The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core (Professional Development)

The Core Six is a user-friendly easy read designed for any teacher looking to boost their literacy instruction. I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated the author's direct, no nonsense approach to writing. The Core Six are concisely explained; research supporting each strategy is given and easy to follow implementation steps/phases are outlined. A teacher with any level of experience could implement these ideas into their lesson plans today.I am a seasoned middle school math teacher with 18 years of experience in public school classes. I found the strategies to be absolutely applicable to any teaching situation - regular education, students with specific learning disabilities and/or the gifted student. The strategies in this book will help facilitate that deeper understanding of the standards no matter what the content.My favorite quote comes from the summary where the author writes, "When teachers learn a manageable number of strategies, and when these strategies are commonly named and defined, teachers can have substantive conversations just by comparing notes." This is exactly the kind of framework that teachers can use to begin professional learning communities or that can strengthen already existing ones. This book is a must-have for every PLC in our schools.

Great overview of important research-based instructional strategies!

Educators should know the difference between a strategy and a tactic. This book is just a bunch of tactics, most of which I have seen elsewhere.They use the term "research based" a lot, and even have subsections in each chapter titled "The Research". However,they never get around to telling us how the research was done or what the actual results were, although they give some references. So, I have no idea when they make the statement "reading scores really took off" if they meant little Jose jumped from a 4th to a 6th grade level or if he moved 2% on a reading test. I may go look up some of the research, but I know already what I am going to find which is a lot of mushy stuff passed off as research. Education research is an oxymoron. Education professionals like to use the term "scientific method" but they don't know what it means or how to employ it.They also seem to imply if you don't see fantastic results, its not because their tactics don't work, but because you didn't implement them well.I am not saying these can't be helpful. I've used several of them before. Some were OK and others not. But, administrators are pushing this book as if it holds all the answers and forcing the faculty (like at my school) to implement the things in it.Common Core is a train wreck just like "new math" and the elimination of phonics. It is extremely elitist and is backed up by NO credible research. Get ready for the howling and gnashing of teeth when test scores start rolling in.

You need this book if you are a teacher going through the transfer from state to common core standards. Instead of sifting through huge binders of paperwork, read this book to find the strategies that actually work, how to use them, and what is really important when it comes to teaching the most important material. Based on research from 1000's of teachers, this book will break down six separate strategies, give sample lesson plans, and explain in a nutshell, why you should use each strategy and how to implement it. As a 5/6th grade teacher it has already come in handy and we are just getting started this school year.

As a veteran teacher, I found this book to be very helpful in seeing how specific strategies I've been using align to the Common Core PLUS it adds some extended thinking concepts to fully exempify how these strategies (like Compare and Contrast, for example) can be tweaked to fully fulfill what the Common Core is trying to do. I will use it as a foundation in revamping my syllabus for the coming year.This would be great for a new teacher to use these strategies properly from the very beginning. I highly recommend this book -- something I've rarely done in my 25+ years of teaching!

This short book contains concise and practical advice for teachers of other content areas to integrate reading and writing strategies into their practice. As a science teacher, I can immediately see ways to apply these strategies, with the help of its clear, cookbook style approach and its examples from various subjects. I also appreciated the authors providing references for the research basis of each approach and for further exploration.

The core 6 ideas explained in a clear manner. This book gives beginner teacher a general concept to plan a lesson.

I love this book because it is to-the-point and practical. I appreciate that the authors included examples of how teachers use the information and lesson ideas in their classrooms.I refer to the book often as I make my language arts lesson plans.