About a year and a half ago, I came up with the non-freaked out approach to Common Core literacy while driving home from a conference for edu-policy types in my state capital of Lansing. I was frustrated by the acrimony that seemed to suffuse the day’s sessions — there were politicians bickering with superintendents bickering with teachers […]
Research
No More Painful Research
Note from Dave: A few months ago, my friend Deborah Owen of EinsteinsSecret.net approached me with an idea for a guest post on an approach to research that seemed pretty… well, non-freaked out. I immediately loved the idea of having Deborah share this approach to research with the Teaching the Core community because it’s a Common Core […]
Common Core W.CCR.9 Explained
All right, we’re almost done pwning these writing anchor standards. And just so we’re clear, pwn is pronounced “pown” which rhymes with own, and it essentially means domination. My little brothers (high schoolers) taught me the meaning of this word on a recent road trip we shared: Now then. Let’s pwn this. W.CCR.9 — that’s […]
Common Core W.CCR.8 Explained
W.CCR.8 — that’s the 8th College and Career Readiness anchor standard within the Writing strand of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA/Literacy — reads as follows: Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism. This standard is the second […]
Why Did my Students Bomb their Extended Research Paper?
At the Michigan Reading Association (MRA) conference this past spring, I heard Mike Schmoker give an address about his most recent book Focus. During the address, Schmoker recommended that, when building curriculum, each summative paper should be graded for a single item (e.g., explaining quotations). I tried this on a recent epic research assignment that I […]
