In order to mine a standard’s true meaning, you typically have to unwrap it a bit. The purpose of this work is to distinguish the standard’s explicit and implicit meaning. Implicit meaning? Aren’t standards supposed to be articulated with precision? Well, that’s the hope, but even the best standards require skillful interpretation. This is informed by the professional conversations that we have with others and the expertise we are all willing to share. For instance,…
At first glance it might seem like we are doing this already, but teaching confidently with the CCLS challenges us to understand them with depth. Glancing at the standards is what we do when we say we are reviewing the standards….exposing ourselves to the standards….. or introducing the standards to teachers. Developing a fluency with the standards? Well, that’s a whole other ball game. This week, I’ll try to share as much as I can…
What does it mean to Race to the Top? Ensuring that students leave schools prepared for college and career is the ultimate goal of course, and as a Network Equivalent Team member in an urban school district, it was tempting to get the race to that top underway as quickly and painlessly as possible. It seems there is a lot of work to do over the next four years. The same is true in other…
This: And what conditions create people who act like this? These videos punctuated early conversations I had with teachers and leaders relevant to Race to the Top.They prompted the articulation of some important beliefs: RTTT will be translated differently inside of every system it lives in. We believe that all teachers have a vision of the difference they want to make and distinct expertise that must be mined in service to kids. We can choose…
Pythagoras suggested that the beginning is the half of everything. Anyone who has been facilitating ELA work around the Common Core Learning Standards this fall knows this, because David Coleman makes reference to it here as he focuses on powerful ways to begin the act of reading. Pythagoras was clearly on to something, and I can’t help but think that the way we begin the work of Race to the Top will be worth half…
What is your vision of the graduate you hope to shape? What is your vision of the professional you will become? Envision your students at the very top of their game. Envision retiring at the very top of yours. What will this look like? How will you know when you’ve arrived? How can you maximize every learning opportunity that you are given in service to this vision? And what will happen if you begin the…
It depends on your perspective, I guess. We can treat Race to the Top as a mandate. We can make it our holy grail. We can bend dramatically under the weight of an agenda we don’t understand and break ourselves and the vision that we had of the teacher we would be–of the difference we would make—against this invisible wall. We can qualify the steps we take in pursuit of this vision with hot-headed criticisms…
What makes this powerful? And this? And this? For that matter, what makes most persuasive writing powerful? Story does. No one is saying that narrative writing has jumped the shark. Not even this guy. More importantly, I don’t think we have the right to take narrative writing away from kids. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for expository writing and engaging kids in the development of argumentative pieces. I agree with David Coleman: we don’t…
This is the sixth and final post in a series about research and writing in Heather Bitka’s kindergarten classroom. To learn more about this project’s purpose and outcomes, you might want to read the first post. If you are interested in understanding how this project enabled the teachers and coaches involved to position themselves as learners, you can click through to the second post. The third post demonstrates the beginning of instruction, where researchers applied…
This post is the fifth in a series about research and writing in Heather Bitka’s kindergarten classroom. To learn more about this project’s purpose and outcomes, you might want to read the first post. If you are interested in understanding how this project enabled the teachers and coaches involved to position themselves as learners, you can click through to the second post. This post demonstrates the beginning of instruction, where researchers applied strategies that helped…