STEM | News

Sally Ride Science Debuts Training to Help Align STEM Courses With Common Core

• By Christopher Piehler
• 09/02/14

Sally Ride Science has launched a new professional development course, “STEM Connections to Common Core,” designed to help educators use STEM lessons to support specific Common Core State Standards. The course is available to all Sally Ride Site License customers for no additional charge.

The one- to two-hour online PD course provides both high-level strategies and detailed lesson ideas for using Sally Ride Science eBooks and classroom activities to support Common Core standards in Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, Language, and Mathematics. Within each course and the Sally Ride Science resources on which it is built, educators will be able to align STEM-focused classwork to Common Core standards.

Sally Ride Science cofounder and CEO Tam O'Shaughnessy (pictured) gave an example of how the course might help educators. “The Common Core standard 'CCSS-ELA.Literacy, Informational Text' requires grade-specific levels of comprehension of nonfiction by students — every STEM and STEM Career text we provide is nonfiction. And the PD gets granular, directly connecting specific standards to specific classroom activities, even down to the exact pages in our texts that support a standard.”