Core Task Project

Angela Orr, Washoe’s Teaching American History Project Director, shared the following for those interested in bringing the CCSS into the secondary grades. (Important tools are linked at the bottom of the post.)

In an effort to scale the work of the Core Task Project into the secondary grades, over 230 middle and high school social studies teachers from Washoe and 60 social studies teachers from other Northern Nevada counties were invited to attend a  2-day workshop to learn and practice the Instructional Shifts and the Close Analytical Reading method.  The workshops were offered during the Spring and Fall semesters of 2012 and were attended by multiple social studies teachers from every single WCSD middle and high school and five other Districts.  During the workshops, teachers were asked to continuously reflect on the changes and shifts they would make to meet the expectations of Common Core with their students. Overwhelmingly, by the end of the workshops, the social studies community united around a few core ideas, which included a general understanding that the teachers had originally underestimated their students’ abilities to persevere when encountering difficult text and that the teachers’ role in building literacy would require a great deal of preparation and planning as well as a true commitment to better facilitation of learning experiences around reading and writing for and about content.

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