Group items tagged

To gauge changes in student growth across the year, as part of the new evaluation system, the district has settled on growth in academic vocabulary as an indicator. In every grade and content area, teams of teachers have come up with those words and related concepts all students must master by the end of the year.

"Many states are moving away from the 'train the trainer' model and trying to have more direct communications with teachers, because the message either gets diluted or changed otherwise," said Carrie Heath Phillips, the program director for the Council of Chief State School Officers' common-standards efforts.

Another phenomenon that may also need reining in is overemphasis on students' personal impressions of complex texts. So-called "text-to-self" questions are absent from the standards, reflecting a push away from personal meaning making and toward more rigorous, evidentiary analysis. "The mantra of a good middle or high school English class is, 'Where is that in the text?'" says Wiggins.

humanity's most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world.

Ask any math student what their least favorite part of the math curriculum is, and they will tell you "word problems." Seriously, this is a universal truth : ). Wolfram wants us to give just word problems, letting the com

Not only weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning

Within these Common Core standards are six fundamental shifts that all educators (not just English teachers!) need to understand

build students’ background knowledge and vocabulary

build school-level curriculum that reinforces big ideas across content areas.

The standards are supposed to be 80 percent of what you teach; it would be absurd to say you don't ever want to connect a text to kids' lives and experiences. But it should be after you have mined from the text every insight and understanding you can," says David Liben,

You won't find "text-to-self" questions like these recommended anywhere in the new Common Core English and Language Arts State Standards.

Yet a fundamental contradiction underlies the progress: While we are promoting radical change in creating a coherent national framework for what students should know and the way they learn, we have not yet committed to offering teachers the deep learning they will need to transform the way they work.

oo many plans for supporting the transition to the common core read more like communication plans than serious road maps for preparing educators to teach the standards.

"What made you think you could transform teacher practice and student learning with traditional models of professional development?"

What should students know, understand and be able to do

What facts, concepts and principles should they know?  What processes, strategies and methods should they learn to use?

understandings” that you want students to remember after they’ve forgotten the details of the course.

28.8 percent), along with students’ difficulty learning the material (20 percent) and a “lack of needed mathematics knowledge among teachers” (15 percent).

28.8 percent), along with students’ difficulty learning the material (20 percent) and a “lack of needed mathematics knowledge among teachers” (15 percent).

which demand that students hone their skills at understanding and analyzing a variety of texts. To do that, teachers must help them delve more deeply into what they read.

The two groups recognized that in order to reflect the standards’ expectations, teachers must begin asking different kinds of questions than most of those suggested in the teacher’s editions of the popular basal readers.

Student Achievement Partners, has already created and posted on its website a guide to crafting text-dependent questions.

Looking back on this lesson with my common core lenses, I took all the joy out of reading from my students.  Because I unlocked all the secrets of The Butter Battle Book for them and did all the work of dissecting the piece as part of my lesson planning

You may have heard some of the controversy recently surrounding David Coleman, primary writer of the English language arts standards statements, and his seemingly anti-pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading comprehension strategies.  What Coleman and the common core standards want us to do is stop frontloading so much information because what we research and dig up to tell our students in an attempt to build context for a reading is information they can dig up on their own while we guide and facilitate their reading.  Oftentimes, in doing pre-reading activities, we give away all the answers, such was the case in my Butter Battle lesson, unfortunately.  When we ask students to complete anticipation guides in which we address the themes of a text, we are doing the work of finding the themes for them.