I’d bet a Galapagos Tortoise that no one decides to become a teacher based solely on the prospect of adhering to a list of teaching standards. So, here’s a great question: why in the heck should we care about them? (Hint: It’s not because some armageddon is coming in the form of a standardized test […]
Beyond the Common Core Standards
As I mentioned in the first post on Teaching the Core, I’ve never been a fan of teaching standards; in fact, “standards” is a word that I happily deleted from the Tagxedo word cloud that I created out of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) ELA & Literacy document. A ton of things attracted me to becoming […]
Common Core R.CCR.6 Explained
R.CCR.6 — that’s the sixth College/Career Readiness anchor standard within the Reading strand of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA/Literacy — reads as follows: Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text. In other words, how does where a writer or narrator is coming from (point of […]
Common Core R.CCR.5 Explained
R.CCR.5 — that’s the fifth College/Career Readiness anchor standard within the Reading strand of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA/Literacy — reads as follows: Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole. […]
A Class Purpose and the Promotion of Student Flourishing
I love summer break’s gift of decompression. It is during the weeks from mid-June to mid-August that my brain defrags the preceding school year’s experiences, condensing them into a more manageable series of memories, lessons, and principles. What are we about? One principle that I began examining in the Fall of 2011 is that of […]