Note: this is part 4 of a ten-part series on the Common Core. For part three, see here. Building on my discussion of Common Core aligned materials yesterday, today I want to talk about Common Core ...

For nearly an hour, Dowan McNair-Lee has been walking her 8th grade English/language arts students through ways to identify the central idea of a text. She’s come at it from several angles, and no ...

"Why aren't you using all the resources?" That was the first question a district coach asked me in my rookie teaching year. She wanted me to use the nearly 60 teacher books that went along with our ...

As many educators and researchers will attest, there’s no exact science to choosing vocabulary words—no inherent reason the word “detest” is more important to teach than “despise,” or why “compassion” ...

WHAT IS COMMON CORE?The Common Core State Standards are a set of academic benchmarks adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia designed to lay out which concepts students should master. They ...

To briefly summarize Common Core, the decision to adopt the Common Core standards was left almost exclusively in the hands of the governors and the state boards of education. The public was not made ...

It is difficult to pick up a newspaper or listen to a news broadcast nowadays that fails to mention the Common Core curriculum. Conservative and liberal pundits, alike, complain about it. Let’s ...