March 1, 2013
Lyn Cannaday, an English teacher and writer in Phoenix, shares how her students have thrived through a Common Core curriculum in the Education Week article, “A Happy Tale From a Common-Core Classroom.” Cannaday explains how dreadful her literature class was for her and her students, who were indifferent to the district-mandated curriculum. She indicates that the mandated standards had no relevance to the real world and a limited range of fiction and nonfiction readings and goes on to dismiss critics’ claims that the Common Core State Standards take fiction out of the classrooms. Cannady says she now has a balanced curriculum because of the Common Core, and her students have a deeper understanding of the world and how the fiction they are reading reflects it. “I feel like my students have joined the real world. They are engaged and making connections across genres that I never thought would be possible.”
Read more here.
