Uncommon Core: Where the Authors of the Standards Go Wrong About Instruction-and How You Can Get It Right (Corwin Literacy) - Softcover

Appleman, Deborah; Smith, Michael W.; Wilhelm, Jeffrey D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1483333523 ISBN 13: 9781483333526

Publisher: Corwin, 2014

Synopsis

Leave instruction to the experts!

Uncommon Core puts us on high-alert about some outright dangerous misunderstandings looming around so-called  "standards-aligned" instruction, then shows us how to steer past them―all in service of meeting the real intent of the Common Core. It counters with teaching suggestions that are true to the research and true to our students, including how:

• Reader-based approaches can complement text-based ones
• Prereading activities can help students meet the strategic and conceptual demands of texts
• Strategy instruction can result in a careful and critical analysis of text while providing transferable understandings
• Inquiry units around essential questions can generate meaningful conversation and higher-order thinking

About this title

About the Author:

Michael W. Smith, a professor in Temple University′s College of Education, joined the ranks of college teachers after eleven years of teaching high school English. His research focuses on understanding both how adolescents and adults engage with texts outside school and how teachers can use those understandings to devise more motivating and effective instruction inside schools.

Review:

"This book represents what we should all be doing with the CCSS―making suggestions for modifying them so that they stand a chance of achieving the goals behind them. Unless the CCSS are a living document that can be shaped and reshaped by the educators and students who are held accountable to them, they will fail.  Read this book to help them succeed."

Author: P. David Pearson, Professor of the Graduate School of Education

"Finally! A book with more light than heat on the issue of standards and their implications for learning. This is a well-argued, even-handed, and clear-headed look at the need to distinguish the value of the Common Core Standards from some of the questionable views of teaching and learning that standards writers and promoters have been expressing. . . . Every teacher of reading, supervisor, and district leader will find value in this text." 

Author: Grant Wiggins, Coauthor of Understanding by Design

"Talk about overdue! This book is an urgently needed corrective to the oversights, overreaches, and idiosyncratic weirdness of the Common Core Standards and what their authors say about how they should be taught. These authors aren’t standards-bashing; they stipulate that the Common Core has ‘the capacity to provide a real opportunity for progressive change.’ . . . Thank goodness three of our best teacher-thinkers have come forward to speak truth to Zombie literacy. "

Author: Harvey "Smokey" Daniels, Coauthor of The Best-Kept Teaching Secret

"Michael Smith, Deborah Appleman, and Jeff Wilhelm seek to salvage the Common Core State Standards from both their friends and their enemies. On the one hand, they systematically debunk the destructive pedagogy that many friends of the Standards have advocated. . . . On the other hand, they demonstrate to those who would reject the standards how they can enrich good practice as it has emerged from the last thirty years of research in reading and writing instruction. Readable, classroom friendly, and realistic, Uncommon Core is a must read for everyone struggling with the current wave of curriculum reform."

Author: Arthur Applebee, Distinguished Professor & Director

"Prompted primarily by David Coleman′s ill-informed interpretation of the instructional implications of the CCSS, Smith, Appleman, and Wilhelm have written an important and compelling book describing the kinds of instruction that will help teachers and students actually achieve the goals of the Common Core. With lucid descriptions and a host of classroom-tested examples, the authors demonstrate ‘Where the Authors of the Standards Go Wrong About Instruction and How You Can Get It Right.’"

Author: Michael F. Graves, Emeritus

About this edition

• Publisher: Corwin
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1483333523
• ISBN 13: 9781483333526
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 226