Common Core State Standards, or CCSS, were designed to prepare students for college and workplace readiness. Although the CCSS ensure that K-12 students across the country study the same rigorous curricula, states have the option to implement the curriculum of their choice.
President Obama has made it clear that every American needs to “get more than a high school diploma.” Enter the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Educators concur with the CCSS and its mission that students must develop specific skills and background knowledge in preparation for the task of getting more.
The Common Core is far from business-as-usual for our nation’s educators, which means we’ll need more than traditional strategies to implement these standards on the ground.
When public K-12 schools are pressured to decrease costs and devote more time to standardized testing, arts programs are one of the first to be cut. Despite a nationally adopted education agenda that seeks to promote creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration among students as well as meaningful ways to connect students to the school environment and thereby increase graduation rates, the arts are still not seen as central to the solution. (more…)
“Open Ed” is a thirty-second video, that stitches together fragments of physical abandon captured at ISKME’s Big Ideas Fest 2012. Since 2009, hundreds of educators, students, entrepreneurs, researchers, philanthropists, and education technologists have attended the Big Ideas Fest to collaborate — by brainstorming, designing and hands-on prototyping — on ways to create educational change. (more…)
I’m always reaching to see the ‘intertwingled’ — a term coined by computer scientist Theodor Nelson to describe knowledge that is related and is often connected by cause and effect. The intertwingled nature of human knowledge represents a primary frontier of scientific inquiry in the 21st century, as scientists increasingly examine the nature of interdependent social and natural systems.