Resources specifically designed to highlight the ELA/Literacy and Math Shifts and expectations of college- and career-ready standards.
Understanding fractions is one of the most critical elements for student success in math. This collection contains resources and practices for the teaching and learning of fractions with students in grades 3-5.
Foundational skills are the building blocks of early reading. This Collection has resources, materials, and best practices for teaching these concepts to all students.
Resources designed to highlight expectations of college- and career-ready standards across content areas.
Author Candice Iloh joined us to talk about cultivating trust and awareness with students. Candice shared their experience building trust with students in the classroom and talked about their YA debut novel Every Body Looking and their upcoming novel Break This House. Candice also discussed student impact when centering non-dominant narratives and identities in the classroom.
Candice Iloh is a first-generation Nigerian American writer and dancer from the Midwest by way of Washington, D.C. and Brooklyn, New York. They are a proud alumna of the Rhode Island Writers Colony and their work has earned fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA, Kimbilio Fiction and a residency with Hi-ARTS, where they debuted their first one-person show in 2018. Candice became a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and in 2021, a Printz Award Honoree for their debut novel, Every Body Looking. Their forthcoming novel, Break This House, is out in May 2022.
Interested in opportunities to learn from other educators? Take the Core Advocate survey to learn about upcoming Coffee and Conversations and other free events.
Have a topic in mind for further discussion or feedback about the event? We want to hear from you! Please reach out to Joy Delizo-Osborne.
The IMET is a tool for evaluating a comprehensive textbook or textbook series for alignment to the Shifts and major features of the CCSS. While alignment to standards in literacy and mathematics is a critical and necessary feature of instructional materials, and the IMET is a useful tool for understanding this alignment, instructional materials can and should do more. Instructional materials play a role in disrupting racist systems that continue to devalue, ignore, and fail to recognize the inherent brilliance of Black students, students who are English learners, and others. Materials must attend to:
- Affirmation and development of students’ identities and empathy for others, for example through inclusion of a diverse set of authors and perspectives that creates mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors (Bishop, 2015) for students; and
- Development and application of critical thinking and consciousness, including opportunities for students to interrogate and analyze inequities (for example, criteria outlined in the Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecards for STEAM and English Language Arts from the NYU Steinhardt Center); and
- Development of oral language proficiency via engagement with grade-level content (for example, the English Learner Success Forum Guidelines for ELA and Math) and instructional approaches anchored in rigorous, grade-level content with supportive access to complex text (for example, the Council of the Great City Schools Framework for Raising Expectations and Instructional Rigor for English Language Learners for ELA and Math);
- And other areas about which we are still learning.
Beyond considerations of instructional materials, disrupting systemic racism requires that educators create affirming, student-centered learning experiences. We are doing further learning and exploration in order to continue to support educators to:
- reflect on and interrogate the impact of biases on instructional practices and systems;
- purposefully learn about systemic forces of exclusion and design inclusive classroom communities where all students feel a sense of belonging and will thrive;
- be radically curious about their students and connect classroom learning to students’ interests, cultures, and lived experiences;
- create opportunities for student voice and choice;
- work in community with students, families, and colleagues;
- And other areas about which we are still learning.
Please keep an eye on this page as we share more tools and resources that reflect what we continue to learn from educators and ongoing research.
If you are a district leader identifying and selecting high-quality instructional materials or a teacher adapting existing instructional materials to create affirming, student-centered learning experiences, we want to hear from you. Please share your perspective.
Observe high-quality, standards-aligned instruction in action. The Instructional Practice Guide (IPG) is designed around Core Actions that encompass the Shifts in instructional practice required by the college- and career-ready standards, including the Common Core.
NEW OBSERVATION TOOL
If you use the IPG, consider checking out the *new* Essential X Equitable (e²) Learning Walk Tool™ which centers an expanded definition of what it means for instruction to be high-quality. This new tool maintains the IPG’s emphasis on Essential grade-level mathematics and literacy content and strengthens the attention to fostering instruction that is asset-based and joyful.
If you would like to learn more about Essential x Equitable (e²) Instructional Practice™, click here. If you currently use the IPG and want to learn more about how the e² Learning Walk Tool™ builds on this foundation, explore this resource and/or contact us here.
Lessons and resources specifically designed to highlight the ELA/Literacy Shifts and expectations of college- and career-ready standards.
This toolkit aims to support educators in the process of selecting and analyzing texts based on complexity and cultural relevance. The resources focus on tools for reflecting on the identities of educators and the students they serve, analyzing texts with multiple lenses, and considering implications for use in their specific context. The resources here may support your process of text selection, or they may be embedded into your lesson preparation process for pre-selected texts (with or without instructional materials). You’ll look at each text as it stands alone, but should also think about how the text fits into the unit you are teaching and how this text may impact instructional decisions across the year.
Student Achievement Partners continues to get feedback from educators and iterate on these resources. Find an earlier version of the toolkit released summer 2021 here.
Mistake Literacy is a conceptual framework that equips schools and students with the capacity and capability to recognize, react to, and repair their mistakes. This session will help educators and school leaders create the learning conditions wherein students can make the most of what is natural and unavoidable to the learning process – the process itself.
In this session, participants will learn:
- What the research tells us about how to optimize learning from mistakes
- Why learning from mistakes matters, and why it matters now
- How to foster a classroom/school culture that embraces and learns from mistakes
- How to apply this research to suit their unique classroom/school contexts
This webinar offers a certificate verifying professional learning time on the topic. To receive this certificate, select the “Access On-Demand” option and complete the webinar as a registered participant. If you’re accessing this page on a mobile device, the recording and resources from the webinar are available under “files.”
This learning experience will be most powerful if used as part of a comprehensive, ongoing program of content-specific professional learning. To learn more, see the Professional Learning Principles.
Lessons and tasks specifically designed to highlight the Math Shifts and expectations of college- and career-ready standards.
Attending to students' social and emotional learning, and academic understanding is critical for student success. No longer can social emotional learning and content be taught in isolation. This webinar shares strategies for planning with intentional focus on the SEAD themes of belonging, identity, discourse, and agency and get practical resources to use in your classroom. It highlights relevant resources available on Achieve the Core and related professional learning opportunities.
This webinar offers a certificate verifying professional learning time on the topic. To receive this certificate, select the “Access On-Demand” option and complete the webinar as a registered participant. If you’re accessing this page on a mobile device, the recording and resources from the webinar are available under “files.”
The Common Core and other college- and career-ready (CCR) standards call for a greater focus in mathematics. Rather than racing to cover topics in a mile-wide, inch-deep curriculum, CCR standards require us to significantly narrow and deepen the way time and energy are spent in the math classroom. We focus deeply on the major work of each grade so that students can gain strong foundations: solid conceptual understanding, a high degree of procedural skill and fluency, and the ability to apply the math they know to solve problems inside and outside the math classroom. The following documents illustrate these concepts using the Common Core State Standards, but Focus, Coherence, and Rigor are integral to all college- and career-ready standards.
Students should spend the large majority of their time on the major work of the grade (). Supporting work () and, where appropriate, additional work () can engage students in the major work of the grade. Emphases are given at the cluster level. Refer to the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics for the specific standards that fall within each cluster.
This webinar shares about the development of a new resource, Math Milestones Asset Maps™. Math Milestones Asset Maps™ can be used to interpret and leverage assets in students' thinking towards understanding grade-level mathematics.
Hear from team members who have played a role in developing and using the Math Milestones Asset Maps™. Participants will understand what the Math Milestones Asset Maps™ are and what problems they might help solve. Educators will also share about their experience using the Math Milestones Asset Maps™ in their classrooms and what this work has meant to them.
Unfamiliar with Math Milestones™? View the last Math Milestones™ webinar recording for full context and background on the initiative.