College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

Next Generation Science Standards for Today’s Students and Tomorrow’s Workforce:

• Through a collaborative, state-led process, new K–12 science standards are being developed that will be rich in content and practice, arranged in a coherent manner across disciplines and grades to provide all students an internationally benchmarked science education.
• The NGSS will be based on the Framework for K–12 Science Education developed by the National Research Council.

By Christina Hank

Deep reading forces students to dig further into the text by asking them to re-read, re-visit, and search for the hidden intricacies of the text.

Deep reading, text-dependent questions, and teaching them to uncover the mysteries of texts leads our students to become more critical readers.

• Because they are doing the work of analyzing the text, the expectations of the common core are that students will become more critical consumers of texts in their college and careers—areas of their lives when they will not have teachers around to impart the secrets of texts to them before they read.

This kind of reading also relates to the writing expectations of the common core standards that require students to deeply analyze texts, to identify the author’s explicit argument and claims to support it.

• If students are being asked to “read like detectives,” they are being asked to “write like investigative reporters,” which means building their own arguments in response to texts (NYSED video).

By Stephanie Simon

(Reuters) - American high school students are terrible writers, and one education reform group thinks it has an answer: robots.

Human Graders are Inconsistent

• The human graders he's trying to match are inconsistent.
• They disagree with one another on the merits of a given essay.
• They award scores that seem random.
• Indeed, studies have shown that human readers are influenced by factors that should be irrelevant, such as how neatly a student writes.

"The reality is, humans are not very good at doing this," said Steve Graham, a Vanderbilt University professor who has researched essay grading techniques. "It's inevitable," he said, that robo-graders will soon take over.

O'Leary won't mind when that day comes. He tests his program against student prose that has already been graded by a teacher. When the scores diverge, O'Leary reads the essay to find out why.

"More often than not," he said, "I agree with the computer."

By SHANNON DOYNE and HOLLY EPSTEIN OJALVO

What can a single sentence accomplish? How do writers achieve different effects in sentences?

In this lesson, students share favorite sentences, look closely at what makes them great, paraphrase them, then evaluate the results. They also work with sentences that are “mini-narratives” and write some of their own, before writing full-fledged short stories based on other students’ sentences.

by Barbara Blackburn

The new Common Core State Standards require that students read more complex texts. What are ways teachers can provide support for new levels of rigor?

One of the areas of emphasis in the new Common Core State Standards is to move students to higher levels of text materials.

• The Common Core State Standards require that we move students to higher levels of text.
• Providing extra help and scaffolding becomes a critical aspect of helping students succeed.

There are three simple ways you can scaffold learning for your students.

1. Modeling
2. Layering Meaning
3. Making Connections