Posted inCommon Core

Teaching Writing With Hyperdocs

If you’re looking for a new approach to teaching writing, you’ve got to try teaching with hyperdocs. What are hyperdocs? According to their creators, Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton and Sarah Landis, hyperdocs are “a transformative, interactive, personalized engaging too to help facilitate student creativity and collaboration” (The Hyperdoc Handbook). And I can testify that hyperdocs […]

Posted inOpinion

Text Evidence in the Common Core: There Are Such Things as Facts

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were released in 2009. They are now seven years old. I will admit that I was not initially enthusiastic about the English Language Arts literacy standards.  I felt they were heavy in non-fiction…(no, wait.. heavy in “informational texts”). The CCSS suggested a typical student should have a reading diet filled with informational texts […]

Posted inCommon Core

Have You Been To A #GAFE Summit?

I’ve been teaching for 26 years – English, AVID, Yearbook, Reading, History and any sort of intervention class that gets thrown my way. I’ve been through whole language and back. I’ve survived NCLB. I’ve been trained in teaching the Gifted and Talented, the At-Risk and 21st-century students. And last weekend, I went to my first […]

Posted inCommon Core, Instruction & Curriculum, Literacy

The NAEP Chicken and the Common Core Nonfiction Egg

What came first…the NAEP Chicken or the CCSS Egg? In 2009, there were revisions to the reading content in  the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the “largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject areas.” The revisions increased nonfiction reading. In 2009, the development of the the Common […]