Common Core Standards - Reading

When looking at the common core standards for the first time, they can be confusing and a little much. There are a lot of words that would not make sense if you showed them to a parent. Teaching based off of the common core standards is not a bad thing. It is a universal group of standards that schools all over the country follow. Which means that even though each teacher has a different style of teaching, they are still teaching the same standard needed for their students. As teachers, however, we need to remember that parents will not understand when we say something like, "I am teaching your student how to analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme. As stated in the common core standard RL. 9-10.3." A parent would just smile and nod and act like they understand but in reality, people not well versed with the common core standards are not going to understand what they are saying. Instead, a teacher should explain how based off of the common core standards that I have to follow I have chosen to go this route with my lesson plan and chose these activities to teach the students how to show the development of characters in a story we are reading. When parents come to you asking you why you are teaching a certain thing in your classroom, you can not just spit out a common core standard and hope they understand. 

The Reading: Literature section of the common core standards gives a nice broad overview of the basics of what students need to be able to do when reading a book or a story, but also says how the students need to become more analytical. Analyzing not only the theme or characters of a story but also what the author is doing as they are writing. In 9th-10th grades, students are becoming more analytical of the stories and the author's choices within the stories to answer the question of 'why did the author do this?'. The common core standards are providing a baseline for what the students should know and should be learning. 

Overall I believe in common core standards and the use of the universally throughout the country. With the common core standards, teachers are able to understand what their students need to know and what their students need to accomplish.