Reading, Thinking, and Writing About History: Teaching Argument Writing to Diverse Learners in the Common Core Classroom, Grades 6-12 (Common Core State Standards in Literacy Series)

So excited about this book! Multiple ideas and examples for a teacher to use and it came in the mail fast! I have not used it yet but I can tell this book will be used consistently. It is made for high school students. I hope to use the techniques to help my history students think and write like historians. From what I have seen the book's ideas challenges students to read, think and write the way college professors expect but on the level of a high school student. It will set students up for success for college history classes for sure and fulfills required standards.

The subtitle of this book is "Teaching Argument Writing to Diverse Learners in the Common Core Classroom, Grades 6-12". The authors, all of whom teach at the college level, make this claim, which is, in my view as a 7th-grade Social Studies teacher in a non-magnet setting, irresponsible and uninformed. Why do they make the claim? Because they want to sell their book, which is designed strictly for Eighth Grade and nothing else. Why is the claim irresponsible and uninformed? Because it completely ignores the by now plentiful research on the development of the adolescent brain that clearly shows that sixth-graders are so different from twelfth-graders, for example, that they might as well be two different species.The authors developed this book while working only with 8th-graders studying U.S. history in a large school district in the Mid-Atlantic region of the east coast. They then claim that the methods used would work for, say, 7th-graders studying medieval history in Los Angeles. This is exactly the sort of nonsense that works to convince uninformed people.Here is why the claim is nonsense. MRI studies of adolescents done at NIH since the 1990s show that the adolescent brain is full-size, but not fully formed. Different parts come "on line" in adolescents over each year going up to about age 25. The pace at which this happens is different for all kids and cannot be standardized. For 7th-graders, one part that is missing is crucial: the prefrontal cortex, which governs the so-called executive functions such as time-management, patience, organization, and persistence. Since the authors of this book have designed three-day lessons, the pitfalls of trying to do this with 7th-graders become immediately obvious. In addition, thanks to social promotion, many of today's students come to middle school three to five years below grade-level in their English Language Arts skills. They can't write, and they can barely read. Since the authors brag that their book uses "an instructional approach that highlights subject-specific ways of reading, writing, and thinking that are the hallmarks of advanced literacy practice in a discipline", it is apparent that low-level students in grades six and seven will have a very hard time. They are metaphorically being told to drive before they can even ride a bicycle. They are being set up to fail.So, in short, the reasons I am giving this book one star are first that it is not based in any way on how adolescents actually learn. Rather, it is based on how the authors say History should be taught. They are basing their approach on the Common Core Standards, which were written without the participation of a single child-learning expert or secondary Social Studies teacher. Second, the claim made in the subtitle is so sweeping that it is ridiculous. The book is specific to eighth-grade U.S. History. The skills taught via the book might possibly transfer upward to the higher grades, but they almost certainly do not transfer downward to grades six and seven.I've taught 7th-grade Social Studies for over a decade, and have seen over 1,500 non-magnet seventh-graders go through my classroom. Last year, and every year, the vast majority of my students were assessed as functioning 3 or more years below grade-level in their language skills. If a book is ever written that concentrates on 7th-graders functioning years below grade-level and has a method for successfully teaching them History, I will be the first to sing its praises.

As an experienced classroom teacher, once I recognized that this is a propaganda piece for the Common Core, I approached it with predjudice. While the Common Core curriculum requires Social Studies teachers to have to actually teach the material in meaningful ways, for a change, it is a horrible system designed to make hundreds and hundreds of millions for Microsoft every year. No one with any background in education was involved with the inception or developement of the Common Core, with the exception of Bill Ayers, Obama's buddy, the American terrorist who said on 9/11 that he wished he had bombed more buildings. In particular, the math portion of the Common Core is a political system representing the goals of the Left: make everyone equal by penalizing the better students and failing those who have not yet cought up and who deserve to be taught in meaningful ways. The Common Core Math, disliked by better math teachers. will cost us in the world. In their obesession with "the group" the Left has created a system where the upper learner will many times do the work to get the grade. Now, the lower level learner is taught by his peers, rather than by an educator and he know he is not keeping up. Oh, and don't memorize those multiplication tables, spend your time drawing boxes. At the middle school and high school level, the Common Core is made for lazy teachers, since Students are to learn (all those advanced math concepts) from each other. When I read this book I was stunned to read the constant accolades to the Common Core- the reason homeschooling, Charter Schools, and private schools are experiencing exponetial growth. In America we have never before had a national system of education, and especially one designed and foisted on us by people with a political agenda with no background in education: Obama (he was not a professor,hired as a part time instructor), Gates, who made his billions and was known here in the Silicon Valley as a vicious predator who now believes the rest of us should be socialists, Ayers, a criminal college professor..., and Arne Duncan. Secretary of Education with no background at all in education. No teachers, no parents, no educators in the trenches, just a phone call and bribery from Obama to the governor, and bingo, a system that serves no one.