The following post was written by Eye On Education's Senior Editor, Lauren Davis.

When I attended NCTE in Chicago, I heard the following misconceptions about the CCSS. I hope to clear things up.

1. I can’t teach students to write poetry anymore; it’s not in the writing standards.
   The second part of that sentence is correct—the standards do not mention poetry as a genre of writing. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t teach it. If you look at Appendix A of the standards, you’ll see the following clarification: “The narrative category does not include all of the possible forms of creative writing, such as many types of poetry. The Standards leave the inclusion and evaluation of other such forms to teacher discretion” (The Common Core State Standards, Appendix A, p. 23).


2. I have to determine the Lexile level of every text I assign.
   Not necessarily. In Appendix A, on page 7, you’ll see an explanation of various readability formulas (Lexile, Flesh-Kincaid, etc.). However, on page 8, the authors of the CCSS acknowledge that there are limitations to these formulas. The authors recommend that qualitative measures for determining text complexity (involving the teacher’s own judgment) are given preference over quantitative measures when evaluating narrative fiction for grades 6 and above.


3. The era of prereading has come to an end.
   This is a tricky one. It’s true that David Coleman, one of the CCSS authors, is not a fan of prereading exercises; he says that it’s more authentic to jump right into the text (more on that in a later post). However, I noticed something interesting. There were two drafts of the Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards, written by David Coleman and Susan Pimentel (another CCSS author). The first draft (dated 6/3/11) explicitly advised against prereading exercises in K-2, stating that “Prereading activities [should be] eliminated or sharply curtailed.” However, in the second draft (revised on 8/25/11), that sentence no longer appears. The new version says: “Care should be taken that introducing broad themes and questions in advance of reading does not prompt overly general conversations rather than focusing reading on the specific ideas and details, drawing evidence from the text, and gleaning meaning and knowledge from it.” The language in the new document seems more toned-down. No, we shouldn’t use prereading exercises in a way that tells students one thing to look for and doesn’t allow for them to make their own discoveries as they’re reading. But we can use prereading exercises when appropriate to motivate students to read a text and help them access prior knowledge. I think the revision acknowledges that we shouldn’t make a sweeping rule one way or another; teachers know best and need to be given flexibility to use the strategies that they see fit.

Happy Teaching!