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"This ASCD Study Guide is designed to enhance your understanding and application of the information contained in Teaching the Core Skills of Listening and Speaking, an ASCD book written by Erik Palmer and published in March 2014. You can use the study guide after you have read the book or as you finish each chapter. The study questions provided are not meant to cover all aspects of the book but rather to address specific ideas that might warrant further reflection. Most of the questions you can think about on your own, but you might consider pairing with a colleague or forming a study group with others who have read (or are reading) Teaching the Core Skills of Listening and Speaking."

"ASCD SmartBrief Special Report: Common Core State Standards (Part I) For many years, academic standards in the U.S. have differed by state, district and sometimes even school. The varying standards have resulted in wide disparities in student knowledge. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards by most states is an attempt to create guidelines that can be used by educators across the country to teach math and English, with the goal of improving student proficiency. This two-part ASCD SmartBrief Special Report on the Common Core State Standards offers guidance to educators on what to expect as the standards are implemented. Part I examines the standards and how instruction will change. Part II, to be published Thursday, looks at how schools are beginning to align their teaching with the common core and how testing will change. "

"In a given subject, standards or benchmarks-and potentially state curriculum-there are skills and content students must master. Within a given curriculum map, the trick is to identify what skills and content students need to learn, and then identify where students will have the freedom to construct inquiry on their own. If the goal of an activity is acquisition of content knowledge, perhaps you can vary the presentation method. For example, students could have a checklist of information about a particular historical era and then choose a specific medium for sharing those facts with the general public-essay, slideshow, podcast, video, and exhibit being just a few of the options. Alternately, if the goal is skill mastery, students can apply the specified skill to problems and situations that they select on their own, such as applying the same mathematical formulas to analyze statistical data on a topic or field of their choice, be it professional sports or neighborhood crime. The most advanced students can be offered control over both content and methods-what's important to learn, and how to present it."

Handouts Notes from ASCD Presentation on Assessments Shifts Presented by Susan M. Brookhart Presented April 3, 2012.

"Why does this matter? I'm largely okay with the Common Core Standards. Anyone who reads me regularly already knows this. There are limitations, sure, but by and large, they are better than previous individual state standards that, for the most part, prepare children for 1992, but aren't so great at preparing them for 2025."

"Now that the Common Core State Standards in English and math have been adopted by most states, how will teaching and learning change? This two-part ASCD SmartBrief Special Report on the Common Core State Standards offers educators a guide to the latest information. Part II of this special report looks at how states and districts are preparing for the changes and how student assessments will be revamped. Part I of the report, published on Tuesday, looked at the standards in detail and how instruction will change. "

"Social studies supervisors and teachers across the country are revising their unit plans to meet their state's content standards, as well as, the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in History and Social Studies. Simultaneously, many states are implementing new evaluation and observation frameworks. The performance ratings employed by the most popular evaluation models encourage a shift away from teacher-led direct instruction to more student-centered activities incorporating inquiry and synthesis. In social studies, primary source document analysis goes hand in hand with the 9-12 Common Core reading and writing standards. Here are five top resources to align your curricula to the Common Core with student driven lessons. "

"It is critical that teachers structure units and lessons so that all students can access a clear standard. Students who struggle must understand what they need to do to meet expectations and students who are advanced must be challenged to meet a more complex learning goal."

"Results from new state tests in Kentucky-the first in the nation explicitly tied to the Common Core State Standards-show that the share of students scoring "proficient" or better in reading and math dropped by roughly a third or more in both elementary and middle school the first year the tests were given."

"The Common Core State Standards recognize that to thrive in the newly wired world, students need to master new ways of reading and writing."

"Well before the Next Generation Science Standards became final last month, teachers in pockets around the country were already exploring the vision for science education espoused by the document and bringing elements of that approach to the classroom."

"Math has a bit of an image problem. It's often seen as hard, abstract-even pointless. he creators of the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City are all about turning that image around and convincing young people that mathematics is cool."

"As the common core is brought to life in classrooms this year, some English/language arts teachers are finding themselves caught in a swirl of debate about whether the new standards require them to cut back on prized pieces of the literary canon to make room for nonfiction."

"When I was a student, watching a movie in class meant watching documentaries, literary adaptations, or informational filmstrips. " RL.4.8 / RL.5.8

"When the writers of the Next Generation Science Standards began sketching out a new vision for K-12 science education, they gave themselves a mandate: Develop standards with all students in mind, not just the high achievers already expected to excel in the subject."

"By setting up ways to get frequent feedback from students' works in progress, we can find out what they need-before it's too late. Several years ago, I decided that if I were going to spend time writing comments on my students' writing work or on assignments connected to their in-class reading, those comments had to do more than justify a grade. They had to give targeted feedback that would show students how to improve the quality of their work. I'd been finding the hours I spent writing feedback on students' work discouraging. For one thing, students didn't pay attention to my comments, and, for another, the quality of their work wasn't improving. A change in how I responded to their work was necessary. If I wanted my comments to fuel improvement, I realized, I had to build in time for learners to revise their work after receiving my suggestions. Not only did I change the timing of my feedback, but I also streamlined my process of writing comments, allowing myself more time to shift instruction in response to what I'd learned from reviewing work"

"When teachers understand what makes texts complex, they can better support their students in reading them. How is reading complex text like lifting weights? Just as it's impossible to build muscle without weight or resistance, it's impossible to build robust reading skills without reading challenging text. The common core state standards in language arts treat text difficulty as akin to weight or resistance in an exercise program. This is in contrast to most past discussion of this topic, which emphasized how overly complex text may impede learning. Such discussion therefore focused on developing various readability schemes and text gradients to help teachers determine which books might be too hard for their students. The new standards instead propose that teachers move students purposefully through increasingly complex text to build skill and stamina."

"The 10 percent summary strategy costs little in teacher time, and it prepares students for the common core state standards in literacy." Excellent article for sumarization.

"A standard is a statement that can be used to judge the quality of a mathematics curriculum or methods of evaluation. Thus, standards are statements about what is valued. -From 1989 standards released by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics "