The context for the question to follow:
I am writing on behalf of our ELA team at the Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency in Bettendorf, Iowa. We are and AEA providing professional services to 22 school districts in eastern Iowa.
This year we have tackled close reading, complex texts, and writing to sources as our focus for this year. In doing so we have provided multiple days of professional learning opportunities to learn about, write, and implement close readings. As part of this work we have also worked to understand, write, and deliver standards-based lessons and questions as part of the work. We have read extensively and studied the work done in other states, (particularly Kentucky, New York, Tennessee, Ohio, and Delaware) as resources for our professional development with teachers and our own learning as well. We have read pretty much everything we can get our hands on written about the Core, including everything Fisher, Fry, and Lapp have written, Pathways to the Common Core by Lucy Calkins and crew, and of course we all follow your blog and writings religiously.

We hope to establish some model classrooms right here in our area using high flyer teachers from our current ELA Core professional development training and coaching. These would be used as model sites for other teacher within our AEA to visit. This is on target to begin in the fall of 2014, and presents us with a new challenge, that of designing the model classrooms.

Now for the question. Do you know of any specific location(s) where we might observe classrooms in which the shifts in the common core are being implemented with any consistency, and/or where we might extend our learning with regards to coaching teachers on the common core. Do you have classrooms in New York that would serve our purpose?

Any thoughts, referrals, or suggestions you have on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Pat Upchurch

Quality Learning Consultant
Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency
729 21st St.
Bettendorf, IA 52722
563 344-6434

pupchurch@aea9.k21.ia.us