College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

The answer is easy: YES, especially if the teacher has access to a Mac desktop or (preferably) laptop and a wifi network in the classroom.

It is an even larger YES if the Mac device has the most current operating system.

Having a computer to which the iPad can sync is not absolutely necessary, but it is a Best Idea.

Must-have apps for MS and HS...and then what to do with them.

Robert Marzano

Educational Leadership

Februrary 2012

"Writing to learn focuses on deepening understanding and improving retention of content."

Writing Across the Curriculum

The concept of writing across the curriculum is commonly credited to James Britton (1970, 1972).

• Writing should be integral to instruction in all subject areas.
• Writing is fundamentally a constructive process of encoding new information.
• The act of translating experience into a personalized account aids and extends learning.
• Writing to learn focuses on deepening understanding and improving retention of content. 

The writing activities, typically:

• are short
• informal
• resemble an advanced form of note taking.

Five Phases for Understanding

• Phase 1: Record - Here, students record their understanding of the content. 
• Phase 2: Compare  - In this phase, students share what they've recorded with a partner, noting what's similar and different between their two recordings. 
• Phase 3: Revise - This phase occurs right after the comparison phase, although a teacher might assign it as homework instead. 
• Phase 4: Combine - Here, students combine the products of the R–C–R cycles they've completed and then generate and defend one or more generalizations. Students must support their generalizations using specific evidence. 
• Phase 5: Review - This last phase always occurs before an assessment, although a teacher could request it at any time. 

Defined Instructional Practices Build Collective Capacity

The Common Core State Standards make school wide literacy a must do. School leaders are faced with the challenge of increasing the capacity of their entire instructional staff within a brief period of time. In order to raise the collective capacity of teachers, school must employ a locally agreed upon set of defined instructional practices in which all teachers engage in every classroom every day. Defined practices build collective capacity!

by Catherine Gewertz

February 8, 2012

*Excerpts are filtered for the benefit of busy school leaders.

Drawn together by the Aspen Institute, some chief academic officers hash out how to deliver a profound shift in reading instruction.

Essential Question

What would happen if English/language arts teachers revolutionized their instruction to focus intently—and exclusively—on the texts students are reading?

Close Reading: A Key Shift

Close reading represents a key shift in the Common Core State Standards:

Students are expected to engage in "close reading" of complex literary and informational texts.

• In contrast to common practice, in which teachers explain reading passages and supply background information before students read, "close reading" confines initial study to the text itself.
• Students make sense of it by probing its words and structure for information and evidence.
• Through questions and class exercises, teachers guide students back through the reading in a hunt for answers and deeper understanding.

Changes H0w Teachers Teach

Close reading requires profound shifts:

• in how teachers teach
• how districts choose texts
• how they test what students know
• how they evaluate teachers.

Teachers Lack the Capacity

• "I'm really worried that we haven't prepared our teachers for this," one chief academic officer said.
• "The academic and cognitive demand [on teachers] is quite high."

One of the chief academic officers said that such a process represents a more significant change for teachers than they might realize.

Significant Professional Development

Moving teachers toward this way of working will require "some significant professional development:"

• teachers must learn to refrain from providing quick answers
• figure out instead how to formulate new kinds of questions that take them and their students back to the text repeatedly in their search for understanding.

Gradual Release

Close reading "moves students toward independence:"

• by developing their abilities to build vocabulary
• access a text's structure;
• grasp a text's meaning and build arguments from it based on evidence in the text itself
• eventually build the confidence to grapple with tough reading on their own.

Questions Left Unanswered

• How, for instance, would they build skill among their educators to provide sufficient supports for struggling readers, special education students, and English-learners to tackle text this way?
• How would teachers respond to a "sea change" that reframes their role from provider of information to facilitator of inquiry?
• And where would they get deep, focused lessons for such instruction?

"States have two school years left to prepare their educators and learners for whichever assessment they have chosen.

While some states are still figuring out how they will overhaul lesson plans, redefine learning objectives and otherwise alter their educational experiences to correspond with Common Core, others are leading the way in early implementation of the standards. They plan to be ready when the new sets of tests are rolled out."

Kentucky - Full Scale Approach 

• Kentucky undertook a voluntary initiative that saw 100 percent of its school districts commit to the standards at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year. 
• Kentucky was uniquely positioned to begin implementation early, Karen Kidwell, director of program standards at the Kentucky Department of Education, told Governing.
• In 2009, the state legislature passed a bill that outlined an education reform agenda, including an overhaul of the state’s academic standards. That work easily segued into Common Core implementation after the state joined the initiative.
• In 2010, the state started the process of preparing its 174 school districts for the new set of standards by holding workshops to train teachers on how to understand the standards and then translate them into tangible learning targets for students. Leadership teams, comprised of teachers and administrators, were established within each school and school district.
• This year, Kentucky has moved beyond laying the foundation and into full-fledged implementation. The leadership teams met for two full days in the summer and continue to meet six times each month to outline and review strategies for applying the standards into everyday instruction. Learning exercises and lesson plans based on Common Core were developed and shared across classrooms and schools.
• The state has also uploaded an online video introducing Common Core, produced by the School Improvement Network, which provides teachers with a broad overview of the standards.
• Next year, Kidwell said, the focus will be on sustainability, ensuring that the use of the standards can continue for the indefinite future. As part of the 2009 legislation, new testing was also introduced, giving the state’s students a few extra years of practice before the official Common Core assessments are instituted.

OP-ED COLUMNIST
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: January 24, 2012

In the 21st-century economy, everyone is going to have to find a little something extra to stand out in their field of employment.

"There will always be change — new jobs, new products, new services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average."

Story

The average (textile) mill has only two employees today, “a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.”

Unemployment

High unemployment persists because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers.

Average is Offically Over

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over!

Lydia Dobyns, President, New Tech Network

Common Core Implementation

To promote success (Common Core), we need to ensure that our teachers have a high degree of digital literacy, so they can communicate and work efficiently and effectively with their students. To accomplish this goal, it's important to establish professional development programs to help bridge the gap between students and teachers.

Engaging Students

To engage today's students, we must speak their language -- the digital language. As an example, a class at Tech Valley were asked to determine how to heat food without using fossil fuel. Of course, this was a wonderful environmental and biology lesson, but thanks to technology, these students were able to take this one step farther. They skyped to a village in Haiti to share with the villagers how to adapt a solar oven adding global awareness to an already rigorous biology project. How much more meaningful is that assignment when it is made useful and relevant through the use of digital technology?

"Professional Learning Communities understand that the “L” in the title refers to both student and adult learning." - Chris Jakicic

Our state has adopted the Common Core State Standards. So we do we do now? We recommend that teams get started on the process now so that they are learning more about what they will need to do as a result. Beginning steps include:

1. Begin with a review of the structure of the new standards—the idea of College and Career Readiness is an important thread beginning even in kindergarten. Read one standard all the way through from Kindergarten to 12th grade to understand how they build on each other.
2. Become familiar with the Appendices for each set of standards. There are hidden gems in each one: Appendix A in ELA has some important vocabulary and discussion about text complexity and the structure of the standards, Appendix B in ELA provides samples pieces of text and ideas for assessment, Appendix C in ELA provides samples of student writing and scoring ideas which can lead to rubrics, and Appendix A in Math explains how the standards are structured for each grade level and the two different tracks for high school math.
3. Identify the power or essential standards for your course or grade level. If you are an elementary school, choose one area (math or ELA) to begin with. Get good at the process, and the next subject will be much easier. Unwrap these standards into their learning targets. Don’t rush this step: getting clarity about the meaning of these standards will take some time. Talk about what your expectations for proficiency will be and what instructional strategies will be most effective to get students there. Look at the grade level before and after yours to assure your expectations are vertically aligned.
4. Begin writing short common formative assessments for a small number of learning targets (1 to 3 maximum). Become confident writers of constructed response questions. Examine the student responses collaboratively to make sure you are all applying the rubric the same way.

Two recent reports have a lot to say about instructional quality—some of which seems frankly troubling.

Gates Foundation - Measures of Effective Teaching

No matter what framework was used, teachers got higher scores on procedural tasks:

• planning
• behavior management

relatively low scores on

• "analysis and problem solving,"
• "using investigation/problem-based approaches,"
• student participation in making meaning and reasoning,"
• "relevance to history and current events."

Consortium on Chicago School Research

A report on the implementation of the Danielson Framework for Teaching found similar results. Teachers generally scored lower on the following domains:

•  "using questioning and discussion techniques"
• "engaging students in learning" than on
• higer on managing the classroom.

School Leaders

• The Chicago study also found that principals were not much better at using these techniques than teachers.
• They struggled to ask questions to elicit good information from teachers on their practice during the post-evaluation conferences.

Conclusions

The common-core state standards call for teachers to help students master precisely these kinds of higher-order reasoning and analytical skills in which they demonstrate consistent weaknesses in instruction and raise big question marks for teacher and leadership preparation.

The values of efficiency and fairness collide head-on in New York’s Education Law §3012-c, passed as part of the state’s efforts to bolster its chances in the 2010 Race to the Top competition.

• The law requires annual professional performance reviews (APPRs) that sort teachers into four categories — “highly effective,” “effective,” “developing” and “ineffective”— based on multiple measures of effectiveness, including student growth on state and locally selected assessments and a teacher’s performance according to a teacher practice rubric.
• The fundamental problem is that it’s hard to assess the efficiency or fairness of an evaluation system that doesn’t exist yet.
• There are too many unknowns to be able to judge, which is one of the arguments for piloting an evaluation system before bringing it to scale.

A Moving Target

The properties of the state tests that are to be used to assess teachers’ contributions to student learning are a moving target;

• The tests have been changing in recent years in response to concerns about their difficulty, predictability and coverage of state curricular standards.
• In a couple of years, those standards and assessments will change, as New York and many other states phase in the Common Core Standards and new assessments designed to measure mastery of them.
• The models to estimate a teacher’s position relative to other teachers in contributing to students’ test performance are imprecise at the level of the individual teacher, and different models yield different results for a given teacher.

There’s been little to no discussion of how to incorporate this uncertainty into the single numerical score a teacher will receive.

The 2013-2014 school year may seem like a long way off, but state school officials are already fretting over a perfect storm of education reforms that could make today's extensive state testing regimen seem like a snap.

1. Technology Concerns

Maryland education leaders are worried that many schools may not have the technology available to make an immediate switch to online tests, and that teachers inundated by other changes may not be able to prepare students.

2. Overlap of Old and New Assessments

Betty Weller, vice president of the Maryland State Education Association, said teachers will have to juggle the old and new curriculum at the same time and prepare students to take the MSAs as well as the new tests.

3. New Teacher Evaluations

To make teachers even more anxious, they will begin to be judged for their performance that year under a new evaluation system that takes into account how much their students have learned — and for some, how well their students do on the tests.

Assessment Consortia

According to my quick count, SMARTER Balanced now has 29 state members; PARCC has 23 plus the District of Columbia. (A handful are hedging their bets.)

Charters in Mutiple States

And therein lies the rub for Achievement First, which operates charter schools in both New York and Connecticut. Yes, indeed: the Empire State joined one assessment consortia, Connecticut joined the other.

“We have attrition in third and fourth grade. Even though third and fourth graders typically don’t physically walk out of school, they walk out of early math and early English instruction. And then they fail early on in the pipeline. Where we’re catching this is in the transition from high school to college, but trust me, it starts a long time before that.

“Rather than rewrite the law of who’s in charge of which grades, I have been a profound proponent of working collaboratively with early childhood educators, elementary and secondary educators, we at the college level, and even the workforce development people to say: This is a pipeline.

“SUNY is on record as trying to meld that pipeline into a more systematic way of educating our young people and it brings everybody to the table.

GRAND RAPIDS - Michigan is not among the seven states that have completely developed plans to bring the Common Core State Standards to classrooms, according to the study, "Preparing for Change," released this month.

Michigan is not alone. Implementation of Common Core State Standards in three key areas (1. teacher professional development, 2. curriculum and 3. teacher-evaluation systems) is behind schedule in all but 7 states (New York, North Carolina, West Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Kentucky and Georgia). 

Keep in mind that the report issued recently by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center relates to the mere existence of state plans, not actual implementation. 

Most states don't expect to implement the plans until 2014-15 the same year that the two assessment consortia, PARCC and SBAC, expect to begin formative and summative assessments.

In other words, schools in the standards-ready states will be assessed and judged on the basis of less than one year of implementation.