You don’t have to do it on your own! In this session hosted by the edWeb.net Implementing the Common Core State Standards community, presenter Kevin Baird, Chairman of the Board at the nonprofit Center for College and Career Readiness, provided educators with specific strategies to engage students in selecting their own stretch texts from electronic titles, as well as pragmatic tools and priority steps to evaluating your own resources and lessons.
College & Career Readiness in a global economy has led to a new definition of what students need to know and be able to do. Those “College & Career Readiness Standards” – whether Common Core or TEKS – have key indicators of Rigor.
The Common Core State Standards place a special emphasis on reading informational text. Teachers often say how excited students are to learn about the world around them. Whether it’s the latest news from Mars or information about a typhoon that struck last week, kids want to know all about it. How can we harness that enthusiasm for nonfiction to help students become great readers?
College & Career Readiness is defined at a new level – student performance at a level of synthesis and extended thinking. Kevin Baird shared concrete examples of student work and grading rubrics to support educators in evaluating learning synthesis.
Non-traditional forms of assessment, such as peer-to-peer learning, can produce useful information for the teacher. Another idea is to include an assessment component in warm-up, group, and closure activities during class. Teachers can make students more responsible for their own learning through technology-enhanced self-assessments.
The largest, most difficult, and most impactful “shift” in Common Core and other “Next Generation” learning standards is the recognition that students must be able to perform at a deeper level of cognition – literally, “depth of knowledge”.
The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics describe eighteen different varieties of math problems which can be solved by multiplication and/or division. In a typical textbook, only a handful of these problem varieties are addressed.
Opinions matter! Many students are eager to weigh in on issues that are important to them. By teaching them how to write sound arguments, we can help them persuade others of their point of view now and in the future.
Dan Levin, President and Founder of EducAide Software, demonstrated how to turn ordinary skills-based questions into the kinds of multi-step questions and tasks which are at the heart of the Common Core math standards. The discussion was practical and based on real-world examples
The Developmental Writing Scale (DWS), which ranges from emergent writing (scribbling) to cohesive and coherent paragraph level writing, serves as the anchor measure and was developed to be sensitive to small changes in writing quality in beginning writers.