Common Core - Where School Boards need help..(Habits of Mind connection, for OST providers)

What Are School Boards Asking About Common Core?

By Learning Forward on January 28, 2013 1:10 PM

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak at my local school board meeting about Common Core implementation and, in particular, the role of instructional coaches in supporting teachers to make the transition in classroom practice. Jefferson County Public Schools (Colo.) was the site of a 2010 evaluation of instructional coaching that prompted my co-authors and me to write Coaching Matters.

A full hour of the meeting had been set aside to help board members know what the Common Core standards meant for the curriculum in the district and state, as well as what steps the district was taking to implement the standards. Without a doubt, Jefferson County central office leaders have taken substantive and aggressive steps to prepare for and initiate implementation of the new standards by establishing a rich online resource of materials for teachers; engaging teachers in training; and supporting principals in leading change efforts.

Board members' questions were insightful and revealed what school board members across the 46 states adopting Common Core both worry about and take responsibility for as leaders and advocates for effective learning for educators and students.

• What is the relationship among the Common Core standards, the new assessments, and our new educator effectiveness system?
• How are principals being prepared to support teachers implement the standards?
• How are we preparing students and teachers to use technology to meet the requirements proposed in the new assessments?
• How will we make the changes we need to make in the limited time before the assessments are fully implemented? How will we accomplish so much in so little time?
• What is the role of professional learning and particularly of our instructional coaches in the implementation of Common Core?
• How do we prevent the changes from overwhelming the entire system?
• How can I be an advocate within the community? What is my role in supporting the Common Core?
• Do we have sufficient resources to support what is needed to achieve success?

What is evident in these questions is strong support for increasing standards for student learning, and commitment to ensuring that both educators and students succeed. The questions also reveal the sense of overwhelming responsibility school boards feel to exhibit sufficient leadership and take concrete steps to support teachers and principals as they implementation the Common Core standards.

District and state leaders, professional associations, and others can provide guidance and support to members of school boards in their role as leaders and advocates. School board members will need to establish clear priorities and goals for full implementation of Common Core standards in every classroom and school. They will want to monitor progress toward implementation and impact on student achievement, and to understand how the Common Core is altering classroom instruction and student learning experiences.

As ambassadors within the community, school board members will benefit from resources that will help them explain and leverage support among parents and community and business leaders. Working hand-in-hand as partners with district and school leaders, school board members are key contributors to the success of Common Core implementation.

Joellen Killion
Senior Adviser, Learning Forward

On STEM, Parent/Community Involvement & the Maker Movement

Q&A with Generation YES President Sylvia Martinez on STEM and ways for parents to be involved

Posted: 14 Jan 2013 07:46 AM PST

Check this out! I’m interviewed in the current issue of Washington Exec. Here’s the interview.

Sylvia Martinez is President of Generation YES. Prior to joining this non-profit, she was VP of Development at Encore Software, a publisher of game and educational software on PC, Internet, and console platforms. For seven years, she was also the executive producer at Davidson & Associates/Knowledge Adventure, an educational software developer.

Martinez has an M.A. in Educational Technology from Pepperdine University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.

WashingtonExec got the chance to speak with Martinez about her role at Generation Yes, how to get involved, the future STEM holds, and more.

WashingtonExec: What is your background and how did you get involved in STEM?

Sylvia Martinez: I have an electrical engineering degree and worked in aerospace on the GPS satellite navigation system development right out of college. After I had children, I became interested in using computers in education. I got a masters in education, then worked as an executive producer for Davidson & Associates, of MathBlaster software fame and other software and console game publishers.

WashingtonExec: Please describe your day to day responsibilities at Generation Yes.

Sylvia Martinez: Generation YES is a non-profit with a mission to empower young people to make a difference by using technology in education. We have curriculum and online tools that help teachers and students collaborate to use technology in the classroom. As president, I speak, write, and evangelize about our mission. It encompasses product development, PR, marketing, development, grant writing, and working with educators all across the US.

WashingtonExec: The U.S. is not turning out the engineering students that we need to in order to compete as an innovative country. Why is this issue so important to you?

Sylvia Martinez: For me personally, becoming an engineer was the intellectual turning point in my life. I was always good at math and science in school, but learning to solve real problems that could make the world a better place meant that I could make a difference. I want everyone to have that feeling.


Children need to have those powerful experiences at all ages, to prove to themselves that their ideas are valuable and can turn into positive action. Those experiences are key to innovation.

WashingtonExec: What’s your view to get more parents involved in STEM?

Sylvia Martinez: I think schools need to be more open to the whole community, not only parents. We need children and parents to see that science is around them everyday. STEM isn’t worksheet problems or vocabulary words.

WashingtonExec: What are some simple ways to get their kids more involved in STEM at an early age?

Sylvia Martinez: Parents can seek out experiences where their kids get to make and do things. The Maker movement has exploded recently. Get a copy of Geek Dad or Geek Mom and make something with your kids–anything from cooking and sewing to building a fort. Sometimes moms do not realize that the crafts they do have terrific STEM connections. The act of making something reinforces learning, and also teaches habits of persistence, willingness to “have a go”, and mindfulness. Parents should not accept schools where science and math only happen on paper and are only measured with multiple-choice tests.

WashingtonExec: What’s the best STEM success case study/project that you have been personally involved in?

Sylvia Martinez: For the past 5 years I’ve been on the faculty of Constructing Modern Knowledge, a summer institute for teachers. Every year we bring amazing resources like Legos, robotics, wearable computers, and more for teachers to play with and learn to use. Many teachers are a bit unsure of themselves as scientists and it’s crucial that they have experiences just like ones that are good for kids. Every year, teachers amaze themselves with the projects they do in a few short days. Our graduates report this changes the way they teach and that to me is a huge success.

WashingtonExec: What’s the future of STEM? How can other like-minded people get involved?

Sylvia Martinez: I am hopeful that students will get more hands on, experiential learning, with modern materials and more engaging projects. I also hope that we can empower younger students to experiment with the digital world. So much is possible these days with very inexpensive microcomputers, 3D printing, robots, and other fascinating technology.

However, I worry that the US is too focused on test scores and simple standardized assessment. The future will be about who can be creative and innovative, not who gets the best test scores.


People need to speak out about what’s important for education. We need all kids to have access to engaging, experiential learning opportunities, not just test prep.

WashingtonExec: What blogs/resources are useful to check out?

Sylvia Martinez: I post a lot of resources on our Generation YES blog http://blog.genyes.org and there is more information about the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute athttp://www.constructingmodernknowledge.com. Our website http://www.genyes.org has many free resources such as how to start a student-run “Genius Bar” at your school. We hope that people take these ideas and work with students to make them happen. It’s only by working collaboratively with young people that education will improve and move forward.

Student-Centered Learning for Common Core (Papers, Nellie Mae Foundation)

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Students at the Center

Teaching and Learning in the Era of the Common Core

Students at the Center synthesizes and adapts for practice current research on key components of student-centered approaches to learning. Our goal is to strengthen the ability of practitioners and policymakers to engage each student in acquiring the skills, knowledge, and expertise needed for success in college and a career. The project will be publishing a book in spring 2013: Anytime, Anywhere: Student Centered Learning for Schools and Teachers.

As the country focused much of its attention to implementation of the Common Core State Standards, this project is an urgent reminder that higher expectations can only be met with attention to fundamental issues of how students learn, what they need to learn, and how best to teach them.

Despite growing interest in student-centered approaches to learning, educators have few places to which they can turn for a comprehensive accounting of the key components of this emerging field. With funding from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, Jobs for the Future launched the project by commissioning nine noted research teams to synthesize existing research in order to build the knowledge base for student-centered approaches to learning and make the findings more widely available.

Students at the Center continues to disseminate the papers and the executive summary collection widely through conferences, social and mainstream media, professional development, and education associations. In addition to the papers themselves, the team is developing--in consultation with educators--a collection of tools and resources to help make the papers come alive and be more applicable to those wishing to implement more student-centered approaches in the classroom, school, district, or beyond.

Following are the titles of the papers published in the Students at the Center series:

LEARNING THEORY
Mind, Brain, and Education
Recent brain and cognitive science research makes it possible to study the learning brain in action and track the development of learning pathways. This paper considers student-centered approaches in light of this research. (By Christina Hinton, Kurt Fischer, and Catherine Glennon)

Motivation, Engagement, and Student Voice
This synthesis of research on achievement motivation, school engagement, and student voice concludes that motivation and engagement are likely to be higher when educators use student-centered approaches. (By Eric Toshalis and Michael Nakkula)

APPLYING STUDENT-CENTERED APPROACHES
Teachers at Work - Six Exemplars of Everyday Practice
Taking the reader inside six high schools widely regarded as exemplars of deep student learning, the authors unpack teaching practices and school structures at the heart of student-centered learning. (By Barbara Cervone and Kathleen Cushman)

Literacy Practices for African-American Male Adolescents
Providing a socio-historical perspective on African-American literacy, this paper discusses student-centered learning in the context of race and gender and proposes an improved approach to literacy instruction for African-American males. (By Alfred W. Tatum)

Latino/a and Black Students and Mathematics
Using new perspectives on mathematics as a cultural and social activity and research on learning outside of school, this paper provides student-centered approaches for reducing the mathematics "achievement gap." (By Rochelle Gutierrez and Sonya Irving)

Curricular Opportunities in the Digital Age
This paper explores how new technologies can be used to design curricula that can be readily adapted to individual differences, providing a foundation for student-centered, rather than curriculum-centered, approaches to teaching and learning. (By David Rose and Jenna Gravel)

SCALING UP STUDENT-CENTERED APPROACHES TO LEARNING
Personalization in Schools
This paper examines the connections between strong adult-youth relationships in school and increased student engagement and academic performance, particularly for low-income and underserved students. (By Susan Yonezawa, Larry McClure, and Makeba Jones)

Assessing Learning
Ideally, schools would implement a balanced system of formative, interim, and summative assessments that together inform learning, instruction, decision making, and policy. This paper unpacks the components of such a system. (By Heidi Andrade, Kristen Huff, and Georgia Brooke)

Changing School District Practices 
If student-centered learning approaches are to improve student achievement, school districts will need to reorganize in support of this result. This paper reviews current district practices and explores strategies for supporting more student-centered approaches. (By Ben Levin, Amanda Datnow, and Nathalie Carrier)

Funder

The Nellie Mae Education Foundation

Building a Networked R&D Collaboratory (Overview: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) Submitted by Jim Ross

Getting Ideas Into Action: Building Networked Improvement Communities in Education (PDF)

http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/sites/default/files/bryk-gomez_building-nics-education.pdf?utm_source=Ready+News+D3+-+13&utm_campaign=Ready+News&utm_medium=email

"While innovations abound in education, we argue that the field suffers from a lack of purposeful
collective action. Instead, actors work with different theories of the same problem, activities are
siloed, and local solutions remain local."

"In this essay, we focus on an alternative social organization for this activity network: How might
one structure and guide the varied and multiple associated efforts necessary to sustained
collective action toward solving complex improvement problems?"

"Open networks abound in education. In the main, they function as free-floating idea bazaars,
contexts for self-expression, and places to share information. In fact, the current social
organization of educational R&D functions much like an open network. It is characterized by a
multitude of voices lobbying for preferred approaches, but with weak mechanisms for directing
intentional action that cumulates in coherent solutions to complex problems. In this regard,
educational R&D’s inability to orchestrate such improvement is akin to a market failure."

"The terrain for possible innovation is vast and complex. The roadmap organizes the challenges to be confronted in this space in agreed upon ways. It establishes standards for how developments in different domains must fit together, and then sets micro-targets, domain by domain. In these ways the roadmap helps to coordinate he activity so that different innovations in hardware and software can be expected to interoperate at designated times in the future. In the industry’s view, road mapping is a “practicalapproach to deal with the complex process of technological innovation” (Schaller 2004:13). In essence, the roadmap reshapes accountability relationships that go beyond the confines of an individual firm or laboratory (Schaller 2004). Participants, both individuals and firms, are not autonomous actors operating within a disconnected marketplace. Rather, they form a densely connected network of peers who share a focused interest in common regions of the roadmap."

Absent a working theory of the whole, interventions fail because of externalities not considered (also known as implementation failures), even though these are often predictable. For example, curriculum
interventions often fail because of inadequate professional development. At base here is a natural human tendency to grasp for promising solutions or best practices without fully understanding how such solutions must be integrated with other solutions and pre-existing organizational conditions.

(21st Century Digital Learning Environments Process - Similar to Roadmap & Driver Diagram presented by Carnegie - our graphics designed to aid this process)

RoadmapDriver Diagram

"In general, a driver diagram has three key elements: targets, primary drivers, and secondarydrivers. The target is one of the community’s agreed upon outcomes from the program improvement map. The primary drivers are the major causal explanations hypothesized to produce currently observed results. Secondary drivers, in contrast, are interventions in the system aimed at advancing improvement toward targets."

***** "In principle, each cycle propels some bit of local learning. When parallel development activities occur in different sites at the same time, a network can learn from the ensemble of these experiences."

******* "This practice of learning through doing enlivens the mantra of continuous improvement that deficits are a treasure. Each process failure provides an opportunity to learn and to improve both locally and network wide."

******** "Applied research in education today has become hyper-concerned with the internal validity of the individual field trial. Treatises on modern causal inference place primacy on the word cause while largely ignoring concerns about the applicability of findings to varied people, places and circumstances. In contrast, improvement research must take this on as a central concern if its goal is useable knowledge to inform broad scale change. This consideration has important implications."