place for you to plan, make notes, and so on. Examples of how it might look are shown in the beginning of the book. The sections are as follows:
• Preparing the Classroom: Where you can consider room arrangement (e.g., Will the students be working in groups? Do you have an area where you can meet with a group of students? A place for large group activities?) and the physical tools and materials you will need. For example, chart paper, graphic organizers, or multiple copies of material.
• Preparing the Mindset: Here is where you brainstorm ways to intellectually ready and engage your students for the standard.
• Preparing the Texts to Use: A place to think about books (or book bundles), magazines, short passages or mentor texts, online resources, and so on that you could use for this standard.
• Preparing to Differentiate: This is for you to think about your learners who need additional support. You might consider texts that are accessible, different supplies, differentiation. You may choose to differentiate and include how you will extend the lesson for students working at the upper level.
• Connections to Other Standards: A place to draw your own connections between the standard in question and other standards.
As you use these pages, they should become a resource for future lessons and a record of instruction. They are also beneficial for collaboration with colleagues.
Academic vocabulary: Key words and phrases. Each standard comes with a unique glossary since words used in more than one standard have a unique meaning in each. Any word or phrase that seemed a source of possible confusion is defined in detail.
Planning to teach templates. This is another template for you to record your notes and your planning. This page is divided into three sections: Whole Class, Small Group, and Individual Practice/Conferring. These templates serve as reminders that you should be considering these kinds of work every day when you plan.
Online resources. The intent was to keep this book lean; however, actually seeing examples of charts, student work, and books helps tremendously—both with planning and delivering instruction. Access to organizers, rubrics, and so on is also important. Therefore, you can go to www.corwin.com/thecommoncorecompanion as an online resource for many of the examples I provide in “What the Teacher Does” and additional resources that you can view and download for your own classroom.
How to Use This Book
Every school, district, instructional team, or teacher will pick up The Common Core Companion and have different ideas about how to use it as a tool. And of course there is no one right way to use it. Here are some possible ways, which you should adapt, adopt, or avoid as you see fit:
• Provide all teachers on a grade-level team or school with a copy to establish a common text to work from throughout your Common Core planning work and instructional design work.
• Use it in tandem with the K-2 version by Sharon Taberski to dig into the standards in a whole-school initiative.
• Use it along with the K-2, 6–8, and 9–12 volumes for district-level planning and professional development work.
• Bring your Common Core Companion to all meetings for quick reference or planning with colleagues in your school or on your grade-level team.
• Use your Companion to aid in the transition from what you were doing to what you will be doing, treating the planning pages that accompany each standard as a place to note what you do or which Common Core State Standard corresponds with one of your district or state standards you are trying to adapt to the Common Core.
• Use your Companion as a resource for revisiting your curriculum plans in year two (or beyond!) of implementing the standards to help you develop, refine, and deepen instruction.
• Begin or end meetings with a brief but carefully planned sample lesson based on a teaching idea in this book. Ask one or more colleagues in the school to present at the next meeting on how it might apply to other grade levels.
• Use the Companion in conjunction with your professional learning community to add further cohesion and consistency between all your ideas and plans.
• And of course, access all the accompanying materials and resources from the book’s companion website, www.corwin.com/thecommoncorecompanion.
12 Recommended Common Core Resources
1. The Common Core State Standards Home Page http://www.corestandards.org
2. Council of Chief State School Officers http://www.ccsso.org
3. Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers http://www.parcconline.org
4. Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium http://www.smarterbalanced.org/k-12-education/common-core-state-standards-tools-resources
5. National Association of Secondary School Principals http://www.nassp.org/knowledge-center/topics-of-interest/common-core-state-standards
6. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development http://www.ascd.org/common-core-state-standards/common-core.aspx
7. engageny (New York State Department of Education) http://engageny.org
8. California Department of Education Resources for Teachers and Administrators http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/cc
9. National Dissemination Center for Children With Disabilities http://nichcy.org/schools-administrators/commoncore
10. Edutopia Resources for Understanding the Common Core http://www.edutopia.org/common-core-state-standards-resources
11. Common Core Curriculum Maps http://commoncore.org/maps
12. Teach Thought: 50 Common Core Resources for Administrators and Teachers http://www.teachthought.com/teaching/50-common-core-resources-for-teachers
Teachers Are the Designers of “the How”
P. David Pearson, in his chapter for Quality Reading Instruction in the Age of Common Core State Standards, asks us to be vigilant about how the powers behind the Common Core behave in the
