Common Core CPR

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.

Author: Releah Cossett Lent,Barry Gilmore
Publisher: Corwin Publishers
Published: 09/27/2013
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 9.40h x 7.70w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781452291369

About the Author
ReLeah Cossett Lent was a teacher for more than twenty years before becoming a founding member of a statewide literacy project at the University of Central Florida. She is now a consultant, writing and speaking about adolescent literacy issues. Her three most recent books include Literacy for Real: Reading, Thinking and Learning in the Content Areas (Teachers College Press), Engaging Adolescent Learners: A Guide for Content-Area Teachers (Heinemann) and Literacy Learning Communities: A Guide for Creating Sustainable Change in Secondary Schools (Heinemann). ReLeah′s first two books, co-authored with Gloria Pipkin and published by Heinemann, At the Schoolhouse Gate: Lessons in Intellectual Freedom and Silent No More: Stories of Courage in American Schools, won the American Library Association′s Intellectual Freedom Award and the NCTE/Slate Intellectual Freedom Award. ReLeah was also the recipient of the PEN/Newman′s Own First Amendment Award in 1999. Her latest project with Jimmy Santiago Baca is a new teaching resource for reaching at-risk adolescents, which includes a book and DVD titled Adolescents on the Edge, Stories and Lessons to Transform Learning.

Barry Gilmore, a National Board Certified Teacher, has taught English and social studies for over fifteen years, including ten years of teaching at Lausanne Collegiate School in Memphis, Tennessee, where he also serves as English department chair. In addition to his work at Lausanne, Gilmore serves on the faculty of Tennessee Governor′s School for International Studies each summer and regularly presents his teaching ideas to groups around the country. He is the author of six books for teachers and students, including Plagiarism: Why It Happens and How to Prevent It (Heinemann 2008). Gilmore is a past president of the Tennessee Council of Teachers of English and has received numerous honors for his teaching, including awards from NCTE, TCTE, SMCTE, and the Tennessee Holocaust Commission. In 2005, the U.S. Department of Education named him an American Star of Teaching.