Common Core

No matter what your feelings are about the Common Core State Standards, they are a reality in many schools. Check out the growing body of information on how to make them work for students.

Special Education
High Expectations for Students With Multiple Impairments
A special education teacher shares insights on adapting the Common Core Essential Elements for students with multiple impairments.
Communication Skills
Honing Students’ Speaking Skills
Some guidelines for teaching all students to speak credibly and confidently—an essential skill for college and career success.
Interest-Based Learning
Standards-Aligned Genius Hour
Give your students a chance to follow their own interests with projects that meet state standards.
Common Core
Resources for Understanding the Common Core State Standards
Explore an educator's guide to websites, organizations, articles, and other resources looking at the new system of standards and how they will be assessed.
Common Core
Common Core in Action: 10 Visual Literacy Strategies
Do you wish your students could better understand and critique the images that saturate their waking life? That's the purpose of visual literacy (VL), to explicitly teach a collection of competencies that will help students think through, think about and think with pictures.
Common Core
11 Tips on Teaching Common Core Critical Vocabulary
Teaching vocabulary within the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is an essential component of standards-based curriculum alignment. Making the critical words second nature to our students will enhance achievement on assessments and will be useful in college and career. Following are 11 strategies, supported by education and memory research, for teaching critical CCSS words while keeping the cognitive verbs in mind: analyze, evaluate, compare, delineate, etc.
English-Language Learners
Using Photos With English-Language Learners
Authors Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski share tips for using the Picture Word Inductive Model and others for teaching ELL students.
Common Core
Common Core ELA Resources for Middle School Educators
Implementing Common Core English in middle school is going to be a challenge. Here, blogger Matt Davis curates some of the best resources online that can help update existing content.
Teaching Strategies
Is Homework Helpful? The 5 Questions Every Teacher Should Ask
Common Core
Use Arts Integration to Enhance Common Core
Arts integration specialist Susan Riley looks at some of the ways in which teaching with the arts can meet and enhance Common Core requirements.
PBL Planning
An Example of PBL in Early Elementary: How I Started
School Leadership
When Teachers and Administrators Collaborate
See what it looks like when a district that has a strong collaborative culture undertakes a major initiative like implementing the Common Core.
Coding in the Classroom
Coding in the Common Core
Learn about coding resources that meet the CCSS math and ELA requirements, and discover seven habits to help you teach what might be an unfamiliar content area.
Assessment
Meaningful Connections: Objectives and Standards
Math teacher and teaching strategist Karen Lea looks at meaningful ways to connect learning objectives with Common Core State Standards.
New Teachers
Common Core and Planning: Organizing a Unit of Instruction
Edutopia blogger Todd Finley explains how the Common Core allows for creativity in the ways teachers can plan a unit, and suggests several strategies for hitting the standards while still exercising your free will.