The Common Core Companion: The Standards Decoded, Grades 6-8
What They Say, What They Mean, How to Teach Them
- Jim Burke - Burlingame High School, Burlingame, CA
Corwin Literacy
That version of the standards you wish you had
All over the nation, teachers and administrators are poring over the Common Core State Standards to come up with meaningful plans for raising student achievement. But as clear as the standards are, they are more of a sundial than a GPS for pinpointing just what to teach and how to teach it.
Enter Jim Burke with The Common Core Companion: The Standards Decoded, Grades 6-8. It’s that version of the standards you wish you had: a roadmap of what each standard says, what each standard means, and how precisely to put that standard into day-to-day practice across English Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects.
Designed to provide schools, districts, and departments with a common language or set of reference points for effective school-wide implementation, The Common Core Companion clearly lays out:
- Grades 6-8 standards side by side with key distinctions highlighted so teachers know what they must teach from grade to grade
- All the different content-area versions of each standard arranged on one page to facilitate easy reference and school wide collaboration
- Explanations of each standard on a corresponding page, written in accessible language, along with prompts and questions to help students learn and apply each standard
- Essential content to cover and lesson ideas for modeling the literacy skills behind the standards
- Instructional techniques for each standard based on Jim’s extensive teaching experience and current research on effective instruction
- Complete glossary for each standard and adaptations for ELL students
Don’t spend another minute poring over the standards. Jim has already done that for you. Focus instead on how to teach them, using The Common Core Companion as your one-stop guide for teaching, planning, assessing, collaborating, and designing powerful reading and writing curricula.
“One cannot benefit from or use a document that demands more time than a teacher or administrator has each day. So I share with you, my fellow educators, the reformatted, parallel version of the standards I created to make the document itself more efficient, more usable, more helpful.”
-—Jim Burke
Take a quick tour of The Common Core Companion
Supplements
“I love what Jim Burke has done to make the Standards less threatening and more useful for teachers. In particular, the indicators for what students and teachers should be doing, given the Standard, are extremely helpful; as are such a clear glossary and illuminating examples. All in all, The Common Core Companion is bound to be enormously useful and thus dog-eared!”
“Fundamentally different from other Common Core books, The Common Core Companion is s a user’s guide designed by a teacher who actually uses the standards in his daily work with students. Jim Burke gently demystifies the Common Core State Standards and offers a practical tool for curricular alignment. I think you will find The Common Core Companion helps schools help themselves.”
“I have never read a book for teachers so well laid out and highly useful. I predict administrators across the country will purchase this book for their secondary teachers to use in their staff meetings, individual department meetings, their PLCs, and for individual teachers to use as Burke puts it as ‘a personal compass to navigate the complexities of the Common Core Curriculum.’”
“I must say, I am duly impressed. This book gives the kind of ‘hands-on’ support classroom teachers and curriculum committees really need in doing the work of ‘unpacking’ the standards and interpreting those standards into curriculum documents. The very detailed, complete discussions of the standards and the breakdowns that the Burke does are, in my opinion, exemplary . . . Well done!”
"This very practical guide makes a complex topic easier to understand and less formidable. Schools will want to purchase copies for all teachers and personnel working with the Common Core."
CCSS were not approved in Texas.
Extremely clear and useful! I had previous students explore the book to see what they though and they were all upset it wasn't out when they took the class. They've ordered copies on their own.