Common Core CPR
What About the Adolescents Who Struggle . . . or Just Don’t Care?
- ReLeah Cossett Lent
- Barry Gilmore - Hutchison School, Memphis, TN
Foreword by Richard L. Allington, Afterword by Sharon M. Draper
Corwin Literacy
The ideal? Newly minted high school graduates all across the nation, each one a complex text genius, a writer and analytic thinker beyond compare. All on to glorious colleges and careers, thanks to the Common Core.
The reality? The 1.3 million students who fail to graduate from high school each year and the hundreds of thousands more who either gave up or lost interest long ago . . .
The reality is why Common Core CPR is needed. Urgently. Because if we continue to insist that all students meet expectations that are well beyond their abilities and mindsets, these kids will only decline faster. We must be brave enough—and trained enough—to cast aside what we know harms students and apply with renewed vigor the teaching methods we know work.
Releah Lent and Barry Gilmore rise to the challenge, and there are no two authors better equipped to do so. They embrace what is best about the standards—their emphasis on active, authentic learning—and then explicitly show teachers how to connect these ideal outcomes to practical classroom strategies, detailing the day-to-day teaching that can coax reluctant learners into engagement and achievement. You’ll learn how to:
- Consider choice and relevance in every assignment
- Plan and spot opportunities for success
- Scaffold students’ comprehension of complex fiction and nonfiction texts
- Model close reading through thoughtful questioning
- Teach students to use evidence in reading, writing, speaking, and reflection
. . . And so much more
It’s not the big sweeping formulas for achievement that will win the day; it’s the incremental growth that teachers need to make happen: that one book, that one writing assignment, to help a student turn a corner. “If we can get that one transformational moment to occur, and follow it up by designing more opportunities for success, that’s the ideal,” say Lent and Gilmore.
“I have read two books that give me hope that the CCSS may improve both teaching and learning, especially for struggling readers and writers. This book, written by ReLeah Lent and Barry Gilmore, is one of those two books (the other was written by Lucy Calkins and her colleagues). . . . So, read this book and then begin to adapt your instruction in the manner described so artfully.”
“This is a very helpful and very timely book. Lent and Gilmore provide a very smart yet workable and commonsense approach to not only engaging struggling learners, but then assisting them through collaborative activity in a meaningful context of use to greater facility as readers and writers, speakers, and listeners. The approach will certainly help teachers help their students to meet the next generation of standards and assessments, but also so much more than that.”
“Common Core CPR is a powerful text. . . . [It] offers commonsense suggestions for successful work with the standards in all classrooms, especially with students who struggle. Using an interdisciplinary approach to literacy, the authors do not view the standards as isolated skills to teach, but as natural outcomes as they scaffold learning.”
“Finally! A practical and comprehensive guide for teachers who want to ensure that the needs of all students are met in this age of Common Core Standards, including reluctant and struggling readers and writers. Thank you, ReLeah Lent and Barry Gilmore, for helping ease one our greatest fears about the Common Core--that struggling students will struggle even more.”