Quicky aligning and adapting ready-to-teach classroom materials is our specialty!  Common Core Resources:  Link - Participants/Resources

Avoid implementation problems; be confident about Common Core.  Beyond new lesson plans, and based on THEIR OBJECTIVES, teachers return with materials classroom-ready for quality teaching and to conduct close readings.  Their students annotate text, cite evidence from text, generate questions, create and evaluate arguments, and write summaries.  Teachers learn the capacity to adapt!

Lesson Planning, Learning Teams, and Common Core

 Other "how-to" videos

The solution:  Part 1, How to Implement Common Core
The solution:  Part 2, How to Implement Common Core (worksheets)
What are informational texts?  See the structures and how to use them for planning and teaching
The Problem: Why we fail to help teachers improve and what to do

Based in Phoenix, AZ, at Preston Webster Education Solutions we provide training in lesson planning that implements classroom improvements like Common Core standards, instructional shifts, and other strategies.  Our collaborative teacher training is designed to demonstrate ways to respond rapidly when adapting and aligning curriculum to meet urgent needs.  Your content objectives begin a process of supporting Common Core reading and writing while choosing better ways to teach our content.  Nothing is forced.  This teacher professional development in lesson planning personalizes classroom-ready teaching materials that facilitate research-based teaching, provide formative assessment for student feedback, and generate evidence of teaching content objectives and informational text.  Tangible evidence demonstrates to all stakeholders the very teaching and learning we want to see. 

The capacity to implement the Common Core instructional shifts is the same capacity required to adapt and improve lesson plans and teaching to meet a variety of needs.  These shifts flow from a particular style of lesson planning that prepares teachers, defines instruction, and measures evidence. Normally there is not enough time to do this, but we’ve refined planning for learning teams produce results in the “hours” available.  Using a streamlined version of Understanding by Design, teachers do quick lesson planning that results in ready-to-teach classroom materials that represent and support the desired change.

We’ve used informational text structures for years as a prism through which we design new classroom-ready materials; we naturally support literacy while choosing better ways to teach.   We translate the “what” to teach into materials of practice that define “how” to teach it.  Both levels of curriclulum alignment are addressed.  Teachers feel ready.

In every instance of classroom change, there is a need for teachers to tighten the alignment of elements of instruction (i.e., standards, instruction, curriculum, and assessment).   We show them how to do this in the time available during their school day – they produce results in hours.  It fits!  Brief cycles of improvement become possible.  Teachers, with a common purpose, language, and tools become learning teams.

"Thank you for making Common Core not scary!"
June, 2012

We can succeed with Common Core ELA if we avoid the same implementation problems we’ve experienced in the past.  We know what works in classrooms, but we ususally fail to implement.

The capacity to adapt and improve, the ability to succeed with Common Core, is found in brief cycles of Planning, Teaching, and Revising the materials teachers use to teach.  Our struggle to adapt begins in the Planning phase.  Working top-down in a logical sequence from standards to curriculum maps, units, and lessons, we exhaust all planning time.  But revised units and lessons are not enough to improve teaching.  Effective learning cycles require us to plan and adapt beyond lesson plans.

Transformations in classroom teaching begin as new standards and strategies take form in moment-by-moment details of new teaching materials.  As classroom materials are made ready, teachers test and align new strategies.  As images of how to teach new standards or strategies emerge, teachers gain a critical sense of predictability and control, they achieve a sense of readiness to try new teaching.  And to make revisions possible, teaching materials need enough definition to measure what worked and what didn’t.  However, creating a system in which teachers regularly collaborate at this level requires us to address the time problem head on.

We should try to find more time for professional development and planning, but building the capacity to adapt and improve may require us to use more effectively the “hours” we have available to Plan, Teach, and Revise the materials teachers use to teach.  Teachers need to become more skilled at seeing design clues in their objectives and content.  For example, teachers who recognize and use informational text structures embedded in both their objectives and content build a skill set needed to quickly plan and revise teaching.  Learning from the practice of teaching requires measurable, revisable definition to new standards, like Common Core.  Build this capacity, and tangible evidence of new teaching becomes available to all stakeholders.

Call and I'll show you how to use the worksheets to create ready-to-use materials.  FREE INFORMATIONAL TEXT POSTER

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