Pushing back on Common Core criticism, an advocacy group promotes challenging student work

A nonprofit organization that spurred a national effort to toughen teacher evaluations wants to redirect policy makers’ attention — toward too-easy student work.

Seven years after releasing “The Widget Effect,” which argued that teachers weren’t being pushed to improve, TNTP has come out with “Room to Run,” a multimedia project that aims to answer the question, “What’s possible when students are challenged and inspired in school?”

The project takes viewers into the classrooms of five students in four states whose teachers push them to ask questions, read challenging texts, and build arguments from available evidence. Shatavia, a high school junior in Newark, New Jersey, asks how Watergate affected the American psyche — then sets out to discover the answer. In Reno, Nevada, second-grader Abril and her classmates analyze historical documents. And science experiments inspire Ashley, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, to learn more about the world.

http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2016/08/11/pushing-back-on-common-core-criticism-an-advocacy-group-promotes-challenging-student-work/