• AZ Core Advocates

    Arizona Core Advocates are a dedicated group of educators committed to excellence in all Arizona classrooms. We are working to provide tools and resources to assist teachers in providing high-quality, standards-aligned, and research-based instruction in their classrooms.

    Take  the Core Advocate survey to engage in the state and national levels of Core Advocates work

  • Our Work

    Core Advocates in Arizona are working toward specific, state-focused, standards-based challenges.

    The Arizona ELA/Literacy campaign was designed to support teachers by building knowledge and strategies that identify, analyze, and create quality questions and tasks to support students in accessing complex text. There are four initiatives within this campaign:

    1. Teachers understand the criteria for quality questions and tasks and evaluate those in their local curriculum for alignment to these criteria.
    2. Teachers identify and develop quality questions and tasks for existing curricular resources.
    3. Teachers share quality questions and tasks with colleagues throughout the network.
    4. Teachers analyze local (classroom, school, district, state) assessments for quality questions and tasks.

    The Arizona Mathematics campaign was designed to help teachers understand and apply the concepts of Focus and Coherence in the Standards to support student needs across the spectrum of performance. There are three initiatives within this campaign:

    1. Teachers are familiar with and connect instruction to the Standards’ Progression Toward Algebra, and how concepts build and are developed K-Algebra.
    2. Teachers identify within- and across-grade connections in mathematics and make those connections explicit as they plan units and lessons.
    3. Students can verbalize connections between the math concepts they are learning and concepts they previously learned.
  • Core Advocate Spotlight

    "The Arizona Core Advocates training was the most effective, practical, and influential training I have received for Common Core instruction. The curriculum is designed in a hierarchy, starting with the three most important concepts, and narrowing down to the specific factors, studies, and examples a teacher needs. I believe every teacher can benefit from the three overarching principles: 1) that regular practice with complex text can and will change a student, 2) students who can identify key features of a text or speech can become better readers and writers, and 3) students who understand how to identify and produce evidence will leave high school prepared to read the world and the discipline or work force they enter." ~ Angela Buzan

  • Who We Are

    Arizona Core Advocate Captain - Dayna Burke

    Dayna Burke is a First Grade Teacher in Sahuarita Unified School District, with endorsements in Early Childhood Education and Structured English Immersion.  In 2014 she was named Pima County Teacher of the Year and a finalist for AZ Teacher of the Year. Dayna is a NBCT candidate, anxiously awaiting final scores, and working towards her Master's in Educational Leadership at Northern Arizona University. In addition to teaching, she is a professional development facilitator, training new teachers, in K-2 writing, and The Foundations of Reading Instruction. She serves as an instructional coach and new teacher mentor. She is a Teacher Champion Fellow for The Collaborative for Student Success, a member of the Arizona K-12 Center’s Teacher Solutions Team, and served as First Grade lead for the AZ Department of Education's Standards Review Committee.

    ELA/literacy Content Lead - Tara Dale

    High School Science Teacher in Gilbert School District

    Math Content Lead -  Misha Quarles Freeman

    Professional Development Coordinator in the Avondale School District.

  • Stay Informed

    Email: AZCoreAdvocates@studentsachieve.net

    Twitter: @azcoreadvocates

    Facebook: azCoreadvocates group

    Join a national Core Advocate Network webinar.