Last spring, a number of pieces appeared about David Coleman (Common Core’s co-author), telling us to stop teaching pre-reading strategies. When I asked folks attending Common Core trainings at my district, they had no idea what I was talking about. Clearly, the message has gotten out to the consultant/trainer class over the summer. Here were […]

One of the problems with having “newbies” involved in creating these new standards, especially folks who like to take a “de-contextualized” approach to novel and new situations, is that they don’t know where the land-mines are buried. Most of the discussions around Common Core ELA standards and the exemplars that are starting to show up […]

This week, my student teacher and I were discussing questioning techniques during reading of texts to guide student learning, and boy this was timely with some recent discussions about Common Core ELA. Thanks to Tom Hoffman, I’m learning more about Common Core standards than my district is sharing with me (even though a chunk of […]

Sometimes I worry that all the emphasis on direct instruction, comprehensive curriculum, and teacher-proof texts has beaten the last bit of initiative out of the latest generation of elementary school teachers. Here’s some background… First, let me go into the way back machine to how things were in the old old days. When I attended […]