Latest from The Edcite Team
Edcite has over 35,000 assignments in the public assignment library covering grade levels, subjects, and standards! Every day teachers in the Edcite community share new assignments into the library. You can also find state released practice tests digitized by the Edcite Team and other high-quality assessments from organizations such as Eureka Math and Achieve the Core.
In my recent post about the current status of the academic gap, I stated that many agree that the academic gap is a literacy gap. As a result, many states and agencies have placed significant emphasis on literacy, focusing particularly on reading proficiency by 3rd grade. Why literacy and why this age? Well, the Anne E. Casey Foundation says 3rd grade reading has big implications, so let’s unpack that.
As LeBron James says, “Nothing is Given. Everything is Earned.” Regardless of your feelings on LeBron, it is important for our young people (well, all people) to internalize this life lesson.
Most kids spend at least 13 years in a K-12 school setting. Be it public, private, or charter—13 years of a similar setting can get a bit redundant. 13 years of at least 7 hours a day is also a significant amount of time. Many kids spend just as much time with their peers and teachers as they do with their families at home. As such, it is critical that we intentionally plan for scaffolded privileges and freedom throughout their school “careers.”
Education is meant to be the great equalizer for society, but reality shows continued disparity in terms of educational outcomes along the lines of race and income. The achievement gap, the opportunity gap, the academic gap—these all refer to a systemic difference in educational performance for students of color compared to their white peers or for students in poverty compared to students in more affluent communities. There is something wrong with a system that continues to replicate an outcome of inequity. Though there is much debate about its origin, we’ve heard insanity defined as, “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Yet, according to Teach For America, here we are with a “public school system [that] is remarkably impervious to innovation, adaptation, and change” and that “hasn’t changed in 100 years.”
Teachers give assessments so that they can find out what students understand, what needs to be reviewed or retaught, and where differentiation needs to happen. Because the goal is to determine if student learning has occurred, it’s important for assessments, especially summative assessments, to be true indications of what students know.
When teachers give an assessment on Edcite, they can quickly enable free settings that help support assessment security in the classroom.
At any moment of the day, a variety of stimuli are vying for our students’ attention. Video games. Instagram. Snapchat. Twitter. Texting. Facetime. The list goes on and on. Thus, in order for a kid to choose a book over all the other competing options, we must cultivate a culture of reading. Reading must be equally as “cool” as Fortnite. Period. Here are three tips for cultivating a culture of reading in your classrooms and schools.
