Adventures in ISTEM

It is Thursday afternoon. You have a stack of CER paragraphs to grade, and all you can think of is, “Will I be able to get through all of these today without having to stay late or continue working over the weekend?” You open the first one, read it carefully using your rubric, write a comment about the missing numbers in the evidence, another comment about the reasoning n...

If you have ever been to a professional development session on teaching CER and walked away thinking “this sounds great, but I have no idea where it fits in my already packed curriculum,” you are not alone. That was a common topic of discussion at lunch when CER was first being rolled out during our district PD sessions.

This is the mindshift that changed everything...

It was the Thursday after Thanksgiving break. We had already written more than 20 CER paragraphs since the beginning of the year. I had just spent the class period teaching CER with our first practice problem back from the break. We went through the problem, broke down the reading, analyzed the graphs, and recorded key evidence and reasoning points into a graphic organizer. E...