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found on twitter

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Apps correlated to Common Core State Standards: Math

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,Common Core LFA

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1. Goal (Common Core Standard)

2. Assessment (SBAC)

3. Activities

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The Common Core is packed full of acronyms. This PDF helps breakdown what each acronym means

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A FUN WAY TO REVIEW

WITH STAFF.

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Common Core Standards - Review Jeopardy Template

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1. Greater focus on fewer topics

2. Coherence: Linking topics and thinking across the grades

3. Rigor: Pursue conceptual understanding, procedural skills and fluency, and application with equal intensity.

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Common Core

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Common Core State Standards establish clear, consistent guidelines for what every student should know and be able to do in math and English language arts from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The standards were drafted by experts and teachers from across the country and are designed to ensure students are prepared for today's entry-level careers, freshman-level college courses, and workforce training programs.

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Montana's Against Common Core:

-Student tracking will lead to the

tracking of personal information

(i.e. health records, religion, parental

voting record)

-Common Core dictates the literature

a teacher must use to reach/teach

the standards

-"Keeping tabs on the physiological

activity of schoolchildren is the

trajectory of the data systems developing

alongside the Common Core."

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Seventeen states are involved

in the Partnership for

Assessment of Readiness for

College and Careers Consortium.

The PARCC consortium provides

the opportunity for participating

states to come together and

collectively design a more

high-quality assessment that

measures real world skills.

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Montana has joined with 24

states in developing assessments

with the Smarter Balanced

Assessment Consortium. Field

tests were conducted by

participating states Spring of 2014.

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In November 2011, the Montana

Board of Public Education adoped

the Montana Common Core.

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Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano

wrote "an initiative for the year" in 06-07.

From this she created a task force which

would serve as the building blocks for

Common Core.

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How to Read the Common Core

Sarah Brown Wessling

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Learning to Read the Core: A View from 30,000 Feet

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Want to learn how to read the Common Core State Standards? Teaching Channel will help you. Here's a video with a great presentation giving you the tools needed to read the Common Core and begin implementing the Core in your classroom.

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10 Must-See Common Core Resources

From the Simple K12

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Practical Online Teacher Training - Simplek12

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SimpleK12 is the #1 Source For Professional Development For Teachers. Earn CEUs. Connect with peers. Attend a FREE webinar event today!

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Teaching Channel CCSS Videos

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Teaching Channel presents an inside look into how the Common Core is being used inside the classroom. Watch a number of different lessons covering Math and English Language Arts for a number of grade levels. Get ideas and strategies for teaching to the Common Core.

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Pinterest Boards and Pins

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3 minute video explaination via Vimeo

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Three-Minute Video Explaining the Common Core State Standards

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This three-minute video explains how the Common Core State Standards will help students achieve at high levels and help them learn what they need to know to get to graduation and beyond.

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WHAT DO PARENTS NEED TO KNOW?

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Parent Roadmaps to the Common Core Standards

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Parent Roadmaps to Common Core Standards / Parent Roadmaps- English Language Arts

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Parents for Public Schools "Pros and Cons"

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About.comTeaching "Pros and Cons"

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The full implementation of the Common Core State Standards has come and gone. The true impact that they have on schools and education as a whole may still not be known for several years. One thing that is for sure is this shift to a national set of standards has been revolutionary and highly controversial. They have been highly debated and well discussed with a handful of states once committed to the standards having eventually recanted to go a different direction. As the media continues to evaluate the significance of the Common Core and data from Common Core states begin to pour in, you can bet the debate will rage on. Here, we examine several of the pros and cons of the Common Core Standards that will continue to lead the debate.

1. The Common Core State Standards are internationally benchmarked. This means that our standards will compare favorably to standards of other countries. This is positive in that the United States has dropped considerably in educational rankings over the last few decades. By having standards that are internationally benchmarked that ranking could begin to improve.

2. The Common Core State Standards has allowed states to compare standardized test scores accurately. Up until the Common Core Standards, each state had their own set of standards and assessments. This has made it exceedingly difficult to compare one state's results accurately with another state's results. This is no longer the case with like standards and assessments for Common Core states who share the same assessments.

3. The Common Core State Standards has decreased the costs states pay for test development, scoring, and reporting. This is because each state will no longer have to pay to have their unique tests to be developed. Each of the states that share the same standards can develop a like test to meet their needs and split costs. Currently, there are two majors Common Core-related testing consortia. Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium is made up of fifteen states and PARCC consists of nine states.

1. The Common Core Standards has increased the rigor in some classrooms and may better prepare students for college and global work success. This is probably the single biggest reason that the Common Core Standards were created. Higher education has long complained that more and more students need remediation at the beginning of college. The increased rigor should lead students to be more prepared for life after high school.

2. The Common Core State Standards arguably has lead to the development of higher level thinking skills in our students. Students today often are tested on one skill at a time. The Common Core assessment will cover several skills within each question. This will ultimately lead to better problem-solving skills and increased reasoning.

3. The Common Core State Standards assessments have given teachers a tool to monitor students' progress throughout the year. The assessments will have optional pre-test and progress monitoring tools that teachers can use to find out what a student knows, where they are going, and to figure out a plan to get them where they need to be. This gives teachers an avenue to compare an individual student's progress instead of one student against another.

1. The Common Core State Standards assessments have been more authentic to a child's learning experience. We will be able to see what all a student has learned across all curricula through the multi-assessment model. Students will no longer simply be allowed to come up with the right answer. Often times they must give an answer, state how they arrived at that conclusion, and defend it.

2. The Common Core State Standards can benefit students with high mobility when they move from one Common Core state into another. States will now share the same set of standards. Students in Arkansas should be learning the same thing as a student in New York. This will benefit students whose families move continuously.

3. The Common Core State Standards has given students stability thus allowing them to understand what is expected of them. This is important in that if a student understands what, and why they are learning something, there becomes a greater sense of purpose behind learning it.

4. The Common Core State Standards has in many ways enhanced teacher collaboration and professional development. Teachers across the nation have been teaching the same curriculum. This allows teachers in opposite corners of the nation to share their best practices with each other and apply it. It also provides the opportunity for meaningful professional development as the education community is all on the same page. Finally, the standards have sparked a meaningful, nationwide conversation about the state of education in general.

1. The Common Core State Standards has been a tremendously difficult adjustment for students and teachers. It has been a difficult transition. It was not the way many teachers were used to teaching and not the way that many students were used to learning. There have not been instant results but instead, has been a slow process with many almost refusing to get on board.

2. The Common Core State Standards has caused many outstanding teachers and administrators to pursue other career options. Many veteran teachers have retired rather than adjust the way they teach. The stress of getting their students to perform will likely continue to cause more teacher and administrator burnout.

3. The Common Core State Standards are vague and broad. The standards are not particularly specific, but many states have been able to deconstruct or unwrap the standards making them more teacher friendly.

4. The Common Core State Standards has forced younger students to learn more at a quicker pace than they ever have before. With the increased rigor and higher level thinking skills, early childhood programs have become more rigid. Pre-Kindergarten has become more important, and skills students used to learn in second grade are being taught in Kindergarten.

1. The Common Core State Standards assessment does not have an equivalency test for students with special needs. Many states provide students with special needs a modified version of the test. There is no modified test for the Common Core Standards, meaning that 100% of a school's population has their results reported for accountability purposes.

2. The Common Core State Standards could be watered down when compared to a few states who had previously developed and adopted rigorous standards. The Common Core Standards were designed as a middle ground of the current state standards meaning that while many states' standards were raised, there were some whose rigor decreased.

3. The Common Core State Standards caused many textbooks to become obsolete. This was a pricey fix as many schools had to develop or purchase new curricula and materials that were aligned to the Common Core.

4. The Common Core State Standards costs schools a lot of money to update the technology needed for the Common Core Standards Assessments. Most of the assessments are online. This created many issues for districts who had to purchase enough computers for all students to be assessed in a timely manner.

1. The Common Core State Standards has led to an increased value on standardized test performance. High stakes testing is already a trending issue, and now that states are able to compare their performances against another accurately, the stakes have only become higher.

2. The Common Core State Standards currently only have skills associated with English-Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics. There is currently no science, social studies, or art/music Common Core Standards. This leaves it up to individual states to have to develop their own set of standards and assessments for these topics.

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Controversial Common Core, What You Should Know Before Taking Sides

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The full implementation of the Common Core State Standards has come and gone. The true impact that they have on schools and education as a whole may still not be known for several years. One thing that is for sure is this shift to a national set of standards has been revolutionary and highly controversial.

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NEA 6 Ways Common Core is Good for Students

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As the Common Core debate heats up, we've heard a lot from policy makers, politicians, and even TV talk show hosts about the challenges posed by the new standards and whether they'll help or hurt education. With all the chatter, the voices of the professionals who are actually responsible for implementing the Common Core have been all but drowned out in the mainstream media.

To get their perspective, NEA Today convened a panel of educators from around the country who were attending NEA's Common Core Working Group in Denver, Colorado - a strategy- and ideas-sharing meeting of education professionals from the 46 states who have adopted Common Core. (Find out more about NEA's involvement in the Common Core.) They told us there's a lot of anxiety among educators about the Common Core, and a lot of unanswered questions. How do we best implement them? How do we train more teachers? How do we help students master the new content? And what about testing?

But despite these significant hurdles, the overwhelming consensus of the educators we heard from is that the Common Core will ultimately be good for students and education. Read on for six reasons why.
1. Common Core Puts Creativity Back in the Classroom
"I have problems and hands-on activities that I like my students to experience to help them understand a concept or relationship," says Cambridge, Massachusetts, high school math teacher Peter Mili. One of his classic activities is taking a rectangular piece of cardboard and asking the students to cut from each corner to make a box. They learn that different sized boxes need different lengths in cuts, and then they fill the boxes with popcorn and measure how much each box can hold.

"I haven't been able to do that in years because of the push to cover so many things. Time is tight, especially because of all the benchmarks and high-stakes testing," Mili says. "So I've had to put the fun, creative activities aside to work on drill and skill. But the Common Core streamlines content, and with less to cover, I can enrich the experience, which gives my students a greater understanding."

Mili says a lot of teachers have fun, creative activities stuffed into their closets or desk drawers because they haven't had the time to use them in the era of NCLB tests and curriculum. He thinks the Common Core will allow those activities to again see the light of day. That's because the Common Core State Standards are just that - standards and not a prescribed curriculum. They may tell educators what students should be able to do by the end of a grade or course, but it's up to the educators to figure out how to deliver the instruction.
2. Common Core Gives Students a Deep Dive
When students can explore a concept and really immerse themselves in that content, they emerge with a full understanding that lasts well beyond testing season, says Kisha Davis-Caldwell, a fourth-grade teacher at a Maryland Title 1 elementary school.

"I've been faced with the challenge of having to teach roughly 100 math topics over the course of a single year," says Davis-Caldwell. "The Common Core takes this smorgasbord of topics and removes things from the plate, allowing me to focus on key topics we know will form a clear and a consistent foundation for students."

Davis-Caldwell's students used to skim the surface of most mathematical topics, working on them for just a day or two before moving on to the next, whether they'd mastered the first concept or not.

"Students would go to the next concept frustrated, losing confidence and losing ground in the long haul," she says. "The Common Core allows students to stay on a topic and not only dive deeply into it, but also be able to understand and apply the knowledge to everyday life."
3. Common Core Ratchets up Rigor
The CCSS requires students to take part in their learning and to think more critically about content, as opposed to simply regurgitating back what their teachers feed them, says Kathy Powers, who teaches fifth- and sixth-grade English Language Arts in Conway, Arkansas.

One way Powers says the standards ratchet up the rigor is by requiring more nonfiction texts to be included in lessons on works of fiction, and vice versa.

She uses Abraham Lincoln as an example.

A lesson could start with "O Captain! My Captain!", the extended metaphor poem written by Walt Whitman about the death of Lincoln, and incorporate the historical novel Assassin, which includes a fictional character in the plot. Then she'd follow that with the nonfiction work, Chasing Lincoln's Killer, and have students also look at newspaper clippings from the time.

"Or if we're working on narrative writing, I can have them read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and ask them not to just absorb the story, but also to evaluate C.S. Lewis as a writer, and then to try to write a piece of narrative in the style of C.S. Lewis," she says. "In the past we'd ask them to simply write a story. But this requires more critical thinking, and this kind of increased rigor will make students more competitive on a global level."
4. Common Core is Collaborative
The Common Core allows educators to take ownership of the curriculum - it puts it back into the hands of teachers, who know what information is best for students and how best to deliver that information.

"Not only does it integrate instruction with other disciplines, like English and social studies, or literacy, math, and science, the common standards will allow us to crowd source our knowledge and experience," says Kathy Powers of Arkansas.

Kisha Davis-Caldwell agrees. "The Common Core will create opportunities to share resources and create common resources," she says. "We can discuss what isn't working and use our voices collectively. That way we can all be part of the conversation about assessment of teaching, learning, and the standards themselves."

Peter Mili says the key word to focus on is "common." He believes there is far too much academic variability from state to state and not enough collaboration. With the Common Core State Standards, "the good things that may be happening in Alabama can be shared and found useful to educators in Arizona because they are working on the same topics."
5. Common Core Advances Equity
Cheryl Mosier, an Earth Science teacher from Colorado, says she's most excited about the Common Core because it'll be a challenge for all students, not just the high achieving students, which Mosier and her colleagues say will go a long way to closing achievement and opportunity gaps for poor and minority children. If students from all parts of the country - affluent, rural, low-income or urban - are being held to the same rigorous standards, it promotes equity in the quality of education and the level of achievement gained.

"With the Common Core, we're not going to have pockets of really high performing kids in one area compared to another area where kids aren't working on the same level," she says "Everybody is going to have a high bar to meet, but it's a bar that can be met with support from - and for - all teachers."

Davis-Caldwell's Title 1 school is in a Washington, D.C., suburb. In the D.C. metro area, like in other areas in and around our nation's cities, there is a high rate of mobility among the poorest residents. Students regularly move from town to town, county to county, or even state to state - often in the middle of the school year.

There has been no alignment from state to state on what's being taught, so when a fourth-grade student learning geometry and fractions in the first quarter of the school year suddenly moves to Kansas in the second quarter, he may have entirely different lessons to learn and be tested on.

It also helps teachers better serve their students, says Davis-Caldwell. When teachers in one grade level focus consistently and comprehensively on the most critical and fundamental concepts, their students move on to the next grade level able to build on that solid foundation rather than reviewing what should have been learned in the previous grade.
6. Common Core Gets Kids College Ready
"One of the broad goals is that the increased rigor of the Common Core will help everyone become college and/or career ready," says Peter Mili. Preparing kids for college and careers will appeal widely to parents and the community, especially in a struggling economy where only 31 percent of eleventh graders were considered "college ready," according to a recent ACT study.

If a student who was taught how to think critically and how to read texts for information and analysis can explain the premise behind a mathematical thesis, she'll have options and opportunities, Mili says. Students with that kind of education will be able to decide what kind of career path to follow or whether they want to attend a university or any kind of school because they were prepared to do a higher level of work that is expected in our society and our economy.

Student success is the outcome every education professional works so tirelessly toward, and the Common Core will help them get there if it's implemented well, according to the panel of educators.

"Yes, it's an extra workload as a teacher, and it's difficult...but it's for the betterment of the students," says Davis-Caldwell. "And if we keep that our focus, I don't see why we can't be successful."

Related Post:
Ten Things You Should Know About the Common Core
NEA President Van Roekel: We Need a Course Correction on Common Core Find Common Core resources on NEA Today's Pinterest Board and at NEA.org

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Six Ways the Common Core is Good For Students - NEA Today

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As the Common Core debate heats up, we've heard a lot from policy makers, politicians, and even TV talk show hosts about the challenges posed by the new standards and whether they'll help or hurt education. With all the chatter, the voices of the professionals who are actually responsible for implementing the Common Core have been all but drowned out in the mainstream media.

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ASCD 2010 Article

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Engage NY Math/ELA

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Common Core Learning Standards for Mathematics

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OPI's Common Core page

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Cybraryman's Common Core Page

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Cybrary Man's Educational Web Sites The internet catalogue for students, teachers, administrators & parents. Over 20,000 relevant links personally selected by an educator/author with over 30 years of experience.