“To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.”
― Abraham Harold Maslow
You may be familiar with Mr. Maslow. He has a Hierarchy of Needs named for him. However, this is not what I’m concerned with today. You have tests to administer and a curriculum to teach. If your primary tool is the Common Core State Standards, are you looking at each and every lesson and objective in your classroom through the prism of CCSS?
More correctly, the primary tools you use in your classroom every day are your textbooks, workbooks, and supplementals. Perhaps you’re fortunate enough to work in a school district where all-new textbooks have been purchased to help you meet the rigors of the Common Core State Standards. Or you may teach in a district where you must adapt your older materials to the new standards.
Studies by Morgan Polikoff of the University of Southern California and William Schmidt of Michigan State University find most new textbooks do not in fact meet their claims of being fully Common Core aligned. Professor Polikoff suggested teachers use supplemental teacher resources to “plug the common-core holes left by traditional textbook publishers.”
My question for you today is: How’s it going? Do you have textbooks and resources that fully support your Common Core lessons? Or do you count on resources from The Mailbox to help you meet all your Common Core objectives?