Welcome!

Colleagues -- My hope is that you find this little blog a useful reminder of our work together, as it will continue to inform us all; it will help us to have some touchstone of the shared experience as a point of reference. Please help clarify and add insights, responses, nuanced clarifications, etc. as you see fit.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

3. Notes from Jason Zimba, Founding Partner, Student Achievement Partners

Jason Zimba, founding partner, Student Achievement Partners.
One of the authors of the first draft of the standards (how accurate is this?)

Simple, but urgent in his address:

"Three shifts:
Focus. Strongly where the standards focus
Coherence. Think across grades and link to major topics within grades
Rigor.  Require conceptual understanding fluency and application."

On "Focus." TIMSS data reveals that curriculum has been a mile wide and an inch deep.
On "Coherence." Progressions / math is a subject about things making sense.  Focus teach deeply / teach things based on foundations. Standards make explicit connections at a single grade.
The starting point is focus. The Hong Kong story comparison -- held up to show a stark difference in that in-depth mastery of a smaller set of things pays off.  Asks us to pay special attention to p. 3 of the math standards, their introduction.

Achieve the Core website. Steal these tools (the three shifts are there, standards and publishers criteria are linked here). You've got to read this (blog entries, research, American educator article by that math professor). By teachers for teachers (description of voices of educators doing the work of the core).

No comments:

Post a Comment