UNCOMMON CORE

Alerting educators to dangerous misunderstandings regarding "standards-aligned" instruction, this teacher-friendly resource doesn’t flatly reject the standards, but rather zeroes in on how to steer around the trouble spots and get to the real intent of the Common Core. Filled with strategies, lesson ideas, and links to reproducible activities, the book delineates how to use excellent teaching to meet the Core ideals. Teaching suggestions, true both to the research and to students, include how reader-based approaches can complement text-based ones, how pre-reading activities can be used most successfully, how inquiry units can generate meaningful conversation and higher-order thinking, and why selection criteria that consider interpretive complexity are more effective than those that consider only textual complexity.