Although we originally stayed out of the Common Core conversation for fear that we would look like we were profiteering from this major initiative, many of the schools that we were currently working with asked us for help in making the shift to the Common Core. So we dived into understanding the standards and the [...]
This summer, John (Our Vice President) called one of our clients to schedule some workshops for the year. We’d worked with this particular school district for several years and were familiar with some of their needs, but as is always a part of our process, we asked them to share with us what their current [...]
There is a lot of fear mongering surrounding the Common Core Standards. As a result, many teachers and administrators are terrified that they will not be prepared to implement these standards by their 2014 deadline. What’s more, most Common Core training tends to make teaching the common core much more complicated than it has to [...]
By: Shauna Brown Leung One of the challenges common to all teachers focused on increasing rigor in the classroom is getting students to master the vocabulary of the content. Teachers throughout the country tackle this feat by giving students lists of “key terms” to define for each unit. Some require flash cards, others ask students [...]
Recently in one of our rigor workshop series, I worked with two teachers – Elise and Sylvia — who were planning a unit on Harriett Tubman for second-grade students. Prior to the workshop, these teachers had worked to plan a unit. Their unit appeared rigorous on the surface but they wanted to find ways to [...]
By:Robyn R. Jackson One Thanksgiving my father’s entire family gathered at my great uncle’s house for dinner — all seventy of us. We had a ball from the oldest (91) to the youngest (4 months). After dinner, I was standing near the pool table talking to one of my uncles when one of my littlest cousins, aged 2, [...]
Whenever we deliver a rigor workshop, one of the first questions we get is “What is rigor?” While everyone agrees that rigorous instruction is important, few agree on what rigor is. In most cases, educators believe that they know rigor when they see it without really having a fully defined idea of what it looks [...]
Because our professional development at Mindsteps™ is fully customizable, how schools implement our work looks different from school to school. While the concepts and principles are the same, how each gets implemented is highly individual to each teacher. Here is how one school has used our workshops and materials on rigorous instruction* to create a school-wide focus [...]
Just the other day I was helping a group of teachers plan rigorous units. As we were creating essential questions and thinking through the standards, I asked what I thought was a simple question: Why are you teaching this? The teachers were stumped. They had no idea why it was important that students learn the [...]
I’d seen this before. Teachers who are working so hard that they eventually get burned out. They want so badly to do the right thing that they end up doing everything.
