Nevada is one of the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) states, and the SBAC has released some questions on their website in a way that shows us how the test will look and work when it is fully released. Guess what, I can’t get it to work at school. Why? The district is standardized on [...]
I started out to write a post about my frustrations and fears last week, and deleted it over and over again. I just couldn’t get what I wanted to say correctly on the screen, nor could I collect the facts and links that led me to the conclusions I was making. I had previously said, [...]
My friend Anthony created a blog post the other day saying he was looking for the CCSS in Excel format instead of PDF format. He did all the work to create the file he needed, which made me feel a little bit bad. You see, I have had exactly what he needed for the last [...]
In which the CCSS website makes changes to the notation of the standards without really communicating it. So today I am working on the Exeter Project, aligning questions to the CCSS, and one of the persons I am working with is using this notation for the standards that confuses me greatly. After some research, I [...]
Where to start. I have been thinking and working with the Exeter materials quite a bit in the last 3 months. I have come to see the value in the methods and the questions, and the way the questions cycle from lower levels to higher levels. But I have to say I don’t see the [...]
One short lesson that came from the Exeter sessions was how they teach lines and what formats they use to teach writing equations of lines. It is amazing how often we, as math teachers, fail to build connections between different elements of mathematics simply because we feel like we have to hold to some form [...]
Okay, all along I was promising a massive file upload for all the readers who want the Exeter materials. I will explain what each group of files are for as I go. All files are in WORD or PDF format, and all are in a zipped folder. Downloading and unzipping the folders will speed up [...]
One of the struggles I have as department chair is coming up with what we should be doing in our PLC time. I decided that we needed to start examining the CCSS much closer, and really start implementing things this year that we are going to be asked to implement next year. Why? Because if [...]