Terry Heick, an education blogger and contributor to Edutopia, authored a fantastic article about the important questions teachers would love to be asked by parents. He listed nineteen thoughtful questions that left me thinking...
So I'm going to use our class blog to answer Terry Heick's thought provoking questions about my teaching practices. You'll get all of the answers without me hyperventilating and stammering while giving them. It's a win/win!
Let's get started!
Question 1: What academic standards do you use, and what do I need to know about them?
I'm sure that many of you have heard about Common Core State Standards (CCSS). CCSS is a US educational initiative that, for better or worse, attempts to standardize what content and skills are learned in each grade across the country. The goal of CCSS is to insure that second graders attending school in Georgia are learning the same things as their peers in New York. It's a lofty ambition, and one that has had to withstand scrutiny from all public education stakeholders.
History alone knows the fate of CCSS, but for the foreseeable future teachers in Michigan are expected to teach to the Common Core State Standards in the areas of math and language arts, which includes reading, speaking, listening, and writing. In my classroom we strive to meet (and hopefully exceed!) the standards found in CCSS. Social studies and science are not included in CCSS, therefore we follow the State of Michigan's Grade Level Content Expectations for those areas.
- ...if all of my parents asked me all of these questions I'd be quite overwhelmed and intimidated and...
- ...I would love to communicate my answers to these questions to parents, but maybe not nineteen questions to 24 caregivers!
So I'm going to use our class blog to answer Terry Heick's thought provoking questions about my teaching practices. You'll get all of the answers without me hyperventilating and stammering while giving them. It's a win/win!
Let's get started!
Question 1: What academic standards do you use, and what do I need to know about them?
I'm sure that many of you have heard about Common Core State Standards (CCSS). CCSS is a US educational initiative that, for better or worse, attempts to standardize what content and skills are learned in each grade across the country. The goal of CCSS is to insure that second graders attending school in Georgia are learning the same things as their peers in New York. It's a lofty ambition, and one that has had to withstand scrutiny from all public education stakeholders.
History alone knows the fate of CCSS, but for the foreseeable future teachers in Michigan are expected to teach to the Common Core State Standards in the areas of math and language arts, which includes reading, speaking, listening, and writing. In my classroom we strive to meet (and hopefully exceed!) the standards found in CCSS. Social studies and science are not included in CCSS, therefore we follow the State of Michigan's Grade Level Content Expectations for those areas.