Insight Education Group

Our work begins with a simple idea: Every student deserves a great teacher.

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Honoring our teachers - beyond the bagel breakfast

This week we take a special week to honor our amazing teachers.

Check some ways that US Secretary of Education Duncan challenges specifically policy makers, district leaders and principals to honor teachers in new and meaningful ways.

More Substantive and Lasting than a Bagel Breakfast

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Teaching Plus?

At NewSchools Venture Fund's summit this past week, Insight's Richard Nyankori weighed in on a panel about improving professional development.

Idea: What about "teaching plus," allowing teachers to leave classroom to pursue other careers and welcoming them back?

Learn more about the conversation. 

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myCore Curriculum Platform Finalist for SIIA CODiE Award

We're really proud to announce that our online Common Core curriculum platform, myCore, has been chosen as a finalist for the prestigious SIIA CODiE Award in the category of Best Professional Learning Solution for Education.

CODiE winners in each category will be named at the upcoming SIIA Ed Tech Summit in San Francisco May 5-7, 2013.

The myCore platform is structured to guide teachers through various stages designed to help them learn essential curriculum development skills while generating units and lessons that maximize student learning.

When using myCore, teachers can analyze and appropriately group standards into units, develop assessments to measure students’ mastery of the standards as well as create engaging learning activities.

myCore allows for easy access of units by teachers, their mentors and administrators.

With nearly every state adopting the Common Core State Standards, districts are seeking out the best solutions to support their teachers in this endeavor. It is a great honor for myCore to be recognized by SIIA above so many others.

Our CEO, Dr. Michael Moody comments, “We could not be more thrilled or honored that an organization such as SIIA has recognized the value myCore brings to the classroom.”

He continues, “One of the best ways to help teachers learn how to use the new standards is to actually plan lessons and get feedback on those plans. The beauty of myCore it’s both a planner and way to get job-embedded professional development on the Common Core.”

“Our dream is to transform teaching practice in such a way that teachers are effective designers of their own curriculum and that designing curriculum becomes a significant strategy for teachers’ professional learning,” says Moody who has spent over a decade training teachers in how to use standards.

In addition to being a finalist for a CODiE, myCore was also recently named a finalist in the EdTech Digest Cool Tools awards for "Best Common Core Planning Tool."

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What is effective teaching for the Common Core State Standards? 

The Common Core State Standards chart a bold and compelling vision for moving beyond the rhetoric of college and career readiness to making certain students actually are ready.

The Common Core suggests shifts in teaching practices that will help students master them.

At the same time, schools and districts across the country are trying to figure out how to better align their instructional frameworks with the Standards.   

Over the past few years we have helped districts create instructional frameworks for use in teacher evaluation. Throughout this work we puzzled, along with our partners, about how to integrate the instructional shifts required by the Common Core within the frameworks we were building.

We wanted to ensure that expectations about instruction outlined in the evaluation system were consistent with those implied by the Common Core. In the end, we pursued two strategies.

1. To develop a process to help districts align their existing frameworks.

2. To develop a new framework firmly rooted in the Common Core, called the Insight Core Framework. 

Check it out and let us know what you think!