Principal Leadership Focused on the Instructional Shifts

Posted on November 2, 2013 by Aaron Grossman

The Wallace Foundation, in collaboration with the Council of Great City Schools, has shared a report describing the “changing role of principal supervisors” in the publication “Rethinking Leadership.” The report is especially insightful for leaders navigating the implementation of the Common Core with specific mention of the standards and the instructional shifts throughout the document. Such as:

In the Context of the Common Core State Standards, principal supervisors also need professional development focused on helping them develop a deep knowledge of the instructional shifts required by the new standards, as well as what constitutes evidence of the shifts.

For educators interested in seeing how other districts are navigating the implementation of the CCSS, the report, located here, could prove a productive read. For those seeking “evidence” of the shifts, as described in the report, the Instructional Practice Guides remain of paramount value.

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Common Core Lesson Demonstrations

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Aaron Grossman

As part of the NBC Education Nation 2013 Summit, a Common Core Teacher Institute was included to demonstrate Common Core lessons for ELA/literacy and math. Viewers can watch and download a 2nd grade read-aloud lesson—When Charlie McButton Lost Power; a 5th grade close reading, on one chapter, of the non-fiction text—The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Meeting Our Monsters, a 6-12 ELA/Literacy lesson on text synthesis; and How are Mitochondria Connected to the Aging Process?: a 11th and 12th grade text-based lesson in science.

Educators can enrich their personal, grade, or site experience by registering for the Common Core Challenge on the TeacherChannel. At the site, you can build a community and watch the video through the lens of the Instructional Practice Guides, download and try the lesson out, and participate in a discussion forum to share what was successful and what was challenging.

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Realizing the Common Core Summit

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Aaron Grossman

The Contra Costa County Office of Education hosted the San Francisco Bay Area Common Core State Standards Summit: Realizing the Common Core. The Summit included keynotes by William McCallum, lead writer of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics; Deborah Sigman, Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction for the California Department of Education; and Sandra Alberti of Student Achievement Partners.

The day also included specific sessions on unit mapping, mobile learning, the CCSS and the arts, SBAC and technology and the CCSS. It also included a session on the Instructional Practices Guides in ELA/Literacy. The PowerPoint for the session is here and the Instructional Practice Guides here. All of the session resources can be downloaded here.

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Common Core & Curriculum Controversies

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Aaron Grossman

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute hosted a webinar on Common Core and the Curriculum Controversies associated with their adoption. Moderator Mike Petrilli’s first hour was spent with Common Core math author Jason Zimba addressing myths and rumors surrounding the implementation of the CCSS. Some highlights below.

11:07 Jason Zimba reviews the process of creating the standards. This includes the research on which they were based and how they led to the instructional shifts.

17:15 The moderator, Mike Petrilli, asks the question about how to mitigate for the fact that organizations doing workshops and publishing materials might be promoting agendas antithetical to the standards. Zimba answers part of this by directing educators to the Publishers Criteria which Nevada has posted here.

Zimba: “It’s better to cite the standards rather than assail them.”

28:18: Zimba describes those items that might give us pause if materials and practices are described as Common Core aligned. He references several documents at www.achievethecore.org  and reminds viewers that the most appropriate lens to evaluate content remains the instructional shifts.

Zimba: It takes time to move the “instructional-industrial complex”

You can find access to the video here.

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What is “Developmentally Appropriate”

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Aaron Grossman

If you aren’t visiting Thinking Common Core, you may want to take few minutes to look over what is there.  The site curates relevant CCSS content including a recent blog post by Dr. Dan Willingham. In the post, Willingham challenges the assertion that teaching content and academic vocabulary in the primary grades is not developmentally appropriate. In fact, he demonstrates just the opposite noting that developmental psychology can help with describing how children learn and that “The best guide to ‘what’ is what children know now, and where you want their learning to head.”

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NEA Members Gather to Learn more about Washoe’s CCSS Efforts

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Aaron Grossman

Nevada State Education Association members met to learn more about the implementation of the Common Core in Washoe County. Participants reviewed the district’s K-6 3 Year ELA/Literacy Implementation Plan and the 2013-2014 CCSS Professional Learning Overview. You can retrieve the aforementioned items by clicking on the links.

During the meeting the NEA Common Core State Standards Toolkit was referenced several times. The document is a rich source of free and vetted materials matched to the instructional shifts in both ELA/literacy and mathematics.

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Teaching Students to Write Terribly

Posted on October 20, 2013 by Aaron Grossman

In a piece posted at Slate, writer and editor Matthew J.X. Malady, examines the writing section of the SAT. Through a series of interviews with college professors and those who prep students for the SAT, it becomes clear that the SAT has several specific limitations including the concern that the writing test ignores factual accuracy in favor of a student’s ability to “spew forth as many words as possible in as short a time as possible.” This is similar to the criticism offered by College Board president David Coleman who worries that the SAT rewards “fluent production effect” or “lying.”

Both Coleman and Malady offer similar solutions to the issue including the importance of students writing with source material. You can read the Malady piece here and watch Coleman address the question of coming changes to the SAT here.

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The Effects of “Praise” (and the Implications for CCSS)

Posted on October 15, 2013 by Aaron Grossman

In September, schools leaders engaged in a close reading of work by Carol Dweck (exemplar here) describing “fixed mindsets” and “growth mindsets.” The following video demonstrates how praising 5th graders for their intelligence versus their effort leads to the two aforementioned outcomes. If you know Dweck, you know the punch line. Praising students for their effort instills the motivation to persist through new and rigorous tasks. In this case, students are given simple puzzles to complete. As they work, they are either reminded how smart they are or how hard working they are. The students who hear how hard working they are continue through more challenging puzzles while the other group asks to return to easier puzzles.

Knowing how educators impact the development of “growth” and “fixed” mindsets becomes especially important as students are asked to wrestle with increasingly complex text and its academic vocabulary. You can watch the entire video here and gain a firmer understanding what you can do to help your students.

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Principles for CCSS-Aligned Quality Assessments

Posted on October 10, 2013 by Aaron Grossman

 The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has released a set of principles to help in the creation of Common Core-aligned tests. Chris Minnich, Executive Director, Council of Chief State School Officers, writes, the principles “help states hold themselves and their assessments accountable for high quality.”

A review of the principles reveals a tight alignment between what is emphasized with the instructional shifts and what is being expected of SBAC and PARCC. The principles include:

  1. ASSESSING STUDENT READING AND WRITING ACHIEVEMENT IN BOTH ELA AND LITERACY:  The assessments are English language arts and literary tests that are based on an aligned balance between literacy and informational texts.
  2. FOCUSING ON COMPLEXITY OF TEXTS: The assessments require appropriate levels of text complexity; they raise the bar for text complexity each year so students are ready for the demands of college‐ and career level reading no later than the end of high school. Multiple forms of text are assessed, including written, audio, visual, and graphic as technology permits.
  3. REQUIRING STUDENTS TO READ CLOSELY AND USE EVIDENCE FROM TEXT:  The assessments consist of reading  and  writing test  questions, tasks,  and/or  prompts,  as appropriate, that demand that students read carefully and deeply and use specific evidence from increasingly complex texts to obtain and defend correct responses.

The remaining principles and introductory front matter can be found here. The CCSSO were instrumental in moving the Common Core from an initiative to a set of college and career ready standards.

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Cultivating Wonder—Great Texts and the Questions they Inspire

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Aaron Grossman

Although it has not “officially” launched, readers can visit a new website, www.cultivatingwonder.org and learn about a resource being developed to “showcase great texts (essays, poems, excerpts from longer works) and identify simple, elegant questions for each text; questions that propel ourselves and our students back in the world the author has created; that help pause on moments that are worthy of attention; and that, quite simply, cultivate wonder.”

The original essay, Cultivating Wonder, sets the frame by looking at five questions, from five texts, with a focus on the first five Common Core standards. The texts include Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Martha Graham’s “An Athlete of God,” Mark Twain’s Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” by Dylan Thomas “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop. By reading the essay, educators are given a chance to see how good questions can unlock great texts and allow authentic access to the CCSS.

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