The Impact of Great Professional Development
Posted August 28, 2019
By Derrick Love Ed. D, Assistant Superintendent at Priority Charter Schools
Teachers join the profession to make a significant impact on the lives of students and the communities they serve. No teacher wakes up in the morning and says, “Today I want to be a bad teacher.” Their implied mindset is, “I want to be the best teacher ever! But sometimes I simply do not have the tools within my toolkit to make it happen.” The U.S. Department of Education concluded that student achievement could improve by 21 percentile points as a result of teachers’ participation in well-designed professional development programs. Intentional professional development is the key to building and sustaining high-quality teachers in the classroom.
Why Are We Still Focusing on Standards?
Posted June 20, 2019
By Linda Diamond, President, CORE & Dale Webster, Chief Academic Officer, CORE
As many of our readers know, CORE has never wavered from its stance that teachers should be knowledgeable about ELA and/or math pedagogy and equally important, teachers deserve support to implement an evidence-based, standards-aligned curriculum for ELA and math. A renewed focus among educators on implementing a curriculum is a shift from the past several years where many school districts provided teachers with internally-created and loosely-designed units of study. This shift from units of study to adopting standards-aligned materials has been occurring more and more in school districts across the country and is supported by organizations such as the Gates Foundation.
A Standards-Aligned Curriculum with Excellent Implementation is Still Not Enough
Posted May 1, 2019
Our most vulnerable students also require structured materials designed specifically to fill learning gaps
by Linda Diamond, President, CORE and author of the Teaching Reading Sourcebook and Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures
Back in September 2018 I wrote about the importance of selecting and fully implementing a great curriculum with excellent support and ongoing professional learning. This is a huge and important step in accelerating achievement for all students. But is that enough? The answer, unfortunately is “no.” A standards-aligned, high-quality curricula, while significantly improving outcomes for many students, will not be sufficient for those most at risk. Core curriculum is targeted at grade-level standards and will ensure all students have access to robust content, but it will not meet the needs of students who are significantly behind in their skills. Such students will still require a targeted or intensive intervention curricula that is well beyond what a standards-aligned core program can provide.
Siegfried Engelmann, a Life Well-Lived
Posted February 21, 2019
By Linda Diamond, President of CORE
A shining light of education left us on February 15, 2019. Siegfried Engelmann, known as Zig to those of us who knew and adored him, was a genius. His expertise was figuring out and “engineering” instruction so that children learned to read and do math successfully and at advanced levels starting in kindergarten. Despite its critics, Zig and Direct Instruction (DI) did more for at-risk students than any other method of instruction.
READ MORESmall Group Instruction: How to Make it Effective
Posted September 27, 2018
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 in other content areas. However, prior to implementing small group instruction teachers often have questions to be answered.
