Transforming Teaching through Collaborative Practice
By Katherine Bassett, CEO of the National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY)
Teaching is often referred to as the most isolated of professions. In fact, many teachers remain inside their classrooms with little to no interaction with their colleagues during the day.
Yet collaboration is essential for learning, and the Common Core State Standards demand that teachers teach through collaborative practice models, requiring students to work in groups, building problem-solving and collaboration skills. In addition, we know that new teachers grow best through collaboration and mentoring in order to become effective and to persist in a challenging profession.
As states and school districts across the country focus on effective teaching as a strategy to improve student achievement, we must find new ways to increase opportunities for collaborative practice. In some cases, this may mean changing the very structure of school.
Read More →Quality Resources to Implement the Mathematics Common Core Standards
By Ellen Whitesides, Illustrative Mathematics
One of the greatest challenges right now in the implementation of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics is determining the quality of resources, materials, and professional learning that claim to be aligned to the standards. Illustrative Mathematics is a website and growing community focused on illustrating the standards with high quality tasks reviewed by a math expert as well as a classroom expert. Illustrative mathematics is building a community of expertise that writes and reviews tasks, discusses tasks and standards, and works together to better understand strong mathematics instruction.
The idea of Illustrative Mathematics came from the writing of the Common Core Standards. The author team envisioned example tasks to clarify the meaning and nuances of standards but these examples were not finished in time for the publication of the standards document. These examples became the basis for Bill McCallum’s project, The Illustrative Mathematics Project. The project aimed to illustrate the standards with tasks, and at the same time give recognition to the difficult art of task writing and reviewing. The community worked together to determine the necessary pieces of a good task, and formulated criteria for task reviews. As tasks were discussed, reviewed, edited, and revised expertise developed within the community, and The Illustrative Mathematics Project grew into its current form, Illustrative Mathematics. Illustrative Mathematics images a world where people know, use, and enjoy mathematics and we are collaborating together as a community to create that world.
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