District-Funded Common Core Collaboration Grants Used for Teacher Professional Development

With the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts and mathematics by the State of California in 2010, a shift in instructional practices along with the level of rigor and expectations for students began. As a result of these changes, a local school district sought a way through district-funded Common Core Collaboration Grants (CCCG) to provide professional development that supported 4th-6th grade teachers in their implementation of the CCSS. The purpose of this qualitative program evaluation case study was to examine teachers\u27 perceptions of the effectiveness of professional development funded by CCCG in supporting 4th-6th grade teachers in understanding and application of instructional strategies aligned with the CCSS. Weiss\u27s theory of change and Roy and Killion\u27s program evaluation framework guided the study. Data were collected from individual interviews of 7 teachers of 4th-6th grade who participated in the district CCCG professional development sessions. Interview data were coded and themes of choice, time, collaboration, and integration of the CCSS emerged. The results indicated that the use of CCCG for professional development is assisting teachers in successfully implementing the CCSS through increased collaboration and more opportunities to engage in learning within their own contexts. A program evaluation report and presentation to the district school board were developed. The results of this study may affect positive social change through suggestions of an alternative in the form of grants to schools and districts looking for innovative ways to support teachers and enhance student learning through professional development on the CCSS

New Results in Sona Drawing: Hardness and TSP Separation

Given a set of point sites, a sona drawing is a single closed curve, disjoint from the sites and intersecting itself only in simple crossings, so that each bounded region of its complement contains exactly one of the sites. We prove that it is NP-hard to find a minimum-length sona drawing for $n$ given points, and that such a curve can be longer than the TSP tour of the same points by a factor $> 1.5487875$. When restricted to tours that lie on the edges of a square grid, with points in the grid cells, we prove that it is NP-hard even to decide whether such a tour exists. These results answer questions posed at CCCG 2006.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures. To appear at the 32nd Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2020