Renaissance Blog

 Toward the end of my master’s degree program, I called my parents and excitedly announced that I was entering a doctoral program in psychometrics. A few uncomfortable moments later, my father responded, “That sounds…interesting.” Encouraged, I explained that a big [...]

A question that I constantly wonder about is this: What does it look like when teachers are truly making a difference in the lives of each and every one of their students? Improving learning starts with knowing the academic and [...]

Our brains thrive on repeated experiences. This explains why we seek to watch the same movies again and again and re-read favorite books. According to the health blog, “The Body Odd,” the drive to re-experience is a conscious effort to [...]

When my son Justin was young he was a dinosaur omnivore. He voraciously ate everything related to dinosaurs. He checked out dinosaur videos at the library; he read about allosaurus; he drew protoceratops; he told grandma about velociraptors; and he [...]

Upon turning the last page of a book, I often feel a sense of accomplishment-slash-relief at having arrived at the end of the book.  However, these feelings, coupled with a sense of nostalgia and loss that I have to leave [...]

Change is sweeping K-12 assessment. Many teachers are evaluated against summative test outcomes. Students are expected to step up to the higher bar of Common Core and state standards. Districts are taking ownership of assessment tools, striving to scaffold teacher [...]

With Common Core, like any other complex initiative, we have to first take in the larger, straight-forward ideas before ever considering some of the nuances. Now that most states are years into work with the initiative, some more nuanced discussions [...]

Earlier this month, our Chief Academic Officer Gene Kerns wrote about text complexity and the Common Core State Standards. His comments remind us that even with all the attention on the “shifts” demanded by new standards, we [...]

In his work, Understanding Common Core State Standards, John Kendall cautions that under Common Core “it’s likely that [we] will have something new to learn and something to unlearn” (Kendall, 2011, page 43). This idea applies in the area of [...]

I believe that education is the only way to social justice. That belief led me to an undergraduate degree in elementary education and a master’s in curriculum and instruction, with a reading specialist emphasis. Since those days at the University [...]