By Cyndia Acker-Ramirez and Katie Laskasky Teacher Practice Teams (TPTs) engage in collaborative inquiry to advance students’ sense of belonging and achievement in mathematics through professional learning routines that embrace teacher creativity and ownership of instructional decisions. Imagine a thriving team of math teachers, impassioned about growing students’ belonging in their math classroom communities and […]

Welcome to the Spring 2021 edition of the CORE Academic Quarterly newsletter! In this edition of the Academic Quarterly, the Reading Expert shares recommended practices to leverage Tier 1 reading instruction to address COVID-related learning losses. The Marvelous Mathematician provides recommendations for how to identify and prioritize unfinished learning needs so all students build their […]

Welcome to the Fall 2020 edition of the CORE Academic Quarterly newsletter! In this edition of the Academic Quarterly, the Reading Expert shares recommendations and resources to help you better support students with dyslexia when they are participating in remote learning. The Marvelous Mathematician shares many techniques to help students with dyslexia overcome their challenges […]

Welcome to the Spring 2020 edition of the CORE Academic Quarterly newsletter! In this edition of the Academic Quarterly, the Reading Expert dives into the benefits of explicit spelling instruction and shares what that looks like in the practice. The Marvelous Mathematician shares six recommended approaches and some helpful resources to foster greater student engagement […]

Welcome to the Winter 2020 edition of the CORE Academic Quarterly newsletter! In this edition of the Academic Quarterly, the Reading Expert discusses how to close gaps for older, struggling readers through diagnostic assessment and specific intervention strategies. The Marvelous Mathematician shares why vocabulary in math is so important and the challenges students face when […]

Welcome to the Fall 2019 edition of the CORE Academic Quarterly newsletter! In this edition of the Academic Quarterly, the Reading Expert discusses a few ways that educators can distinguish between a true reading disability and English language development challenges in English learners. The Marvelous Mathematician shares the important role note taking plays in helping […]

Unlike learning to speak, reading is not a natural process. Reading has to be taught. For many, learning to read is one of the most difficult cognitive tasks they will ever encounter, especially for those with dyslexia. According to the International Dyslexia Association (IDA), dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. […]

Welcome to the spring 2019 edition of the CORE Academic Quarterly newsletter! In this edition of the Academic Quarterly, we step back in time to Fall 2014 where we first published the following Reading Expert article. We believe the information is still very relevant in light of the current calls for standards-based curriculum and equity […]

Welcome to the winter 2019 edition of the CORE Academic Quarterly newsletter! In this edition, you’ll find the Reading Expert examining the role of Guided Reading in differentiated small group instruction while the Marvelous Mathematician completes his second article in a two-part series on students with disabilities. This article focuses on the types of materials and knowledge […]

Welcome to the Fall 2018 edition of the CORE Academic Quarterly newsletter! October is dyslexia awareness month! You may recall that there have been two previous editions of the Academic Quarterly’s Reading Expert devoted to dyslexia. The Spring 2018 edition focused on Misconceptions about Dyslexia and the Winter 2018 edition focused on the difference between screening […]

Congratulations to Dale Webster, CORE’s Chief Academic Officer, who was selected from over 100 applications to be on California’s State Literacy Needs Assessment Team! The role of the State Literacy Needs Assessment Team is to provide feedback to the California Department of Education on the proposed questions for the state literacy needs assessment and to assist […]

By Susan Van Zant and Nancy Volpe, Senior Educational Services Specialists, CORE, Inc. All teachers want their students’ achievement levels to increase. Small group instruction and cooperative learning have a significant impact on student achievement (Hattie, 2009) and are widely used in elementary classrooms. Many middle and high school teachers are increasingly using these structures […]

(By Dean Ballard, Director of Mathematics, CORE, Inc.) Numbers are all around us. Let’s teach children to embrace rather than fear numbers. Interested in more great professional learning resources for Math? Check out another CORE blog: Getting Math Group Work to Work

Welcome to the Spring 2018 edition of the CORE Academic Quarterly newsletter! The end of the school year is upon us! We hope that you have had a productive school year and feel proud of the learning that your students have accomplished. In this edition’s Reading Expert column, we tackle some misconceptions about dyslexia that still […]

(By Linda Diamond, founder and former president, CORE and author of the Teaching Reading Sourcebook) Students with disabilities are not making the achievement gains they should make. The achievement gap between students with disabilities and students without disabilities has remained largely unchanged despite adaptive technologies and supposedly research-based methods. But we can improve outcomes for […]