Teaching the Common Core: Essential Understandings as We Implement the Standards

As we continue to implement the Common Core State Standards, we need to ponder several vital issues. These include how the Standards relate to school curricula, what text complexity is and how we can integrate it into our teaching, what the nature of close reading is and how we can use it to engage students in deep comprehension, and what constitutes rich instructional tasks and how we can create them. As our students strive to meet the expectations of the Common Core, we need to thoughtfully examine the Standards, carefully integrate them into our teaching, and work together to help our students succeed.