College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders
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Interview: Rick Hess and Math Scholar Hung-Hsi Wu on #commoncore- Rick Hess Straight Up

Interview: Rick Hess and Math Scholar Hung-Hsi Wu on #commoncore- Rick Hess Straight Up | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it

The following were exerpted from Rick Hess' Interview with Hung-Hsi Wu. The full interview can be viewed by clicking on the title of this post.

 

Background: Hung-Hsi Wu is professor emeritus in mathematics from UC-Berkeley, who has just penned the cover story on this topic for AFT's magazine American Educator. Dr. Wu, who started teaching at Berkeley in 1973, has been actively involved in math education for the past two decades, helping write California's 1999 Mathematics Framework and California's Standards Tests. He was also a member of NAEP's Mathematics Steering Committee, 2000-2001, that contributed to the revision of the NAEP Framework.

 

CCSS math: What are they? Why do we need them?

 

The Common Core math standards place great emphasis on mathematical integrity, [in other words] the statements of the standards are mathematically correct and the progression from topic to topic is logical. In this regard, it is at least comparable to the best state standards, such as those of California and Massachusetts.

 

The Common Core math standards, however, ask that students "understand solving equations as a process of reasoning" and say explicitly what needs to be taught about this process (see Standard A-REI 1 in High School Algebra).

 

When state standards ask that the concept of congruence be taught in middle school, they do not realize that what students will end up getting is that congruence means same size and same shape. As a mathematical definition, the latter is completely unacceptable. By contrast, the Common Core standards explain that congruence means what one gets by a sequence of rotations, reflections, and translations (grade 8, Standard 8.G 2). Such sensitivity to the existing defects is absolutely essential to any meaningful improvement in our math education; in this regard, the Common Core standards leave all rivals far behind.

 

Integrated vs. Traditional Math

 

The 9-12 standards of the Common Core are what they are because the Common Core made a conscientious decision to stay neutral in this debate by describing only the mathematical content of the various strands in high school and allow[ing] each state to make its own decision. This flexibility makes it possible to formulate a high school program that conforms to neither the traditional nor the integrated format.

 

Algebra I in 8th Grade

 

"There is no intrinsic merit in finishing Algebra I by grade 8. When it comes to school algebra, it is not how early you teach it but, rather, how well you teach it. The standards of those states in the U.S. that mandate the completion of Algebra I in grade 8 manage to do so only by stinting on the necessary background material that students need in order to learn linear equations and their graphs. Furthermore, the math standards of both China and Japan postpone the teaching of quadratic equations and functions to grade 9, and these are two of the highest-achieving nations in the world in math education.

 

Spread Concepts Across Grade Levels

 

Common Core math standards' design to optimize mathematics learning by giving students enough time, whenever feasible, to absorb the material as well as time for teachers to teach the material. For children, the addition of fractions is so conceptually complicated that they need the time to internalize the whole process. This particular treatment of fraction addition (teaching of fraction addition over three grades: grades 3 to 5) is one of the outstanding features of the Common Core standards.

 

Strengths of Common Core math standards:

 

1. provide guidance to the teaching [of] fractions in a way that is pedagogically sensible and mathematically correct. Since the fear of fractions has almost become a national pastime, these standards---if properly implemented--- will bring relief to many parents and students.

 

2. The same can be said about these standards on negative numbers.

 

3. the teaching of geometry in middle and high schools is so defective at present that it cries out for a new approach; essentially nothing can make things worse in most cases - provide a seamless transition from middle school geometry to algebra and high school geometry.

 

Teacher Capacity and Preparation

 

We need better teacher preparation and improved professional development in order to stay educationally afloat no matter what the standards may be. If we cannot get better teacher preparation or improved professional development, then we would be better off with a set of standards that is at least mathematically sound.

 

Help for Teachers: Resources

 

1. A set of Progressions documents that highlight the main ideas of each major strand in the standards.

 

2. The Illustrative Mathematics Project that will provide problems to illustrate the standards

 

Concern - Status Quo Not Good Enough

 

What I find most worrisome is the fact that many educators and administrators believe that the status quo (of doing nothing) is plenty good enough. It is not. We need effective professional development, period.

 

Math Assessments

 

I want to make sure that students will not be in any way over-assessed, and that the mathematical quality of the test items be above reproach.

 

CCSS: Good or Bad

 

Nobody can pass judgment on the success or failure within a year of the kind of profound change promulgated by the Common Core math Standards unless the standards are an immediate disaster (which I hope they are not).

 

I think a more reasonable date to make such a judgment is 2017. If things go well, teacher preparation will begin to concentrate on the most urgent need of the moment: better content knowledge. Math instruction in classrooms will be long on reasoning and short on giving out orders, and textbooks will at least be free of ghastly errors.

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College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders
Supporting school leaders in helping all students become college and career-ready and to succeed in post-secondary education and training
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Implementing the Common Core State Standards: The Role of the School Leader Action Brief | Achieve

Implementing the Common Core State Standards: The Role of the School Leader Action Brief | Achieve | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it

These Action Briefs for school leaders are a starting point, designed to increase awareness of the standards, create a sense of urgency around their implementation, and provide these stakeholders — who are faced with dramatically increased expectations in the context of fewer resources — with a deeper understanding of the standards and their role in implementing the standards. Achieve, in partnership with College Summit, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the National Association of Elementary School Principals, released this with support from MetLife Foundation.

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October 17, 2016 5:03 PM
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Is Text Complexity Is a 'Myth'?

Is Text Complexity Is a 'Myth'? | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
In these audio clips, the author and retired professor discusses how background knowledge affects reading comprehension, why he thinks the common core's focus on reading complex texts is useless, and what education policymakers can learn from France.
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October 16, 2016 3:23 PM
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Actionable Feedback is Essential for Growth

Actionable Feedback is Essential for Growth | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
Providing feedback is an art and as we continue to propel our students into independence, we need to carefully monitor where they are providing them the necessary steps like training wheels until they are ready to ride alone. Perhaps it's just the new buzz word of the moment or maybe it's the missing piece in how we make feedback more meaningful, but actionable feedback means not only identifying what needs improvement, but also offering a plan of action to make the necessary improvement possible.It's easy enough to tell a person what's wrong with their writing or a math set but it is a whole other thing to help them understand how to tackle the challenge and start to improve it. This is clearly more important than naming the problem.Too often in education we spend time naming problems rather solving them. We talk about what's wrong at length instead of living in solutions.Actionable feedback is where the solutions begin.There are lots of different ways of providing actionable feedback and depending on the age of the students and the content you're addressing, just make sure you're focusing on the how.
Celeste Osgood's curator insight, January 31, 2018 8:00 PM
Actionable feedback
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October 15, 2016 5:45 PM
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Why Has Ed Tech Made So Little Difference?

Why Has Ed Tech Made So Little Difference? | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
Marc Tucker explores why educational technology has failed to deliver on its promises of raising student achievement. When I began my study of instructional technology in the early 1980s, I was convinced that digital technology could unleash an enormous improvement in learning for very large numbers of school children all over the world. I still think that. But that will not happen unless countries and states make very large investments in their teachers. Not, I might add, to teach them how to use technology. That will get us nowhere. Their lack of knowledge about how to use technology has never been the problem. It is their lack of deep knowledge about the doors that the technology can open that is the problem. Teachers will help young children develop an intuitive feel for the connections among algebraic formulas, abstract geometric forms and the rhythms of everyday life when teachers themselves understand those connections and see them in everyday life and marvel at them for their beauty and elegance. They will teach their students about the ubiquity of dynamic systems and the nature of their control when they themselves not only understand such systems and how they work but understand, too, the crucial role they play in the fabric of the lives we lead. Then they will be thinking like engineers, and that will enable them to help their students think like engineers. What I am describing is a very different kind of education—I am speaking of education, not training—than the kind that teachers ordinarily get. But this sort of change in their education is hardly all that is required. The whole curriculum must be rethought. And the standards to which that curriculum is set. And the way student performance is measured. And the things for which teachers will be held accountable. Only then will teachers be both able and willing to look at a brilliantly conceived piece of software that enables students to play with complex systems as a vital aid and not a distraction.
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August 22, 2016 6:27 PM
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Teachers push back on mandated collaboration time

Teachers push back on mandated collaboration time | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
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February 12, 2016 2:21 PM
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Where Are Teachers Getting Their Common-Core Instructional Materials?

Where Are Teachers Getting Their Common-Core Instructional Materials? | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
A new study found that teachers are mainly relying on homegrown instructional materials, created either by themselves or their district colleagues, to meet the Common Core State Standards.

Via Patrice Bucci
Patrice Bucci's curator insight, February 12, 2016 11:16 AM

I have been saying this for a few years now... so much money has been wasted on "programs" that offer little in terms of quality materials... better off going to @ReadWorks, @newsela, @textproject!

#teachersknowbetter

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December 18, 2015 7:18 AM
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what to do with your individual PARCC score reports

what to do with your individual PARCC score reports | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it

Wondering what to do with your individual PARCC score reports? You're invited to join outstanding teachers nationwide to dig into tools and teacher-tested strategies to help you elevate the PARCC conversation in your school community, classrooms and teams. By the end of our session, you will have:


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December 9, 2015 12:15 PM
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What the first round of test results say about Common Core progress

What the first round of test results say about Common Core progress | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
The Common Core standards raised expectations for students across the board. This fall, results are coming in for the first time, and in many places, they've been disappointing. John Tulenko of Education Week reports.
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November 20, 2015 8:11 AM
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Inspiring Students to Math Success and a Growth Mindset

Inspiring Students to Math Success and a Growth Mindset | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
Common core based lesson plans and math tasks and ways to instill positive math beliefs. Easy to use in classrooms or home by teachers and parents.
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November 13, 2015 1:30 PM
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NAEP and Common-Core Math Show 'Reasonable' Overlap, Study Says

NAEP and Common-Core Math Show 'Reasonable' Overlap, Study Says | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
A new study looking at the relationship between the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Common Core State Standards for mathematics finds that the two have "reasonable" overlap, but that the national test falls short on assessing some of the common standards. 

The study, commissioned by the NAEP Validity Studies Panel, an independent panel run by the American Institutes for Research, was published in advance of this week's release of the 2015 NAEP reading and math scores for 4th and 8th grade students. NAEP is administered to a nationally representative sample of students about every two years. 

The NAEP test was not designed to be aligned with any particular set of standards—it is meant to be used as a barometer of student achievement across the United States.
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October 14, 2015 10:29 AM
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How Common Core quietly won the war

How Common Core quietly won the war | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
The standards that naysayers love to call “Obamacore” have become the reality for roughly 40 million students.
Jamie Dammann's curator insight, October 25, 2015 9:48 PM

Local, State, Federal

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October 13, 2015 9:06 AM
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GreatKids State Test Guide for Parents

GreatKids State Test Guide for Parents | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it

New SBAC test results are in. Use this free tool to understand your child’s scores and see how your child is meeting the Common Core standards.


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October 4, 2015 11:47 AM
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Confusing Ohio test results are latest effort to unravel Common Core’s promise

Confusing Ohio test results are latest effort to unravel Common Core’s promise | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
Advocates hoped to be able to compare student performance across state lines, but that’s still hard to do.
Jamie Dammann's curator insight, October 25, 2015 9:56 PM

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October 17, 2016 5:06 PM
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Neuroscience on what schools should stop doing

Neuroscience on what schools should stop doing | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
Adolescent-brain science findings suggest four things that middle and high school teachers should stop doing, writes psychologist Thomas Armstrong. Findings from adolescent-brain research also suggest a number of things that educators should stop doing so much of at the middle school and high school levels. For example:• Classroom teaching that focuses largely on delivering content through lectures and textbooks fails to engage the emotional brain and leaves unchanged those prefrontal regions that are important in metacognition.• Public posting of grades and test scores (a practice which in this data-driven world appears to be increasing) humiliates and shames students in front of their highly valued peers.• Locking students into a set academic college-bound program of courses takes away their ability to make decisions about what most interests them (a process that integrates the limbic system's motivational verve with the prefrontal cortex's decisionmaking capacity).
Celeste Osgood's curator insight, January 31, 2018 7:53 PM
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Graduation Gaps Closing

Graduation Gaps Closing | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
Graduation rates topped 83 percent in the 2014-15 school year. High school graduation rates inched up for the fourth year in a row, by nearly one percentage point to 83.2 percent in the 2014-15 school year, the Obama administraton announced Monday. And while there are still significant graduation gaps between black, Hispanic, and Native American students and their white and Asian peers, those gaps are slowly closing.Graduation rates have now risen for students overall from 79 percent in the 2010-11 school year—the first year all states used the same method to calculate graduation rates. But over that same period graduation rates for black students rose even faster, by 7.6 percent. And graduation rates for Hispanic students grew by 6.8 percent. What's more, the rates for English-language learners, students in special education, and disadvantaged students also grew faster than for students overall.
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October 16, 2016 3:07 PM
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If Coaching Is So Powerful, Why Aren't Principals Being Coached?

If Coaching Is So Powerful, Why Aren't Principals Being Coached? | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
If instructional coaching is beneficial to teachers, shouldn't leadership coaching benefical to principals? Why aren't more principals doing it? What about principals?If principals believe that teachers can benefit from high quality coaching, doesn't that mean that principals can as well? I wonder how many would engage in that type of professional development? Many times the school leader believes that they are supposed to know it all, which is quite possibly why they moved to the principalship. And some principals may believe coaching is for teaching and not for them, which is an interesting dilemma when it comes to who values coaching and why. If coaches are good for teachers, shouldn't coaching be valuable for leaders too?
Rebecca Robles's curator insight, November 9, 2016 6:22 PM
It behooves administrators to participate in coaching training.  By observing through a coaches lens, a principal can effectively assess areas where teachers need support and provide that support.
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October 14, 2016 11:38 AM
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Standards-Based Learning: Why Do Educators Make It So Complex?

Standards-Based Learning: Why Do Educators Make It So Complex? | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
Educators have the odd habit of taking simple ideas and making them inexplicably complex. Standards based learning is one of them.
Celeste Osgood's curator insight, January 31, 2018 8:04 PM
Standards based learning 
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August 22, 2016 3:01 PM
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18 Digital Tools and Strategies That Support Students’ Reading and Writing

18 Digital Tools and Strategies That Support Students’ Reading and Writing | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
The tech team in Littleton, Colorado is trying to build self-sufficiency in students by compiling digital tools for reading and writing that students can choose

Via Ana Cristina Pratas
Yeison Ossa Trejos's curator insight, August 31, 2016 2:42 PM
Reading and writing are skills that teachers, specially language teachers, need to develop in students. However, due to time constraints and lack of good feedback channels between learners and teachers, these activities may not have the expected results. For this reason, it is paramount for teachers to explore the varying digital tools that are available on the web to help students read and write more efficiently. I personally agree with the idea that having a set of these tools and sharing them with learners for them to chioose from the ones they consider fit their learning styles can be extremelly benefitial and encouraging as students get to see real improvements in their reading and writing performances and become more autonomous learners.
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December 20, 2015 3:16 PM
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Half of grads entering community college need help

Half of grads entering community college need help | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
New data shows about half of Illinois high school graduates going on to the state's community colleges need remediation in at least one subject.
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December 12, 2015 1:27 PM
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Nonfiction Reading Improved but Still Short of College Readiness Levels -- THE Journal

The amount of non-fiction read by students in grades 1-12 has steadily increased since the adoption of new learning standards introduced in the Common Core. Yet students — especially those in high school — don't read to the level of difficulty they should and fall "far short" of what may be required for college and career preparedness. At the same time, students who begin the school year behind their peers can make up for lost time with the right standards in place.

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November 27, 2015 11:21 AM
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Technology Integration to Drive Common Core Writing

Technology Integration to Drive Common Core Writing | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
If there are exceptions to Malcolm Gladwell’s rule, writing is surely one of them. Even after 10,000 hours, the process can still feel tedious, frustrating and lonely.Practice may not make perfect, but feedback and repetition can help students be more competent at writing. At least, that’s the hope
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November 16, 2015 4:06 PM
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Common Core's Big Test: Tracking 2014-15 Results

The 2014-15 school year marked a big change for many states because they switched to tests that for the first time reflect the Common Core State Standards.
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November 8, 2015 5:07 PM
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Common Core testing status in the US

Common Core testing status in the US | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
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October 13, 2015 12:13 PM
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Gaming the System: Another state redefines ‘proficiency’ on Common Core tests, inflating performance

Gaming the System: Another state redefines ‘proficiency’ on Common Core tests, inflating performance | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it
The Arkansas decision doubled the number of Algebra I students considered proficient.
Jamie Dammann's curator insight, October 25, 2015 9:48 PM

Local, State, Federal

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October 4, 2015 2:19 PM
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How to Create Failure and Destroy Public Education

Steven Singer, who teaches in Pennsylvania, explains the planned insanity behing standardized testing, rigged for failure. He likens the situation to a video game that he played with his friend as ...
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October 3, 2015 5:08 PM
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The Common Core Explained

The Common Core Explained | College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders | Scoop.it

The Common Core State Standards arose from a simple idea: that creating one set of challenging academic expectations for all students would improve achievement and college readiness.

Jamie Dammann's curator insight, October 25, 2015 9:56 PM

Local, State, Federal