According to the Common Core State Standards, literate students "demonstrate independence; build strong content knowledge; respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose, and discipline; comprehend as well as critique; value evidence; use technology and digital media strategically and capably; and come to understand other perspectives and cultures."  These same students, in math, "make sense of problems and persevere in solving them; reason abstractly and quantitatively; construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others; model with mathematics; use appropriate tools strategically; attend to precision; look for and make use of structure; and look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning."

How will educators respond?  How can we teach and assess in ways that allow these characteristics to become reality? What existing practices will support teaching and learning?  What new "best practices" may have to be invented?   

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Leveraging the Common Core Standards with Authentic Assessments

 by Giselle O. Martin-Kniep, Ph.D.

 Imagine students engaging in a deep exploration of social policy issues by conducting oral histories of homeless people in their own community and then sharing their research and recommendations to the City Council with the parents in the community but also with the residents and managers of their local homeless shelter. What might happen if students captured their own histories in the form of rap songs and poems and then performed them in Grand Slam competitions with students from other schools across the county? read more