Sample Items | Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium The item above comes from a sample item on the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) website, and it’s supposed to assess the writing  of an argument (what used to be called persuasive writing). Click on the image to get a larger view to read the task.

Female hysteria was a once-common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women, which is today no longer recognized by medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for many hundreds of years in Western Europe. Hysteria was widely discussed in the medical literature of the 19th century. Women considered to be suffering from it […]

Lately I’ve devoted a lot of blog space to what I’ll refer to as “stupid Common Core tricks” that usually result from being overly attentive to the standards, and not giving enough attention to context. Burkins and Yaris, one of my favorite blogs on the actual nitty-gritty of implementing Common Core, has a really great […]

Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole. – Common Core ELA Anchor Standard 5 Critical Classrooms (Katie Lapham) has a lovely piece on the shortcomings of ReadyGEN Common Core curriculum. Basically, the text on Rachel […]

One of my students this year has a propensity to use the sarcastic “WOW,” when they get news they don’t like (like, “You need to re-do this work”). This is not meant as a complaint about a student, after all they are twelve years old, and I did volunteer to teach this sarcasm-rich age cohort. […]