College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

Sandy Cottom was one of the teachers sitting among the group of 15 or so. She’s been up at the front of the classroom going on 34 years, and has been through countless teaching reforms.

With Common Core, teacher’s roles are changing. More and more the teacher is the facilitator.

Tim Shanahan on Literacy

To Multi-Text Or Not to Multi-Text in Close Reading

"aimed at ensuring that readers make sense of a text solely by considering the author’s case as stated explicitly and implied by an author’s own words within the text."

When New York recently released its Common Core test results, children with special needs saw one of the largest drops in the percentage of students rated "proficient". by Rachel Howard

How do we incorporate simple yet powerful writing activities that will not only prepare our students for college/career, but also help with content acquisition?

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). View an interactive map of states that have adopted and are implementing CCSS.

By providing consistent and practical guideposts -- and long-term data analysis that tracks whether educational programs actually help students learn -- Common Core Standards are a long-awaited first step to closing the talent gap that bedevil...

By Dan Willingham

Melby-Lervåg et al. included 235 studies in their analysis and concluded that existing research suggests that all three—rime awareness, phoneme awareness, and size of verbal short-term memory—predict word reading but the largest effect is observed with phonemic awareness.  (In fact, the predictive value of verbal short-term memory is quite small.) 

The second important conclusion from this review concerns causality. All of these studies in the meta-analysis are correlational. Hence, one interpretation is that phonemic awareness is related to word reading skills because phonemic awareness is necessary for that skill. However, an equally viable interpretation is that reading changes phonemic awareness, so the association is observed because more skilled readers have undergone greater change.

 PBS NewsHour

Aug. 13, 2013

In the past, public school standards varied state to state. With backing from the federal government, some governors and superintendents collaborated on a national "Common Core." But they define only the "what" -- what kids should know, not how they should be taught. Special education correspondent John Merrow reports.

As these students prepare for their futures they should be learning the tools they’ll be expected to work with.

Oklahoma’s Chief Information Officer Alex Pettit admits handling I.T. for the State Department of Education starts with bandwidth.

Pat Wasley, CEO, Teaching Channel

September Special: Questions About the Common Core? Teaching Channel is bringing together experts on the CCSS to answer questions for our community of teachers.

The study findings revealed that supes believe that the 2 main barriers to their technology leadership during implementation are:

(a)    Resistance to changes in traditional mindsets by other district stakeholders

(b)   Lack of sufficient funding for technology purchases and technology upgrades

A number of math teachers have complained either directly or indirectly recently that I have offered criticisms but no solutions to the problem of poorly-designed math courses, especially at the se...

The National Assessment Governing Board has adopted language that will define the new "college prepared" scores in reading and mathematics on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

“Since NAEP is the gold-standard assessment, it will be enormously helpful to have NAEP benchmarks for academic preparedness for college as both assessment consortia [for the Common Core State Standards], as well as individual states, work to develop or purchase measures of college readiness,” Michael Cohen, the president of Achieve, a Washington-based college-readiness advocacy group, wrote in a July 30 letter to NAGB Chairman David P. Driscoll.

I sell literacy. I do. If I don't sell kids on wanting to learn to read and write as well as they can, they won't. Sometimes it's an especially hard sell for kids in middle school, both for those who

PBS NewsHour

Aug. 14, 2013

The new "Common Core" sets the standard for learning in America, but how do states test for these new, more complex and career-ready skills?