LDC and MDC Strategies Help Schools Prepare Students for Careers, Advanced Training and Further Study. Best Practices Newsletter

The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) and the Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) are strategies designed to improve how teachers teach and students learn. The designs encourage teacher collaboration and creativity and offer flexible frameworks for building lessons in all disciplines. Their purpose is to engage students to read challenging texts, express understanding in writing and solve problems. Both strategies embed state college- and career-readiness standards into content-area instruction. Many school leaders and teachers wanting to know how to improve student achievement through LDC and MDC attended the inaugural High Schools That Work (HSTW) networking conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in July 2013. The event, which featured proven tools and strategies for implementing rigorous state standards through LDC and MDC, was sponsored by the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) in association with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The sessions from the networking conference are presented herein to assist all schools aiming to help students succeed. This includes schools seeking results-oriented strategies as well as those already using LDC/MDC to go schoolwide in engaging all students to read grade-level texts and express their understanding in a written paper. Sections of this issue of the newsletter include: (1) New Literacy and Math Standards: Implications for Teaching and Learning; (2) Capturing the Efforts and Successes of Using the LDC Framework: Examples From Schools in Three States; (3) LDC for All: Transforming School Culture Through Literacy; (4) Increase the Percentage of Staff Members Using Literacy Strategies Daily; (5) Teacher Uses LDC to Engage Students in Learning Chemistry; (6) LDC and Career and Technical Education: Read, Write and Collaborate; (7) LDC in the Non-ELA Classroom: Tips for Easy Implementation in the Middle Grades; (8) MDC Instructional Practices That Work: A Unit on Quadratics; (9) Trainer Tells How to Involve More Teachers in Using MDC; (10) Whole-Group Response Strategies Are Popular With Reluctant and Struggling Students; (11) Using Formative Assessment Lessons (FALs) in Algebra Classes; (12) Teachers Use the Five Strategies of Formative Assessment to Accelerate Learning; (13) Math Ready: Avoiding College Remediation; (14) Leading by Example: Principal Plays an Active Role in LDC and MDC; (15) The Florida Story: It's a Journey, Not a Destination; and (16) LDC and MDC Successes Abound in Schools Nationwide.