Seattle Schools Community Forum

Update: wanted to add a link to a Pennsylvania teacher's PD day on Common Core.   Eye-opening reading and you will now know the CC theme " Kids these days" and that an official sponsor of the standards is Office Depot.  Long but detailed and from a teacher's POV (which I think is important to the discussion.) End of update. From reader Kristen King's blog, My Daughter, the Guinea Pig : We’re a very mathy family. We all learned math the way human beings learn things — that is, by making it a fun part of our everyday activities. But this year, my daughter is a guinea pig for the new national experiment that is called the Common Core standards. Her class is using a new curriculum designed specifically for the Common Core, “My Math,” and she hates it. I’m hearing her say, “I don’t like math,” and I’m concerned. She still likes math, really, but only when we mess around with it as a family. Her homework is procrastination and resentment and sometimes te...

 Update:  some of you may have missed the link below to a video of a kindergarten teacher teaching math via Common Core standards.  I'm putting it in this thread as well. New York State's Education department has a website to promote its work called EngageNY .   @The Chalk Face education blog has a story on Common Core videos that are being used.  I personally found the one in the story - for kindergarteners - to be somewhat disturbing.  There is something so mechanical and detached about the way this teacher is providing the teaching.  I also learned that there's two ways to think/learn about math.  The teacher does not state the name of the first way (as she starts) but she calls the second way, "the math way." Can a teacher or someone who knows about teaching math explain why the students would need to learn to think of math in two different ways? What is interesting as well are the comments to this story.  Is warmth ...

 More on what works in math and science from this NY Times article , Guesses and Hype Give Way to Data in Study of Education.   Want to be data-driven?  Use real research. But now, a little-known office in the Education Department is starting to get some real data, using a method that has transformed medicine: the randomized clinical trial, in which groups of subjects are randomly assigned to get either an experimental therapy, the standard therapy, a placebo or nothing.  The findings could be transformative, researchers say. For example, one conclusion from the new research is that the choice of instructional materials — textbooks, curriculum guides, homework, quizzes — can affect achievement as profoundly as teachers themselves; a poor choice of materials is at least as bad as a terrible teacher, and a good choice can help offset a bad teacher’s deficiencies.   So far, the office — the Institute of Education Sciences — has supp...