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"I'll admit it: I was skeptical of how "creative-thinking" strategies in math would go over with my 4th grade enrichment students. I see these students just once a week in pull-out groups, so every lesson counts. And I was nervous that this one might be a complete disaster."

"Political cartoons deliver a punch. They take jabs at powerful politicians, reveal official hypocrisies and incompetence and can even help to change the course of history. But political cartoons are not just the stuff of the past. Cartoonists are commenting on the world's current events all the time, and in the process, making people laugh and think. At their best, they challenge our perceptions and attitudes."

"Gene Wilhoit served as chief state school officer in Arkansas and in Kentucky before the Council of Chief State School Officers asked him to assume the leadership of their association. Two decades earlier, Wilhoit had served as an active member of the board of an organization, the New Standards Project, that I had put together to develop new, internationally benchmarked student performance standards for the American states, along with a set of assessments set to those standards. After he took the helm as Executive Director of the CCSSO, Wilhoit led the successful joint effort of the country's chief state school officers and its governors to create the Common Core State Standards. In this multi-part interview, I talk with Wilhoit about why he thought it so important to create the standards and what he thinks will be needed to fully implement them. "

"Whenever I take a new teacher to observe a veteran teacher, I'm surprised at what they notice. We could have observed the most impressive lesson ever, but without fail the new teachers notice the little things in the classroom: the way the chairs are set up, the routine the teacher has established for collecting work, the posters on the wall. They inherently know that seemingly small details can make or break teachers."

"A few weeks ago, I wrote an article for TheAtlantic.com describing some of the problems with how math is currently being taught. Specifically, some math programs strive to teach students to think like "little mathematicians" before giving them the analytic tools they need to actually solve problems. Some of us had hoped the situation would improve this school year, as 45 states and the District Columbia adopted the new Common Core Standards. But here are two discouraging emails I received recently. The first was from a parent:"

"'We must reimagine middle school science and math not as a way to prepare students for high school, but as a place where students are inventors, scientists, and mathematicians today.' So say Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager in this exciting guest article about the Maker Movement and its implications for kids, schools and STEM studies. Martinez and Stager are the authors of a must-read book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. In this informative post, they encourage STEM educators, school leaders and teachers across the curriculum to transform our classrooms into centers of innovative thinking and experimenting. ~ Anne Jolly"

14 Modules to aid teachers in learing the thinking required to be involved in the 8 Standards for Mathematical Practices. Free and downloadable.

"To be college and career ready, students need to be able to read sufficiently complex texts on their own and gather evidence, knowledge, and insight from those texts. These close reading exemplars intend to model how teachers can support their students as they undergo the kind of careful reading the Common Core State Standards require. Each of these exemplars features the following: i) readings tasks in which students are asked to read and reread passages and respond to a series of text dependent questions; 2) vocabulary and syntax tasks which linger over noteworthy or challenging words and phrases; 3) discussion tasks in which students are prompted to use text evidence and refine their thinking; and 4) writing tasks that assess student understanding of the text."

"From the looks of this, Lord Fisher may have been the world's first teenage girl. Did he ever meet a sentence he couldn't end in an exclamation point? In addition to representing the first-known use of the phrase "O.M.G.", this 1917 letter from Lord Fisher to Winston Churchill has given us a new favorite catch phrase: Shower it on the Admirality!! (We think it means go on with your bad self.)"

"Cooks use math to make beautiful food all the time: Slicing eight perfect pieces of pie or doubling a recipe requires basic knowledge of fractions, for example. But how many cooks think about using beautiful food to illustrate the math itself? Lenore M. Edman and Windell H. Oskay of the blog do. Feast your eyes on their latest work, "Sconic Sections," pictured above."

"The Common Core's "six shifts in literacy," or the big ways in which the standards aim to overhaul teaching, can be boiled down a la Michael Pollan: Read complex texts. Mostly nonfiction. Very closely. Through that close reading, teachers get clear opportunities to foster critical thinking. Attempting to help students access texts, previous standards and curricula in many states have focused on previewing the material, skimming it, and connecting it to the outside world, the self, and other texts - at best, achieving a rich holistic understanding, and at worst, dancing around the challenges posed by the author's actual words."

"Take a moment to think about how you learned to write. What steps did you go through? What was your process?"

"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."

Standards 5-12 including skill sets

Standards 1-4's skills sets

"There are some basic properties of numbers any 3rd grader can tell you: Each number is represented by a single symbol, and followed by a single successor. Multiplication makes a number bigger; division makes it smaller. The problem is, none of those qualities-true of whole numbers-is true when it comes to fractions, one of the most chronically troublesome basic mathematics areas for children and adults alike. Now, as the Common Core State Standards push for earlier and deeper understanding of fractions, researchers and teachers are exploring ways to ensure students learn more than a sliver of the fractions pie."

"A professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education has launched a new free math curriculum designed to help engage students more deeply in math. Dubbed the "Week of Inspirational Math," the program is aimed at students in grades 5-9 and includes five lessons, one for each day in a week, featuring math problems designed to be fun and engaging along with videos with positive messages about math. Teachers using the curriculum will also be able to join a network offering additional support and resources throughout the school year. "We want to give kids inspirational math tasks that help them see math as a lovely subject of beautiful patterns and deep inquiry," said Jo Boaler, the program's designer, in a prepared statement. "And we want teachers to see what happens when kids are really engaged in math." Boaler said she hopes teachers will use the program at the beginning of the school year to give students a positive experience right off the bat and set the tone for the rest of the year, but the program can be used at any point. "The lessons address five key areas of math: geometry, algebra, numbers, patterns and connections," according to a news release. "The problems are so-called 'low floor, high ceiling' tasks that are accessible to all students but can be solved in different ways to challenge those just being introduced to the topics as well as high achievers. They also emphasize different messages: Mistakes help you grow, for example, and it's not how fast you complete a task that's important but how deeply you understand it." The Common Core-aligned program is the latest offering from YouCubed at Stanford, a program Boaler helped launch that aims to make new research into math learning accessible to teachers and parents. "We're researching and using new brain science to find out how best people learn," said Boaler, in a prepared statement. "Then, we're giving teachers things they can actually do in their classroom based on this research." The program

"This section defines and explains the ten thematic strands that form the basis of the social studies standards. The explanations give examples of questions that are asked within each thematic strand, as well as brief overviews of the application of each strand in the early grades, middle grades, and high school."

"Until this year, Ena Baxter, an English teacher at Hillcrest High School in Queens, would often have her 10th graders compose papers by summarizing a single piece of reading material... "

"Steve Leinwand, Sue O'Connell, Pamela Weber Harris and other math leaders examine the Standards for Mathematical Practice. 'A deeper understanding of these eight practices enables us to envision what it means for our students to be mathematically proficient, and to select teaching practices that shift our teaching from a focus on content to a focus on application and understanding. The Standards for Mathematical Practice are actually the heart and soul of the Common Core State Standards. Sue O'Connell and John SanGiovanni from Putting the Practices Into Action"