Lead Lit Topic: Common Core
Many teachers and school leaders have a sense of urgency in understanding and implementing the Common Core. Our features focus on the authentic experiences of teachers as they wrestle with new definitions of writing text types and text complexity in the Common Core, work with evidence and build their informational libraries. We include many resources from literacy coaches and school leaders as they bring together teachers to discuss and experiment with new standards in their classrooms. Whether it's one teacher working with a few students, or a district looking to coordinate resources across hundreds of classrooms, we've got the materials you need to learn more about how the Common Core is being tested and tried throughout the country.
Results
Picture It: Objectives and the Coach
Setting and communicating clear objectives to students is essential. In his article “Objectives That Students Understand,” Robert J. Marzano points out that an ineffective use of objectives is “writing the...
Picture It: Pinterest for Professional Development
This fall we are trying a new way to organize how we share professional readings and videos for our professional development sessions. We are creating text sets of professional readings/videos/blog...
Days of Magic and Wonder: Generating Research Topics with First Graders
mag·ic (noun) -- Encarta Dictionary conjuring tricks -- conjuring tricks and illusions that make apparently impossible things seem to happen, usually performed as entertainment inexplicable things -- a special, mysterious,...
Assessing Students: Many Hands for a Lighter Load
Many of our informative assessments are administered individually. The benefit of these assessments is the opportunity they provide to notice which reading strategies each student uses, what the child comprehends,...
Alignment and Community: Planning a Year of Professional Development Opportunities
The role of the leader is to enable, facilitate, and cause peers to interact in a focused manner. Peer interaction is the social glue of focus and cohesion. Michael Fullan...
Introducing the Common Core Standards in Writing (Part 2)
Facilitating big-picture professional development in writing for teacher leaders takes careful time and planning to make the best use of everyone’s time. We began our morning with this objective: “We...
Common Core Standards: Spreading the Word
As a district-level literacy coach in California, I've been given the task of helping move our system toward implementation of the Common Core Standards. We are a large urban district...
Same Old Books with New Intentions: Reflecting on Rigor and the Common Core
Rigor is not an attribute of a text, but rather a characteristic of our behavior with that text. Kylene Beers and Robert Probst I remember one of my first...
Taking Four Corners of Text Personally
Nothing personal . . . I dislike the phrase nothing personal and try not to use it myself. For some communicators it’s the tag that gets added onto something unsolicited...
Hollering About Informational Text
We set out over a year ago to increase the informational side of our bookshelves when we realized that our professional development mentor texts mirrored the elementary school discrepancy between...
