Achieve the Core now offers on its website a FREE book - the 686 page In Common: Effective Writing for All Students Collection of All Student Work Samples, K-12, by The Vermont Writing Collaborative, with Student Achievement Partners and CCSSO. It is a PDF document that you can download and print. Before you think, "PRINT 686 pages?!" remember that no one will need to print the entire document. Instead, you can pick and choose the parts that you need, and print them as you need them.
If you teach ELA, I believe you'll find it invaluable. Check out the Table of Contents:
Dr. Jim Patterson, a lead writer of the ELA/Literacy Common Core State Standards, says that while CCSS Appendix C "sought to illustrate by example what it meant to say that a given piece of writing met the Standards, the included works had not been written expressly to the Standards. In Common advances the work begun in Appendix C."
Joanna Hawkins and Diana Leddy led the effort to complete this project and make it available to teachers across the nation. Patterson explains its value in several ways:
- It has more than twice as many samples as Appendix C, all "planned, drafted, revised, edited, and published by students working over extended periods of time."
- It is the result of "an intriguing real-world 'experiment' in on-demand writing."
- The writers "crafted grade-specific argument, informative/explanatory, and narrative writing prompts...based on source texts and intended to elicit student samples written to nearly uniform tasks across broad grade bands."
- The result is "a stepwise progression of ever-more-sophisticated writing samples with a common baseline."
The switch to the CCSS is huge by anyone's standards, and resources like this one should help to make the transition easier for everyone who teaches writing. I hope it helps you!
