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Collaborating with experts to support schools and deliver professional development, ensuring the success of all students.



Making Standards Work in the Real World

Exciting New Workshop Series and Course for Middle & High School Educators

Can a standards-based approach to education actually work in today’s schools? Using Neuroscience to Make Standards Work for ALL Students  is a new series of four workshops that address real-life issues encountered when implementing a standards-based learning approach, such as crafting student-friendly learning targets; designing performance tasks that get students excited about practice; making the transition to standards-based grading and using data management tools to make standards doable for teachers and students. The series is being designed and presented by: Bill Rich, Susie Girardin & Wendy Cohen.

The roll out of the Common Core, new science standards and new assessments have set significant challenges for education across the nation, but teachers in real-world Vermont classrooms need to figure out how the new standards and assessments will actually work with all their students, their curriculum and grading system and any school-wide standards that already exist in their schools.

To help teachers work through such practical questions, the Teaching All Secondary Students (TASS) program of the VT-HEC is developing an annual series of workshops and courses.  TASS has been working in VT middle and high schools for the past eight years to support their efforts to improve by applying the best research findings from neuroscience and education. It is this knowledge, experience and expertise that will go into the design of these new learning opportunities.

The workshops can be taken individually or together as a three credit course.  You won’t want to miss these days.  To find out more go to:  https://www.vthec.org/documents/2013/11/standards-based-learning.pdf

Grant Wiggins: Current Views on Curriculum, Testing and HS Diplomas

What if Curriculum Focused on Performance & Ability and High School Really Prepared Students for Their Adult Lives

In a couple of deeply thought-provoking articles the co-author of books such as Learning By Design and Schooling By Design asks us join him in thinking about some basic assumptions about what the goal of education should be, how we should determine what should be taught and how we should measure progress. In a recent post to his blog, Wiggins asks us to think of action, not knowledge, as the essence of an education; to think of future ability to perform, not knowledge of the past, as the core . (more…)

Helping Students on the Autism Spectrum Meet Common Core ELA Standards

Struggling Learners: Helping Students on the Autism Spectrum Meet Common Core ELA Standards

This is a summary of an article which explores the challenges that students, who may be quite bright but are on the autism spectrum, may have meeting the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. The authors believe this process will go more smoothly if educators and parents have a good understanding of three important psychological theories and develop classroom strategies to support students with these deficits.  The theories covered here are: Theory of Mind, Central Coherence and Executive Function. (more…)

Bill Daggett’s 13 Recommendations for VT’s Transition to the Common Core

Schools have to get more efficient to free up time for work on literacy, application, personalization and guiding principles (more…)