Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement Author: Christopher Lehman | Language: English | ISBN:
0325043558 | Format: PDF
Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement Description
"As challenging as it must have been to write and finesse the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, that accomplishment is nothing compared to the work of teaching in ways that bring all students to these ambitious expectations. The goal is clear. The pathway is not."
-Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth, and Christopher Lehman
The Common Core is written, but the plan for implementing the Common Core is not.
Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at the Reading and Writing Project have helped thousands of educators design their own pathways to the Common Core. Now, with Pathways to the Common Core, they are ready to help you find your way.
Designed for teachers, school leaders, and professional learning communities looking to navigate the gap between their current literacy practices and the ideals of the Common Core, Pathways to the Common Core will help you:
* understand what the standards say, suggest, and what they don't say;
* recognize the guiding principles that underpin the reading and writing standards;
* identify how the Common Core's infrastructure supports a spiraling K-12 literacy curriculum; and
* scrutinize the context in which the CCSS were written and are being unrolled.
In addition to offering an analytical study of the standards, this guide will also help you and your colleagues implement the standards in ways that lift the level of teaching and learning throughout your school. Specifically, it will help you:
* become a more critical consumer of the "standards-based" mandates that are flooding your desk;
* craft instruction that supports students in reading more complex texts, developing higher level
comprehension skills, and writing at the ambitious levels of the CCSS;
* develop performance assessments and other tools to propel Common Core reforms; and
* create systems of continuous improvement that are transparent, collegial, and accountable.
Above all, this book will help you interpret the Common Core as a rallying cry that ignites deep, wide and lasting reforms and, most importantly, accelerates student achievement.
- Age Range: 5 - 17 years
- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Heinemann; 1 edition (March 29, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0325043558
- ISBN-13: 978-0325043555
- Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Already, before they've even been implemented, the words "common" and "core" have moved into our schools, unpacked their stuff, and begun to act in general like they own the joint. Where exactly did these standards come from and what do they mean to teachers, administrators, parents, and students?
Ask no more. PATHWAYS TO THE COMMON CORE is 197 pages of concise elucidation, making it one book you'd love to put into the hands of everyone associated with education. With its short introduction, the book claims we can bicker and carp about the new standards or we can look for the silver lining and make something of them -- something that can actually help our students. From there, Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth, and Christopher Lehman take us on a tour through the reading, writing, and speaking/listening and language standards, laying it on the line in simple terms: This is what they say, this is what they DON'T say, and this is what they mean for us if we're going to do the job right.
One interesting implication of the CCSS is how they bring us back to the heyday (30s and 40s) of the New Criticism, when text was king. Close analysis of text is back, meaning some common (and beloved) practices associated with reader response will be downgraded and outright eliminated. Included in this would be practices like connections to self and accessing students' background knowledge on a topic before starting a reading. The Common Core has little patience for such truck, instead asking students to read, retell key points in the text and, once understanding is established, move on to interpretation of key ideas and analysis of structure.
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