The Center for Effective School Practices (CESP) at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) is pleased to announce the receipt of a grant awarded by the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) to support the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) by enhancing teachers’ content knowledge and teaching skills aligned to the CCSS and by supporting principals to led this effort in their schools.

The Common Core Academy 2013 (CCA 2013) program will involve intensive, informative and interactive activities, which will inform participants about expected shifts in standards and assessments for English Language Arts and Mathematics education for various student populations. Participants will be accordingly engaged and trained in practical strategies for shifting curriculum, instruction, and assessment. CCA 2013 will offer ample opportunities for building professional learning networks within and across schools and will enable educators to work productively in collaboration with colleagues on making the changes that full CCSS implementation entails.

The CCA 2013 will run from August 5^th through August 9^th with participating educators from Plainfield City Public Schools, Red Bank Borough Public Schools, Central Jersey College Prep Charter School, Monroe Township Public Schools, South River Public Schools, Darul Arqam School, Red Bank Catholic High School, and Saint James Grammar School. The goals and objectives of CCA 2013 were developed in close collaboration with the participating schools and districts to meet their educators’ needs, as well as the NJDOE.

For more information on the Common Core Academy and other similar services, please contact the Center at cesp@gse.rutgers.edu.

• Dessi Kirova had presented her work on Semantics of Single and Multiple Early Motion Event Expressions in French and English in Lille, France at the AFLiCO 5 conference, May 15 – May 17, 2013. The conference's major focus was in multi-modality (in particular, co-verbal gestures and signed languages viewed as multi-channel communication systems) and linguistic variation (typology as well as intralanguage variation). The conference also focused on empirical methods in cognitive linguistics, which have recently been attracting growing interest. With this emphasis on empirical approaches, the conference meets a real need of the linguistic community, given that the field of linguistics is shifting ever more rapidly towards interdisciplinary approaches, using various advanced empirical methods.

• For strategies for training on a teacher practice evaluation instrument, as part of  Achieve NJ and EE4NJ, click here.

• Check out our Director, Cynthia Blitz, spotlight feature on PLCs in the January RELMA newsletter here.

• CESP has partnered with the American Institute for Research to integrate the Doing What Works resources into our Alternate Route curriculum. See more about DWW resources here, and stay tuned for the results from our research about this implementation study.

• NEW! The Camden site has been added to our Alternate Route Program portfolio sites. For more information about our Alternate Route program, click here.