BRAND NEW! Check out these AMAZING Math courses that just hit PEPPER!

Two fantastic new middle school mathematics professional development courses are available in Pepper now. Take a look at the courses and their descriptions and get excited about the opportunities to be prepared and ready to work with your students as the new school year kicks into gear! Click on the course titles to learn even more about what you'll discover if you sign up!

Getting Started With Expressions and Equations (6-8)

Take a deep dive into the Expressions and Equations domain and the clusters of standards it includes at each grade level. Study the clusters of standards for each grade, work on math tasks related to each cluster, and learn more about the mathematics education research behind the CCSS.

Implementing Expressions and Equations (6-8).

Continue your journey into Expressions and Equations by understanding how to implement the domain effectively in your classroom. This course is designed to follow Getting Started with Expressions and Equations course.

Happiness and Learning--Exploring the Connections

It's easy for educators, parents, and even students today to think of education solely in terms of metrics, data, measurable results, assessments, and content standards. And it's true that these things do matter in a world where career- and college-readiness are important, and where being well-prepared gives students a competitive job market advantage in the world outside the classroom.

Yet education is also about so much more than that. As philosopher and ethicist Nel Nodings states in her 2003 book Happiness and Education, "Happiness and education are, properly, intimately connected. Happiness should be an aim of education, and a good education should contribute significantly to personal and collective happiness."

How can educators help their students better understand and experience the real joy and happiness that can come with exploring new ideas, venturing out into new areas of learning, using knowledge to help others, and making sense of the world in which they live?

Here's a great place to begin: "Exploring the Idea of Happiness as Part of Schoolwork," by journalist Katrina Schwartz. She takes a closer look at New Tech Network's "Global Happiness Project," which aims to help teachers and students explore the many ways that happiness impacts their daily lives and their communities, both in and out of the classroom.

Interested in a more in-depth look? Then check out the article "Happiness and Education: Theory, Practice, and Possibility" by researcher Mark K. Smith, writing for pedagogy website infed.org. He explores what happiness means, and argues that education cannot give students what they really need without a connection to happiness.

Project-Based Learning and the Common Core!

Many educators already have made a shift in the direction of Project-Based Learning (PBL) in recent years as research has shown just how effective it can be in broadening and deepening students' knowledge-base and in helping students develop connections between concepts and applications, and in improving their communication skills.

You may be wondering, though, just how project-based learning might intersect with the Common Core State Standards, and what resources might be out there to help educators ensure that their project-based learning strategies are aligned with CCSS.

This blog post from Edutopia.org, is a great place to start! In this post, "The Role of PBL in Making the Shift to Common Core," Sara Hallermann and John Larmer present six big ideas that help educators understand exactly how PBL and Common Core go hand-in-hand. The takeaway, as they explain, is that "Common Core has embedded within it some Big Ideas that shift the role of teachers to curriculum designers and managers of an inquiry process." PBL puts that inquiry process front-and-center, and encourages students to take ownership of what they're learning about.

For a more in-depth look at the connections between Common Core and PBL, you can check out this FREE PBL WEBINAR from ASCD.org. Led by Andrew Miller, the webinar explores the essential elements of PBL, and the best ways of ensuring that PBL units are aligned to Common Core. Be sure to check out the supporting resources, handouts, and slides!