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Five Recommendations for Teaching Common Core Grammar to Elementary Students
The Common Core State Standards emphasize grammar and language study, but what kind of grammar instruction keeps students engaged and makes them better writers? Traditional grammar exercises, taught out of context from writing instruction, frequently reduce student interest levels (Woltjer, 1998) and have very little impact on student writing (Weaver, 1998). Because of this, it’s especially important for teachers to provide students with grammar instruction that keeps their interest while helping them understand how specific grammatical concepts can improve their writing.
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Five Strategies to Help Beginning ELLs Meet the Common Core
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) focus on results and do not define how ELLs will meet their academic expectations. Teachers and school administrators are left to figure out how to help ELL’s meet the Common Core. This white paper defines the unique characteristics of beginning ELLs and five instructional strategies designed to help these students develop greater language proficiency to meet the Listening and Speaking Standards of the CCSS (Boyd-Batstone, 2013).
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How to Teach Students to Evaluate Information: A Key Common Core Skill
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative directly identifies higher-order thinking skills as critical to achieving career and college readiness for all students. As educators pursue CCSS alignment, it is crucial to design curricula and assessment systems that engage students in higher-level thinking tasks that provide opportunities for students to evaluate information. This white paper will focus on one critical thinking skill that students need to learn—how to evaluate.
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Project-Based vs. Problem-Based Learning: Which is Better for the Common Core?
As a result of the CCSS, the terms project-based learning and problem-based learning, which have been around for a while, are starting to get a lot of buzz. However, as those two terms become more and more popular, they're also causing a lot of confusion. Are they the same thing? Is one "better" for the Common Core? How will you know which one to do in your classroom?
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Five-Minute Vocabulary Strategies for the Common Core
As districts continue to work to meet the needs of the Common Core, the issue of sharing the workload across content areas has been broached. So where to start? Vocabulary is an area that every single content area teacher must teach. When we have a few minutes left at the end of class where we often let students begin homework or chat—why not turn these moments into word play?
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7 Classroom Routines that Promote Content Literacy Skills
To get better as readers, our students need to practice. The more practice they get, the more words and information they will absorb. New words and new information form background knowledge, the secret sauce of comprehension.
Practice leads to familiarity with phrases, and that results in the ability to chunk words into phrases, rather than reading word by word. The ability to "inhale" phrases as single units of meaning is what fluency is all about. Fluency is the capacity to read effortlessly and with comprehension.
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Teacher Evaluation and Teacher Effectiveness: Classroom Observations
Classrooms are complex due to the variability of the teaching force and the students who populate them. Good’s (1988) thoughts hold true for the practical aspects of conducting classroom observations as a way “to describe what takes place in classrooms in order to delineate the complex practical issues that confront practitioners” (p. 337). Learning to teach is a lifetime endeavor that needs to be supported by classroom observations. If teachers are not learning, it is highly unlikely that their students are learning (Darling-Hammond, 2010).
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Teacher Evaluation and Teacher Effectiveness: Using Multiple Sources of Evidence
In traditional educational practice, classroom observation has been the primary tool to document teacher performance (Weade & Evertson, 1991). However, while classroom visits remain important and viable ways to observe and inform teaching practices, multiple sources of evidence provide a far more accurate, multi-dimensional portrait of teacher performance (Darling-Hammond, 2006).
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8 Strategies for Designing Lesson Plans to Meet the CCSS Opinion and Argument Writing Requirements
For years, teachers have been designing persuasive writing lessons for their students. The Common Core State Standards are changing that by asking teachers to move away from persuasion and toward argumentation. Argumentation (called opinion writing in the elementary grades) is preferred by the CCSS because it is more rigorous and more in line with the kind of writing students will be expected to do in college and careers.
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4 Key Ways to Help English Language Learners Improve Their Academic Vocabulary
Many teachers are concerned that the new Common Core State Standards will cause ELLs to fall behind. How do we prevent this from happening? It all starts with vocabulary instruction. Here are four big ideas that will enrich your verbal environment, add stimulus to your vocabulary instruction, and expand ELLs’ vocabularies in productive ways.
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Four Key Components of a Successful School Leader Internship Program
Adults learn best when exposed to situations requiring the application of acquired skills, knowledge, and problem-solving strategies within authentic settings. Therefore, in order to get the most out of an internship, students working toward becoming school leaders should apply knowledge and reflect critically throughout their intern experiences.
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School Leadership Strategies for Classroom Rigor
To teach the Common Core’s literacy standards in grades K–5, you don’t have to toss all of your great storybook lessons and start from scratch. However, there are some ways in which you might need to shift your instruction to meet more of the standards and hold students to rigorous expectations.
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5 Things That Elementary School Teachers Should Be Doing to Meet the Common Core's Literacy Standards
To teach the Common Core’s literacy standards in grades K–5, you don’t have to toss all of your great storybook lessons and start from scratch. However, there are some ways in which you might need to shift your instruction to meet more of the standards and hold students to rigorous expectations.
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Bullying: What Schools Can Do
Schools need to assertively confront bullying and take any instance of bullying seriously. By taking organized schoolwide measures and providing individuals with the strategies to counteract bullying, schools can reduce the instances of bullying and be better prepared to address it when it happens.
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5 Easy Strategies for Increasing Text Complexity
At the heart of the new Common Core State Standards is a focus on more rigorous expectations for instruction. In particular, the standards emphasize the importance of teaching higher-level texts. Here are five easy strategies for increasing text complexity.
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Response to Intervention and Continuous School Improvement
Shift your school from a reactive system to a proactive solution by correctly implementing RtI and CSI to address the learning needs of all students..
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Formative Assessment Drives Common Core Mathematics, PreK-5
Formative assessment drives mathematics instruction and is a key component in successfully implementing the Common Core State Standards.
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Six Skills That Will Keep Students in School
Why are some students labeled at risk instead of at promise? Why do some able students fail while others succeed? These six skills provide a simple curriculum for assisting reluctant and disengaged learners.
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5 Things Every Teacher Should be Doing to Meet the Common Core State Standards
When reading the Common Core State Standards, it's easy to get caught up in the details of each standard. These five shifts highlighted by the CCSS will help teachers in grades 6-12 effectively implement the standards in their classrooms on a day-to-day basis.
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Common Core State Standards... Only the Beginning
At the heart of the new CCSS is a focus on higher expectations. Download "Common Core State Standards...Only the Beginning!" by leading education expert Dr. Barbara R. Blackburn and learn how you can create a rigorous environment to help all learners succeed.
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Job-Embedded Learning
Learn about a powerful, practical, and cost-effective form of professional development from Sally Zepeda—instructional supervision, teacher evaluation, and school improvement specialist.
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Using Wikis for Communicating and Collaborating in Your School
Understand the transformational power of wikis on meetings! Download “Using Wikis for Communicating and Collaborating in Your School” by online educator and technology expert, Stephanie Sandifer.
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The Role of Active Literacy in Mathematics Education
Do word problems and math vocabulary confuse students in your mathematics classes? Help your students gain the literacy skills required to achieve the eight Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.
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4 Myths About Rigor in the Classroom
The 3 R’s—Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships—have become accepted as necessary characteristics of quality schools, though many myths about rigor remain. Here, the authors dispel those myths and to demonstrate how academic rigor can ultimately benefit every student and staff member.
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Collaboration: A Building Block for Effective PD in Technology
The inclusion of collaboration into professional development can provide teachers with the communication and support they need to enrich their personal growth and encourage them to embrace their careers. Learn how to incorporate collaboration through planning, implementation, and follow-up.
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Using Seminars to Teach the Common Core's Speaking and Listening Standards
Learn how to explicitly and effectively teach speaking and listening skills by using seminars to facilitate a collaborative, intellectual dialogue driven by open-ended questions surrounding any given topic.
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