Md. Teachers Get Training on Common Standards

Donna Watts, a Maryland education department official, joins her husband, Darrel Watts, for a lunch break outside Mountain Ridge High School, in Frostburg, Md., site of a regional training academy last month on how to implement common academic standards.

—Matt Roth for Education Week

By Sean Cavanagh

Frostburg, Md.

Teachers and principals from across northwestern Maryland arrived here on buses and in carpools, many of them lugging thick binders containing the common standards adopted by their state and more than 40 others.

Their mission: to make sense of those broad academic expectations in English/language arts and math, figure out how to apply them in their classrooms, and bring those lessons back to their schools this fall.

The educators had gathered late last month for one of 11 "educator effectiveness academies" being staged across Maryland this summer, which officials have billed as the largest professional-development program for teachers ever held in the state. Every public school—1,450 in all—has been asked to send a team of educators to one of the academies, which are being supported with federal Race to the Top ...