Ferriss provides some other ways of phrasing the Pareto Principle in his intriguing book, The 4-Hour Work Week: It's named after an economist named Vilfredo Pareto, who observed over a hundred years ago that 80% of the wealth in Italy was held by 20% of the population, and (get this) that 80% of the peas in his garden were produced by 20% of the pea plants. The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is essentially this: for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. I think that all of us, if we train ourselves to focus in, can fairly quickly become adept at the 20% of things that yield 80% of the results. To be honest, I think few of us will get there, and if we do, it will be after about 30 years and 100,000 hours of intensive, deliberate practice.īut we don't need to wait until we have it all figured out before we can start being dang good teachers who make a huge impact with our careers. Teaching is this hugely complex, challenging calling, and that's why I'm glad it's mine - I don't foresee getting to a place where I'm like, “You know what? I've got this all figured out. Donovan, used under CC attribution license.) The peas will make sense in a minute.
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