Yesterday, I wrote an obituary to close reading. This grew out of a delightful professional development session I led with a group of teachers in Louisville, KY. (It was delightful, mind you, because of the audience, not the presenter!) During the training, in which we worked through the non-freaked out approach to Common Core literacy, it hit me: the […]
common core
An Obituary for Close Reading
Close reading, one of the most ubiquitous terms of the Common Core literacy era, passed away yesterday evening. Ironically, its death is mourned by the very teachers (myself included), administrators, coaches, consultants, and authors who killed it through overuse. In its final hours, close reading lay on its deathbed and reflected on its meteoric rise to stardom and similarly rapid decline […]
9 Skills the Common Core Doesn’t List but that Employers Want Anyways
The Common Core State Standards for literacy were intentionally designed with a “less is more” ethos. Despite that, there’s still too many of them for average teachers like me to implement effectively. That’s why I cut them, choosing to achieve excellence with a few skills and strategies rather than achieve mediocrity with them all. My list is what you […]
Don’t You Dare Forget These Truths about Teaching
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n my last post (you know, the one from two months ago), I shared some similarities between the Common Core’s list of college- and career-readiness skills in literacy with the skills listed in Bill Coplin’s book 10 Things Employers Want You to Learn in College. In my next post, I’m going to give that post’s teeter-totter […]
12 Skills the Common Core AND Employers Want
The Common Core is a set of goals aimed at college and career readiness. This we know. But do the anchor standards really correlate to what employers want? Quite a bit, according to 10 Things Employers Want You to Learn in College. So what, according to Coplin, should people entering the workforce be able to do, […]