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Learning and memory specialist Marilee Sprenger writes about vocabulary critical to the Common Core and offers 11 strategies for helping students learn it.

Vocabulary strategies presented here makes it necessary to be reflective of how new words are introduced to students. The strategies require students to interact beyond knowing how to correctly spell a word but how a word is used and what it means for students to engage with the word.

I love Edutopia! Some of their resources are really great. I think that this specific article is FANTASTIC for information about how to teach students the critical vocabulary necessary for them to become successful 21st Century Learners!

It is impressive to watch critical thought happen in a classroom. Through this link you are able to watch a lesson that helps students build higher order thinking skills. This middle school literature lesson brings in the ELA Common Core by teaching how to analyze how a section in text fits into the overall theme and to cite textual evidence to support analysis of text. Through student-driven questioning, the entire class is engaged in critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation. This outstanding lesson was driven by the teacher as she required them to develop higher-level questions using Costa's question levels, verb starters, and Blooms Taxonomy. I have not used this technique of providing these questioning terms to my students to have the them develop the questions. I cannot wait to try this out next school year!

This video from the Teaching Chanel highlights ways and the importance of creating higher order questions in order to analyze and discuss a text. This would be a great resource for my Smart Goal of With my SMART goal: by the end of quarter 1, 60% of students will score a 70% or higher on the Quarter 1 Literacy Assessment. The Quarter 1 literacy assessment is on theme, standard RL 4.2. Having my students become "the teachers" of their own learning and create higher level questions can help them get a deeper understanding of the text and in turn, determine the theme.

The purpose of ProCon is to provide resources for critical thinking and to educate without bias. They research issues that are controversial and important, and present them in a balanced, comprehensive, straightforward, transparent, and primarily pro-con format at no charge. Detailed lesson plans are targeted towards a variety of standards to chose from and guidance on how to incorporate the lessons into 15 National Teaching Standards is included.

Week 9: Eli, Angela, Noelle and Chris This journal article is accessible given above through the UMUC library. The focus of this article discusses how observations can be used as an assessment tool for teachers when dealing with differentiation. The study specifically highlights differentiation in a high level G/T classroom and provides different observation tools that teachers can use to self assess. This article is useful to our team as although not all of us teach high level students, it made us think critically about the observation process of each of our schools. We realized the importance of observations when they are used correctly, where the observer gives constructive criticism in order to improve teaching strategies. Also the differentiation aspect of the article suggests proven strategies to use when contemplating differentiation, which are good examples for us who need more differentiation in our classes. References VanTassel-Baska, J. (2012). Analyzing Differentiation in the Classroom: Using the COS-R. Gifted Child Today, 35(1), 42-48. doi:10.1177/1076217511427431

With all the areas that children are taught in school, the author feels that while trying work at the achievement gap we should look at the engagement gap. The eagerness that children have a young age needs to be maintained. Hands-on learning should be implemented into the lesson.

This is a great article focusing on engagement in the classroom! It discusses the necessity of hands on learning to maintain students interest. This is important for students of all academic levels. Hands on learning not only engages students because they are "doing", they also are developing critical thinking skills. As a special education teacher, I know that in order to assist my students in learning, I need to keep their attention and provide them with interesting, hands on learning.

I love this article! I have always been a strong believer in hands on learning and I love that they call it an engagement gap! Students get bored when a teacher gets up and lectures them all day. They need to be engaged! The activities need to be purposeful and have a specific meaning but a teacher can make just about any topic engaging just by getting the kids moving and interacting. I 100% agree that students retain information longer when they are engaged and enjoying what they are learning.

This is a collection of instructional strategies that can be used to improve student writing and cooperation and encourage critical thinking. Links to strategies are sorted by teachers' needs: Monitor Progress, Compare and Contrast Ideas, Form Groups, Get Moving!, Work Together, Adapt Content, Share Ideas & Opinions, and Take Notes. Within these categories are several links to various strategies to meet these needs. Each of the links leads to a clear description of how the strategy can be used and multiple examples and clickable resources that can be utilized by teachers immediately. This site has a plethora of interesting activities and tasks for students to encourage better collaboration and thinking. An instructional gap our team recognized that is quite prolific among middle school-aged students is the lack of elaboration or explanation of details in their expository writing pieces. Students can organized paragraphs and essays write clear topic sentences and conclusions, but they struggle supporting their claims with specific details and then explaining how their details relate to the topic.

"Eighth-grade students in Rich Richardson's class at the Expeditionary Learning Middle School in Syracuse, NY, offer feedback to their peers in preparation for revising their writing. The praise, question, suggestion protocol helps students see the strengths of their work and consider questions and suggestions that will lead to revision and improvement."

My Smart goal is 80% of students will reach level K in reading (lowest grade-appropriate reading level for second grade) by the beginning of the December. Even though this strategy was used in writing, I believe it could be used for reading as well. The students in my class have reading partners they work with very closely. They could read and show how they are using comprehension strategies and their partner could use the protocol praise, question, and suggestion. Using the planning protocol rubric, it is clear this strategy would be highly effective in the classroom and could be aligned to the content standards. There isn't a high technology element, but it could be adjusted to include a technology portion.

Ericka Posey smart goal: By the end of April, 80% of the 10th grade LSN Government students will be able to analyze political cartoons and write accurate BCRs with 75% accuracy for historical content and meaning. The planning protocol rubric has 7 dimensions if I had to devise which of these dimensions it would be rigor or relevance or student engagement both with a level of 3. I believe that if students peer read each other's written papers they can gain insight on what is incorrect with their peers papers and how they can improve their own writing. Student can find two point to praise on their partner's paper, two question to bring forth inquiry and analysis, 2 suggestions for their partners written works in which the students are building critical thinking and analysis skills to help them analyze political cartoons and writing BCRs.

This article appeared in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education so at first I was worried that it would not be applicable; however, I quickly found that it is a fantastic resource for teachers of all ages. My goal is to learn more instructional strategies to facilitate an increase in the frequency of higher-level questioning that I use in the classroom to support the learning gaps that I have identified with my students. This article highlights very important concepts related to my search. I have learned that questioning strategies and using various levels should be done with appropriate timing, as it relates to the depth of instruction, to avoid confusion or discouraging students. It was also emphasized that all levels of questioning should be incorporated into learning situations, but suggested questioning methods to ensure that all levels are utilized. The article provides great detail about facilitating the Socratic method, Question Circles, and Student-generated questions. All of these methods will produce higher-level questioning opportunities to increase student exposure to critical thinking tasks. I would highly recommend this article for review for all levels of educators. I am now hoping to learn more about the Socratic method to incorporate this into my own classroom.

WEEK 7 - Chris Baugher, Patricia Bankins and Alison Burns - First reading. "This paper investigates how pre-service teacher education can provide a strong literacy foundation for content area teachers. Pre-service teachers emphasized their growing awareness of how literacy strategies can enhance student learning in their specific subject areas." (Orr, Kukner and Timmons, 2014)

This article gives an interesting insight to content area literacy and infusing literacy into science and math classes. I was particularly interested in the different ways the sample teachers incorporate literacy strategies into their teaching. They talk of expanding notions of what learning and assessment can look like in science and math. Teachers must have a solid content knowledge themselves to be able to express "the most useful forms of representation of those [topics to be taught in the subject area and] ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations-in a word, the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others. (Schulman, 1986, p. 9)

The article supports this week's activity and Willigham's video on content knowledge improving reading skill. The first section in 'content area literacy" says it all: "Content area literacy is the ability to acquire understandings of, and think critically about, new content in a discipline using reading, writing and multiple other forms..." (Draper, 2002; Heller & Greenleaf, 2007; Kane, 2011; McKenna & Robinson, 1990) The article as a whole supports and builds upon the importance of not only literacy but also what assessments could look like and what they should reflect. Lastly, "[b]ecause literacy is important in all subject areas, content area teachers can plat a significant role in their students' literacy development" (Alger, 2007, 2009; Draper, 2002; Lind, 2008, Heller & Greenleaf, 2007). Before students can learn the material, we as teachers must become familiar and competent enough in the content to not only explain the ideas but to show them and relate them to the students' lives and prior knowledge.

This protocol helps students share their opinions by asking them to line up along a continuum based on their position on an issue.

Ericka Posey's Smart Target Learning Goal: By the end of April, 80% of the 10th grade LSN Government students will be able to analyze political cartoons and write accurate BCRs with 75% accuracy for historical content and meaning. This activity will assist my students achieve the goal as it gives students a verbal prompt, gives them a chance to analyze that prompt, take a stand and defend that stance with strong examples. The same skills used in the Take a Stand will assist my students in analyzing a political cartoon, take a stand on the written prompt and defend that prompt with evidence from the political cartoon. The only difference is in the Take A Stand everything is done verbally and in the analysis of the political cartoon and BCR is a written assignment.

My chosen dimension is student engagement, I would consider this activity to be highly engaged with a rating of 4 because of its participation requirement and discussion method among all students. The discussion tactic in this video forces students to share their various perspectives in an open environment. Also, the students can easily see each other's choice before going into detail about why they made that choice. The students learn to value different perspectives and methods from their peers. This tactic works with our SMART goal because it emphasizes critical thinking proof to resolve a real problem. This tactic allows students to know that it is not about having one right answer to the problem, but discovering many strategies and reasons to solve the problem. Also I like that students must use retained information to evaluate their decision and the decision of their peers.

This looks at both pros and cons of standardized testing. It helps to see the other sides of the argument. I think as critical thinkers we need to embrace the benefits of education with and without standardized testing.