Supporting Students in a time of Core Standards: English Language Arts Grades 9-12 by Sarah Brown Wessling with Danielle Lillge and Crystal VanKooten is a 2011release from NCTE. The authors created a text that demonstrates how to incorporate the Common Core Standards while remaining student-centered. The text is presented in three sections. The first provides an overview of the Common Core State Standards which illustrates the key shifts needed to move from previous standards to the CCSS. The second section [...]
With less than a month left of school, I am starting to plan my summer. Like many other teachers, I use my “downtime” in the summer to catch up on my professional reading. Doing this in the summer is a good idea for a couple of different reasons. First, I actually have time to sit down and READ, since I don’t have papers to grade or lesson plans to write. Second, I tend to spend my summer reflecting on the [...]
In a recent conversation with middle school literature teachers about curriculum revision, the conversation moved from content to instructional practice. I suggested that our curriculum needed to include enough flexibility to be used in classrooms that implemented a workshop model. In fact, I went so far as to say that it would be my hope that over the course of the next five years, we would see more teachers move to a workshop model rather than the traditional approach, which [...]