Former teacher writes follow-up book on Common Core State Standards

While pundits and politicians debate over whether the Common Core State Standards are useful or not, former Southern Regional High School English teacher Sarah Tantillo presents her latest book, Literacy and the Common Core: Recipes for Action, published in July by Jossey-Bass. She homes in on the advantages of the standards and how they can help educators enhance instruction and bridge achievement gaps. A follow-up to her first book, The Literacy Cookbook published last year, which serves as a guide to effective reading, writing, speaking and listening instruction for English and non-English teachers, Literacy and the Common Core offers guidance on how to use the standards to improve classroom instruction.

Photo courtesy of Sarah Tantillo
The new book focuses on ways to help
educators enhance instruction.

“If you just watch the news and listen to certain radio stations, you might think everybody hates the Common Core because there’s a lot of pundits who are making a lot of noise,” said Tantillo, who has worked as an independent consultant primarily focused on literacy instruction for the past seven years. “The truth is that I work with a lot of people in the field who are excited about what the standards can mean for their students, in terms of pushing them to achieve at higher levels. Having national standards means that we can work across state lines and support one another and share ideas across state lines in a way that we haven’t been able to do in the past.”

Acknowledging the importance of consistent, real-world learning goals, the effort to develop the Common Core State Standards was launched in 2009 by state leaders from 48 states, two territories and the District of Columbia through their membership in the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers to make certain all students, regardless of where they live, are graduating from high school ready for college, a career and life in general. The New Jersey State Board of Education adopted the standards in 2010.

“There has been a push for literally decades to create national standards, but it hasn’t been successful until recently,” said Tantillo. “Historically, even the push for standards, period, has taken a long time to develop. So I’m really excited about it.”

Currently, the most pressing concern for professionals in the field is how to implement the standards and how to get students to meet and exceed the expectations, Tantillo said. Her new book offers K-12 teachers advice on how to design units, lessons and objectives to meet the standards in English Language Arts. The book describes how to analyze the standards to strengthen instructional planning and curriculum development. It also offers practical approaches that teachers can use right away to target key standards.

Contrary to popular belief, the standards are not a curriculum. It is a misconception that the standards inform teachers of what they have to teach and how to teach it. Rather, the standards set bars for student performance, so teachers can design a curriculum they believe will best enable their students to meet those standards.

“Any time a policy is put in place, some people like it and some people don’t. But what everybody has to deal with is the question of how do we actually implement the policy,” Tantillo explained. “That’s a challenge for a lot of teachers, many of whom have never been trained in how to write curriculum. I see that all the time in my work, so that’s a key feature of this book. It explains how to do that.”

Of course, English Language Arts teachers are not the only ones affected by this issue. As the standards emphasize building arguments and supporting them with evidence and explanation, it is clear the expectations apply to all teachers, school leaders, parents and children, Tantillo said. Literacy and the Common Core aims to make the job easier for everyone.

“It’s very practical, so in that sense people can use it right away,” she said. “It’s not theoretical in any respect. Everything in it has been tested and used in the field and proven to be of use. It offers ideas about how to implement, for example, school-wide reading initiatives. One of the realities of why our students tend to under-perform is they’re not reading enough. If we can get them to do that, if we could get them to fall in love with books, a lot of these problems would be solved.

“The idea is that we’re all literacy teachers, so if you want to meet the literacy standards, everybody really has to pitch in,” she added. “It can’t just be the English teacher’s job anymore.”

Individuals who purchase Literacy and the Common Core will receive an accompanying CD with document tools from the book and a free 30-day trial subscription to the website literacycookbook.com.

For more information, readers may also want to follow along on theliteracycookbook.wordpress.com, which features Tantillo’s latest thinking on how to help students meet and exceed the Common Core State Standards.

— Kelley Anne Essinger

This article was published in The SandPaper.