1. Using Chess to Move Towards the Common Core State Standards
Chess has a plethora of research supporting how it raises student abilities, and it now can also serve as a promising tool to connect
with the CCSS that are newly in place across most of the country.
Text & Photos by Victoria W. Guadagno
On February 17, 2011, my 4th
grade class from P.S. 18Q held a
fair. Not a county or science fair, but something new – a chess fair.
Academic benchmarks have been raised due to the Common Core
State Standard Initiatives which have been formally adopted in most
U.S. states. The standards are built upon the most current
philosophies to prepare students for success in college and careers.
Wanting to immediately incorporate these new ideals into my
teaching, I used the approach that I have consistently found works
best for meeting challenges: Face up to the unknown, do the work to
comprehend, and take action to demonstrate understanding. As a
teacher, I had the added advantage of a team of students, eager to
join me on the journey.
I read to the children many official wordings of the standards, and
then translated them into kid-friendly language. The idea of using
our beloved chess to express a command of these ideals was met with
great enthusiasm. And so was born the first Chess Fair at P.S. 18.
The students were encouraged to select a standard connected with
their individual goals, and to build their project around it. This
allowed pupils to honor their needs as well as personal learning
styles and intelligences. Some chose math standards, others chose
from the English language arts list.
Among several projects that addressed standards in the domain of
measurement and data, one group created a display that compared the
amount of moves necessary for three different kinds of checkmate.
They rendered the comparative data into a bar graph, and also had a
chess board set up to demonstrate the execution of each endgame to
visitors. They were proving their ability to reason abstractly and
quantitatively, making sense of ―quantities and their relationships in
problem situations.‖ They validated their ability to decontextualize
— to abstract a given situation (specific checkmate sequences) by
representing each one symbolically, and manipulated the
representing symbols (bar graphs) without needing to attend to their
referents (the chess pieces and positions). When visitors had
questions, the students played out the mates on the chessboard for
clarity, displaying the required ability to recontextualize, to ―pause as
needed during the manipulation process in order to probe into the
referents for the symbols involved.‖
An example of fulfilling a 4th
grade writing standard requiring
―narratives that developed real or imagined experiences or events
using descriptive details‖ was at a nearby table. Tricia read aloud her
original action story about a general’s first skirmish in the Civil War,
while Alexis simultaneously provided a visual display by making
related and synchronized battle moves on the chessboard.
There were numerous other equally creative displays touching
base with a large cross section of the common core, and the families
and students had an authentic and shared entertaining experience of
the new state standards in action.
It is my belief that when approached this way, the CCSS initiative
need not be at all in disharmony with the more modern theories such
as those of Howard Gardner regarding multiple intelligences and
learning styles. By adding an enrichment topic as a point of entry, in
this particular case chess, an engaging means is provided for students
to communicate mastery of various concepts in their own, unique
ways at all levels of rigor from Bloom’s taxonomy. Chess attracts
students at every learning level and clearly can provide inspiration
for a wide range of performance tasks for assessment.
Thanks to the positive response of students, parents and
administration, the Chess Fair will continue as an annual event.
Different checkmate sequences were decontextualized into a bar
graph. A chessboard was available so that the original referents
could be manipulated to clarify data for visitors.