Search Results for: "common core"
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What Higher Standards Would Have Meant for My Students
After graduating from college, I spent two years teaching math at a high school in rural Mississippi. The experience was a rewarding one that invested me deeply in education, but it was also immensely frustrating, exhausting, and humbling. It wasn’t until I moved back to Nashville and began learning about policies and reforms taking place…
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Higher Standards Give Spoken Word Students Greater Power to Express Themselves
By Laura Louis and Benjamin Smith Students sit next to each other for 60 minutes a day 180 days a year, yet they don’t actually know each other. They can text each other at a rate of 50 words per minute, but they don’t know anything about their classmates that isn’t posted somewhere. They are…
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High Expectations, High Support: Helping At-Risk Students Succeed with RTI2
Joshua is a second-grade student here in Tennessee. All his classmates are diving into books on their own, but Joshua is completely mystified by the squiggles on the page. His teacher is worried. She can’t give him the support he needs to catch up, but he’s not far enough behind to qualify for special education…
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Voices of Teachers: Our Students Need a New Assessment
Dear Friends, Who was the biggest contributor to your success when you were in school? For me, three talented teachers come to mind: Mrs. Seiler, who taught me to love reading, Mrs. Funderberk who showed me that while learning can be hard, it is also fun, and Mrs. Dunning, who spent countless hours patiently supporting…
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Setting Priorities from the Ground Up: SCORE’s Summer 2014 Focus Groups
Every year, SCORE releases a comprehensive report on the state of education in Tennessee that reviews progress and sets priorities for approaching challenges in the coming year. For example, this year’s report highlighted rigorous standards and assessments, effective school leadership, access to great teaching, using technology to enhance instruction, and supporting students from kindergarten through…
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Performance-Based Tests Take the Guesswork Out of Assessing
Marianne’s multiple-choice test was the easiest things in the world to grade. A, B, A, D, D, B….it’s right or it’s wrong and I move on. The problem is that in mathematics, all “A” really tells me is that Marianne (not her real name) can write down a letter. There are a dozen different reasons…
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Elementary STEM Education and Rigor in Digital Learning
Tennessee teachers have been offered an extraordinary opportunity. With implementation of the Common Core State Standards, we can redesign the way we teach to better prepare our students for an unknown future. The Internet provides an abundance of resources that promise “Common Core aligned lessons” that allow students to apply knowledge. Apps and web tools allow…
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Teacher Voice: In Defense of Standardized Testing
It seems like every day there’s another article about the horrors of standardized testing. Just this week comedian Louis CK raised the issue to seemingly new heights when he first took to the Twittersphere to rail against testing and then followed up with an appearance on Letterman. His daughter took New York’s state tests last…
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Education Legislation: What You Need to Know – Part 1
The second session of the 108th Tennessee General Assembly encompassed 67 legislative days full of activity, during which the 33 senators and 99 representatives worked to promote, advocate, and revise the laws of our state with a common goal to improve life for Tennesseans. I became a member of the SCORE team in January. Prior…
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SCORE Statement on the 2014 Legislative Session and Assessment Legislation
(NASHVILLE) – The State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE) released the following statement from President and CEO Jamie Woodson regarding the 2014 legislative session in Tennessee and HB1549/SB1835, which passed the General Assembly today: After a year of extensive public and legislative conversation regarding higher academic standards and related strategies to improve student learning, our…
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Success in the 21st Century Depends on Technology Skills
“I did fine without technology in the classroom when I was in grade school—why is it so important now?” That was a direct quote from one of my college classmates on the first day of our “Technology and Learning” course my sophomore year. I have to admit that I questioned it as well. Up until…
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Teacher Voice: How the Common Core State Standards Have Affected My Teaching
Over the past few years, I have heard a lot of discussion about Common Core State Standards, their roll out, and the assessment designed to measure CCSS. As an educator immersed in Common Core implementation, here are a few of my thoughts. New standards are not new. Standards change as we educators learn more about…
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Teacher Voice: Common Core Deserves the Support of the General Assembly
“Tell me the height of our school.” This is a seemingly easy question, yet one that requires the student to apply a variety of academic and critical-thinking skills. It’s also a very Common Core-driven question and one that I wouldn’t have been able to tackle in my classroom under the old Tennessee state math standards….
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Teacher Voice: RTI² Helps Students Master Challenges of Common Core
There’s a young man at our school – let’s call him Dedric (his name has been changed for issues of privacy) – who has always been a good student. He made good grades in elementary and was proficient last year on the reading/language arts portion of TCAP. But he’s been struggling a little this year,…
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Are We Missing the Point? – Data Collection in TCAP versus PARCC
As someone who researches the nuances of assessment data, policy proposals, and academic studies for a living, I have a great appreciation for the details. It’s the details – the finer, perhaps boring points of education policies – that determine how things actually happen in practice. Having a clear understanding of the details gives us…
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Teacher Voice: Common Core Standards Help Our Students Achieve More
They say the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing but expecting different results. Tennessee adopted the Common Core State Standards in 2010. Prior to this adoption we received an “F” for failing to give our students the knowledge and skills needed to compete in today’s workforce. I believe the Common Core…
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State of Education in Tennessee Report Calls for Sustaining Commitment to Standards, Assessments
The State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE) today released 2013-14 State of Education in Tennessee, a comprehensive annual report that assesses Tennessee’s recent work to improve K-12 student academic performance and identifies five priorities for public education this year. The 52-page report was released by SCORE’s founder and chairman, Senator Bill Frist, M.D., at an…
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The Importance of Sharing Best Practices
When I first started my internship with SCORE, I remember hearing a lot about SCORE’s commitment to “sharing best practices.” At the time, I knew very little about what that meant, or what that would look like. Over the course of the semester however, I became familiar with what some of the best practices throughout…
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CTE Finds Common Core Not So Different, but Deeper
In 1981 Barbara Mandrell released the song “I Was Country, When Country Wasn’t Cool.” In the song, Mandrell reflected on the things she did that were country before others found them to be “cool” and began to mimic those same things. In many ways, Career and Technical Education teachers could make the same proclamation about…
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Social Media Captured Education’s Big Moments of 2013
Social media is amazing, not just for the ability to connect us in real time, but also for the living history that we create as we interact with one another. 2013 was a banner year for public education in Tennessee.