4.28.15 Virginia "Jenny" Williams Four Reasons Why I Talk to Myself When I was a child, not unlike other children, I had an imaginary friend and I often carried on long complex conversations with my friend. As I grew, my friend visited less and less frequently, but... Read more
11.11.14 Rebecca Moore Phantom Test Results and the Need for Assessment and Data Literacy Our own John Cronin and Nate Jensen recently penned an article that appeared in Phi Delta Kappan titled The Phantom Collapse of Student Achievement in New York (PDF download). In it they addressed... Read more
3.25.14 John Wood “Close Reading” or “Reading Closely”? In several blog posts, I have expressed misgivings about “close reading” as an aspect of the implementation of the CCSS, most recently in this post. Last month, CUNY English professor Aaron... Read more
3.11.14 John Wood CCSS Reading Instruction: Eat Your Vegetables??? In his book ‘I Got Schooled’ filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan draws an analogy between education reform and ideas in health care. Basically, good health depends on implementing several changes in... Read more
3.4.14 Kelly Goodrich Do students know that change is coming? #CommonCore It’s an exciting and challenging time to be an adult in the world of K12 education. Everyone, including the 50 Chief State School Officers, staff at every SEA and LEA, classroom teachers,... Read more
2.27.14 John Wood Bob Dylan on Common Core Curriculum Good and bad, I define these terms Quite clear, no doubt somehow Ahh, but I was so much older then I'm younger than that now Bob Dylan - My Back Pages Lyrics | MetroLyrics States and districts... Read more
1.23.14 Matt Hicks Four Ways MAP or MPG Interim Assessments Can Support the Transition to the Common Core Many school districts across the country use our interim assessment MAP®, or Measures of Academic Progress® and MPG®, or MAP for Primary Grades. We’ve aligned them to work with the Common Core... Read more
12.16.13 Kathy Dyer Academic Vocabulary: Semantics Matter When I worked with a diverse student population I was fortunate to learn SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) strategies. Designed to support English language learners, these strategies... Read more
12.4.13 Kelly Goodrich Interim Assessments’ Role in Showing Common Core Success Rigorous, inspiring, exciting, and challenging are all accurate descriptions of the Common Core State Standards. And regardless of your viewpoint they provide a framework for 21st century education... Read more
10.25.13 Kelly Goodrich Let the Common Core State Standards be Common They say politics makes for strange bedfellows. It seems the Common Core State Standards do as well. The initiative was led by a coalition of the nation’s governors and education commissioners,... Read more
10.14.13 John Wood Teacher Voices in the CCSS Conversation The implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has focused the conversation on the standards in a different way and brought in more classroom teacher voices. One of the main... Read more
10.11.13 Kathy Dyer Higher-Order Questions, Rigor, and Meeting the Common Core State Standards Barbara Blackburn, on her website, has a great definition of "rigor" that I think most educators can get behind, and that I certainly appreciate: Rigor is creating an environment in which each... Read more
