That version of the standards you wish you hadAll over the nation, teachers and administrators are poring over the Common Core State Standards to come up with meaningful plans for raising student achievement.  But as clear as the standards are, they are more of a sundial than a GPS for pinpointing just what to teach and how to teach it.

Enter Jim Burke with The Common Core Companion: The Standards Decoded, Grades 6-8. It's that version of the standards you wish you had: a roadmap of what each standard says, what each standard means, and how precisely to put that standard into day-to-day practice across English Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects.

Designed to provide schools, districts, and departments with a common language or set of reference points for effective school-wide implementation, The Common Core Companionclearly lays out:

• Grades 6-8 standards side by side with key distinctions highlighted so teachers know what they must teach from grade to grade
• All the different content-area versions of each standard arranged on one page to facilitate easy reference and school wide collaboration
• Explanations of each standard on a corresponding page, written in accessible language, along with prompts and questions to help students learn and apply each standard
• Essential content to cover and lesson ideas for modeling the literacy skills behind the standards
• Instructional techniques for each standard based on Jim's extensive teaching experience and current research on effective instruction
• Complete glossary for each standard and adaptations for ELL students

Don't spend another minute poring over the standards. Jim has already done that for you. Focus instead on how to teach them, using The Common Core Companionas your one-stop guide for teaching, planning, assessing, collaborating, and designing powerful reading and writing curricula. "One cannot benefit from or use a document that demands more time than a teacher or administrator has each day. So I share with you, my fellow educators, the reformatted, parallel version of the standards I created to make the document itself more efficient, more usable, more helpful."                                                                                                                                                                                                         ---Jim Burke