Two teachers from Badillo Elementary School, Pat Sjodt and Diane Andersen, attended the CTA Common Core Seminar in Pasadena on February seventh. In one of the many workshops offered they were able to preview sample English Language Arts performance tasks and scoring rubrics for fifth grade, eighth grade, and high school. Even though it is academic content that is being tested, there are a number of technological skills embedded in these tasks. These include qwerty, clicking and highlighting, cut and paste, and being able to work with multiple windows. If these skills are taught first in the lower grades that are not tested, then students in the grades that are being tested should be more comfortable completing these tasks.
Sample items, practice tests, and performance tasks are available at smarterbalance.org. For security reasons they cannot be printed out. Seminar materials and some of the presentations are available on the CTA website: www.cta.org/ipd. Other Common Core Seminar dates are April fifth in Stockton, and May third in San Luis Obispo. There is a March fourteenth Good Teaching conference scheduled in Anaheim as well. Further information on these conferences is available on the CTA website.
