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"Social studies supervisors and teachers across the country are revising their unit plans to meet their state's content standards, as well as, the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in History and Social Studies. Simultaneously, many states are implementing new evaluation and observation frameworks. The performance ratings employed by the most popular evaluation models encourage a shift away from teacher-led direct instruction to more student-centered activities incorporating inquiry and synthesis. In social studies, primary source document analysis goes hand in hand with the 9-12 Common Core reading and writing standards. Here are five top resources to align your curricula to the Common Core with student driven lessons. "

"RACE is the acronym we've adopted school-wide to help unify our teaching language and help students develop good answers. The thought is that even kindergarteners can start restating questions verbally and teachers in the youngest grades can use the vocabulary when they are modeling."

"After decades of collaborating to increase child language vocabulary, Betty Hart and Todd Risley spent 2 1/2 years intensely observing the language of 42 families throughout Kansas City. Specifically, they looked at household language use in three different settings: 1) professional families; 2) working class; 3) welfare families. "

"When teachers understand what makes texts complex, they can better support their students in reading them. How is reading complex text like lifting weights? Just as it's impossible to build muscle without weight or resistance, it's impossible to build robust reading skills without reading challenging text. The common core state standards in language arts treat text difficulty as akin to weight or resistance in an exercise program. This is in contrast to most past discussion of this topic, which emphasized how overly complex text may impede learning. Such discussion therefore focused on developing various readability schemes and text gradients to help teachers determine which books might be too hard for their students. The new standards instead propose that teachers move students purposefully through increasingly complex text to build skill and stamina."

"A large color photograph of an iceberg on display in teacher Angel Chavarin's fourth-grade classroom at Laurel Street Elementary may not be the typical prop for a language arts lesson. But Chavarin is hoping visuals like this largely submerged icy mass will help his students better understand the concept of inferences, which are, in effect, "the tip of the iceberg.""

"About the Mini-series This video mini-series has been designed to provide an efficient pathway for understanding and implementing the most significant shifts in English language arts and literacy instruction. Ranging from seven to ten minutes in length, each video tackles one important topic and then provides tools that educators can begin using in their classrooms immediately. The order in which the videos are watched is not critical, so please feel free to start with the one that seems the most intriguing."

Well ... yes and no, according to a pair of new surveys from the RAND Corporation, a research and analysis firm. Teachers do seem to be getting a lot of professional development aligned to the common core in both English language arts and math. The problem is that it's not always focused on the topics that they say they need the most help on. Instead, teachers seem to be saying: "OK, we totally get that there are these new standards. We even kinda know what they want us to do differently. But we still need help digging into the pedagogy on some of the finer points."

"As states across the country implement broad changes in curriculum from kindergarten through high school, English teachers worry that they will have to replace the dog-eared novels they love with historical documents and nonfiction texts."

"Adults forget all that they do while reading. We are predicting, making connections, contextualizing, critiquing, and already plotting how we might use any new insights or information. Yep, we do all that when we read. As teachers, we need to train students in each of these skills, and begin to do so early on. I was recently in a second-grade classroom where 70 percent instruction was in English and 30 percent in Spanish. Most of the children spoke Spanish as their first or home language. "

"The school year isn't a series of sprints, but the way you forge your curriculum can make it feel that way. The most common way of structuring how you teach is by first assembling standards into units, then those units into lessons. You may use a backwards-design process (popularized by UbD and Grant Wiggins), where you start with what you want the students to understand, then decide what can act as evidence of that understanding, then finally design an assessment that provides the best opportunity to uncover what students know."

"3. Atop the Mountain, Into the Sea On the board, I draw a picture of a mountain overlooking the sea. A lone figure stands perched atop the mountain's summit and another swims among the waves below."

"Even before the invention of photography, certain images have gained iconic status in human culture. Our history and art textbooks are full of examples and many of them are etched in our memories. 440px-Join_or_DieBenjamin Franklin's "Join or Die" snake image, said to be the first American political cartoon, originally appeared during the French and Indian War, was repurposed by Paul Revere in 1775, and continues to be a powerful representation of the movement toward U.S. independence and nationhood. More recent visual texts, from the Hindenburg disaster, to Iwo Jima, to MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, to the haunting images of September 11, help us understand what "iconic" means in terms of cultural memory and messaging."

"With students gone for the day, 6th grade teachers Joy Ford and Ryan Rusk sat in a classroom discussing the Latin root temp. After determining that "contemporary" and "temporary" share the root, which refers to time, the two Woodlawn Elementary teachers then turned to the word "temptation." "I'm tempted to eat this chocolate," said Ford. "That doesn't have to do with time." "But if I'm tempted, I want it now," responded Rusk. "So could it?" Along with a half-dozen other K-6 teachers, the two were participating in a study group in which they meet weekly to learn how to incorporate Greek and Latin roots into their daily instruction. The group was doing a "word sort" activity from the book Greek and Latin Roots: Keys to Vocabulary Building."

"When the word creativity is used, the left side of my head begins to hurt. Now why would that happen? Let's see, could be the years of exposure to right and left brain mumbo jumbo?"

"To be college and career ready, students need to be able to read sufficiently complex texts on their own and gather evidence, knowledge, and insight from those texts. These close reading exemplars intend to model how teachers can support their students as they undergo the kind of careful reading the Common Core State Standards require. Each of these exemplars features the following: i) readings tasks in which students are asked to read and reread passages and respond to a series of text dependent questions; 2) vocabulary and syntax tasks which linger over noteworthy or challenging words and phrases; 3) discussion tasks in which students are prompted to use text evidence and refine their thinking; and 4) writing tasks that assess student understanding of the text."

"I've always struggled with calculating students' participation grades. I have experimented with rubrics for students to fill out for themselves, or ways for them to track their participation grades daily or weekly. I've tried ditching it altogether and just grading students for distinct speaking activities. "

Handouts Notes from ASCD Presentation on Assessments Shifts Presented by Susan M. Brookhart Presented April 3, 2012.

"The 10 percent summary strategy costs little in teacher time, and it prepares students for the common core state standards in literacy." Excellent article for sumarization.