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Good Classroom Time Management
Posted March 18, 2020
by Susan Van Zant and Nancy Volpe, Educational Services Specialists, CORE
What can be done to maximize the time that students are in school?There is no mystery about time. Students attend school a set number of hours each week and days each year. At each grade level they have a lot of skills and knowledge to learn. Establishing specific times that reading and math are taught is a good beginning. However, if time is not used efficiently during the allocated periods, student learning time is lost. Often precious minutes slip away because good time management practices are not in place.
Ten minutes might not seem like much, but it can add up. For example, students take three minutes to enter the class and quiet down, the teacher waits two minutes while three students look for their materials, a student sharpens a pencil for a minute, one group needs three minutes to transition to another, and a class disruption lasts for a minute. It all adds up. Just 10 minutes a day adds up to 50 minutes a week. In a typical school year, it would add up to about 1,800 minutes. Divide that 1,800 minutes a year by 180 days of school, and that is the equivalent of 10 school days lost. READ MORE
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Getting Curriculum Implementation Right
Posted March 12, 2020
Implementing a new curriculum is a challenging process. Often the organization, layout, and even the instructional approach can be drastically different from the previously used curriculum. Change takes time, especially if that change includes learning new instructional practices. Taguma and Barrera (2019) cite teacher commitment, beliefs, and content and pedagogical understanding of the new curriculum as key factors that either facilitate or impede successful curriculum implementation. READ MORE -
A School Playbook for Responding to Coronavirus
Posted March 5, 2020
By Arun Ramanathan, CEO, Pivot Learning, featured in EdSource
Every day, we wake up to new stories about the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19). More than a decade ago, there were similar headlines about another pandemic, the swine flu (H1N1), as it spread from Mexico into the United States.
At that time, I oversaw student services, including nursing and medical services, for the San Diego Unified School District, the second largest school district in California. Because of our proximity to the Mexico border, we were on the front line of the pandemic.
Sure enough, one of our students was one of the first people infected with H1N1 in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flew a team to San Diego. As more cases appeared, they ordered the closure of two high schools and a middle school. Fortunately, we had planned for that possibility.
The lives of our parents and students were disrupted for a few days. But when no new cases appeared, and the threat H1N1 receded, life returned to normal. As I look back on that experience, there are four lessons I’d offer school district leaders today.
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February Is the Hardest Month
Posted February 24, 2020
by Linda Diamond, President, CORE and author of Teaching Reading Sourcebook
When I was seven years old, my mother and father brought home my newly adopted baby brother, Larry. Right from the start, I thought that he was mine and that it was my job to protect him and love him. And I tried. But he was not an easy child, and as he grew older he was always in trouble and sometimes violent, even breaking car windows on the neighbor’s car and hitting another neighbor with a baseball bat. He was angry all the time, but I didn’t know why. However, when he was in seventh grade I realized that he couldn’t read and that every day at school was another day of rage and embarrassment. He brought those feelings home with him. Not one of his teachers tried to help and my parents were at a loss, so I, a high school student and knowing very little, tried to help him. I taught him letters and then I did flash cards, and we would laboriously sound out easy words. Often after a really bad day at school he would crawl into my bed and let me read to him. And during those quiet times, he would ask, “Why am I like this?” I had no answer. READ MORE -
Assessing How We Grade Assessments
Posted February 14, 2020
By Dean Ballard, Director of Mathematics, CORE
When I started teaching math 35 years ago, chapter tests were easy to grade. Typically, a test had 20–25 problems and I simply made each problem worth four or five points, whatever was needed to make the total 100 points. In many math curricula today, there may be only 5–10 problems total on a chapter, module, or unit assessment. Suppose I have a test with nine problems. If I assign equal weight to each of these problems, and a student gets six out of nine problems correct, this student would have a score of 67% correct. This often translates into a grade of D. Yet six out of nine correct may warrant a better grade when we consider the actual knowledge displayed by correctly answering those six problems.Many teachers use a standard percent to grade relationship when determining grades for students: 90–100% is an A, 80–89% is a B, 70–79% is a C, 60–69% is a D, and below 60% is an F. Ten years into my teaching career two parts of this grading system started to strike me as questionable. First, even if a student correctly answers 59% of the problems deemed appropriate to include on the assessment, that student is considered failing. Second, since I’m the one determining the weight of each problem on an assessment, what does the percent correct, or percent of total points, really mean? READ MORE
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What can be done to maximize the time that students are in school?
Implementing a new curriculum is a challenging process. Often the organization, layout, and even the instructional approach can be drastically different from the previously used curriculum. Change takes time, especially if that change includes learning new instructional practices. Taguma and Barrera (2019) cite teacher commitment, beliefs, and content and pedagogical understanding of the new curriculum as key factors that either facilitate or impede successful curriculum implementation. 
When I was seven years old, my mother and father brought home my newly adopted baby brother, Larry. Right from the start, I thought that he was mine and that it was my job to protect him and love him. And I tried. But he was not an easy child, and as he grew older he was always in trouble and sometimes violent, even breaking car windows on the neighbor’s car and hitting another neighbor with a baseball bat. He was angry all the time, but I didn’t know why. However, when he was in seventh grade I realized that he couldn’t read and that every day at school was another day of rage and embarrassment. He brought those feelings home with him. Not one of his teachers tried to help and my parents were at a loss, so I, a high school student and knowing very little, tried to help him. I taught him letters and then I did flash cards, and we would laboriously sound out easy words. Often after a really bad day at school he would crawl into my bed and let me read to him. And during those quiet times, he would ask, “Why am I like this?” I had no answer. 
When I started teaching math 35 years ago, chapter tests were easy to grade. Typically, a test had 20–25 problems and I simply made each problem worth four or five points, whatever was needed to make the total 100 points. In many math curricula today, there may be only 5–10 problems total on a chapter, module, or unit assessment. Suppose I have a test with nine problems. If I assign equal weight to each of these problems, and a student gets six out of nine problems correct, this student would have a score of 67% correct. This often translates into a grade of D. Yet six out of nine correct may warrant a better grade when we consider the actual knowledge displayed by correctly answering those six problems.