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Race to the Top program to encourage states

misconception that standards and testing are identical has become widespread

Many teachers like the standards, because they invite creativity in the classroom — instead of memorization, the Common Core emphasizes critical thinking and problem-solving.

Four Corners and Anticipation Guides:Both of these techniques “activate schema” by asking students to react in some way to a series of controversial statements about a topic they are about to study. In Four Corners, students move around the room to show their degree of agreement or disagreement with various statements — about, for instance, the health risks of tanning, or the purpose of college, or dystopian teen literature. An anticipation guide does the same thing, though generally students simply react in writing to a list of statements on a handout. In this warm-up to a lesson on some of the controversies currently raging over school reform, students can use the statements we provide in either of these ways.

Gallery Walks:A rich way to build background on a topic at the beginning of a unit (or showcase learning at the end), Gallery Walks for this purpose are usually teacher-created collections of images, articles, maps, quotations, graphs and other written and visual texts that can immerse students in information about a broad subject. Students circulate through the gallery, reading, writing and talking about what they see.

Graphic Organizers:

Don't let fear based on misconception prevent you from creating a more student-centered, innovative learning culture. Rest assured, everything else will fall into place.

The fear of not being able to meet national and state standards, as well as mandates, leaves no time in the minds of many educators to either work technology into lessons, the will to do so, or the desire to learn how to. Current reform efforts placing an obscene emphasis on standardized tests are expounding the situation

With budget cuts across the country putting a strain on the financial resources of districts and schools, decision makers have become fearful of allocating funds to purchase and maintain current infrastructure

Common Core is a step in that direction, and in many ways it is a necessary condition for any number of education reforms. Don't fall for cheap conspiracies. It's a major step forward.

The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted.  The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.

Whether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate for second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the top.  What is of deeper concern, however, is that during a time when 7 year olds should be listening to and making music, they are instead taking a vocabulary quiz.

Real learning occurs in the mind of the learner when she makes connections with prior learning, makes meaning, and retains that knowledge in order to create additional meaning from new information.  In short, with tests we see traces of learning, not learning itself.

Ms. Wertheimer warms them up with a text-dependent question: "Are all of these native peoples nomadic?"

"On page 6, paragraph 2," he says, "the first sentence: 'The Haida and Tlingit of the Northwest built permanent wooden homes called longhouses.' "

seems to engage the kids

Teachers — many of them — will continue to resent efforts to use standardized tests to measure their ability to teach.

Tucker, 72, a former senior education official in Washington, is the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which he founded in 1988. Since then he has focused much of his research on comparing public education in the United States with that of places that have far better results than we do — places like Finland, Japan, Shanghai and Ontario, Canada. His essential conclusion is that the best education systems share common traits — almost none of which are embodied in either the current American system or in the reform ideas that have gained sway over the last decade or so.

His starting point is not the public schools themselves but the universities that educate teachers. Teacher education in America is vastly inferior to many other countries; we neither emphasize pedagogy — i.e., how to teach — nor demand mastery of the subject matter. Both are a given in the top-performing countries. (Indeed, it is striking how many nonprofit education programs in the U.S. are aimed at helping working teachers do a better job — because they’ve never learned the right techniques.)

Teachers in social studies, science and math should require more reading, which would allow English teachers to continue to assign literature, he said.