4 Steps to Instructional Excellence What is a culture of instructional excellence? It’s a place where teachers and administrators focus on providing excellent instruction for students. It’s a place where everyone knows what excellence looks and feels like, and the whole team supports the goal of obtaining it. Dr. Edwin Feulner, president of The Heritage…
How do EDI and Common Core Standards work together? Let us begin with understanding the terminology to avoid miscommunication. Common Core refers to educational standards created at the national level. Common Core standards are organized by subject and grade. Many teachers have been misled to believe that Common Core requires inquiry learning, project-based learning, or…
Educeri is Here We are proud to report that our new service, Educeri, is officially up and running! What is Educeri, you ask? Educeri (ed-ju-sair-ee) is a subscription-based lesson service that gives users unlimited access to hundreds of digital K-12 resources from any device. Through Educeri, we are committed to providing lessons – awesome ones…
Literacy: The Shifts Imagine this scenario: You are a 6th grade social studies teacher. Your principal visits your classroom and asks you how you are meeting the new literacy standards promoted by Common Core. Perhaps your jaw drops, and then you stumble out a few words about helping them read and write. “Well, check it…
Next year I will be the parent of a school-age child. Wow that makes me feel old! From my son’s experiences in pre-school I can already tell that his education is going to be vastly different from my own. But how different? I imagine that I will be uttering statements like, “I don’t remember learning…
The Well-Crafted, Well-Taught Lesson gets even better! What’s new? Explicit Direct Instruction: The Power of the Well-Crafted, Well-Taught Lesson was published in 2009, and since then authors John Hollingsworth and Dr. Silvia Ybarra have forged a path through the Common Core State Standards, visited hundreds more classrooms, and fine-tuned their EDI strategies. Now they are…
Don’t Just Teach Math, Use Math The Common Core State Standards are specific in their mandate to have students apply math to “real-world” situations. But what does that look like in the K-8 classroom? One way for teachers to make math really come alive in the classroom is to connect math with what happens in…
Each state that has adopted Common Core State Standards will select an assessment consortium to assess how children are progressing in school. The two options most widely chosen at this point are: Smarter Balanced and PARCC. Each assessment consortium has provided practice test questions and today we will review one of these questions and…
Usually in the Ask DataWORKS blog, we like to feature answers to questions that readers have asked. This time we are fortunate to have a special guest who has some definite opinions about education. Our guest is Yoda, the great 900-year-old Jedi Warrior, who played a starring role in the Star Wars movies. We…
Each state that has adopted Common Core State Standards will select an assessment consortium to assess how children are progressing in school. The two options most widely chosen at this point are: Smarter Balanced and PARCC. Each assessment consortium has provided practice test questions and today we will review one of these questions and discuss its potential impact on classroom instruction.…