Into the Common Core: One Classroom's Journey

Dowan McNair-Lee leads her 8th graders at Stuart-Hobson in a lesson on figurative language.
—Jared Soares for Education Week
Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org.

For nearly an hour, Dowan McNair-Lee has been walking her 8th grade English/language arts students through ways to identify the central idea of a text. She's come at it from several angles, and no light bulbs are going off.

Using an article about labor leader Cesar Chavez's grape boycott and hunger strike, these students at Stuart-Hobson Middle School are doing a "close read," a skill prized by the new Common Core State Standards being put into practice in the District of Columbia. Ms. McNair-Lee had read the article aloud, then students read it on their own. Now, the class is diving into it together, analyzing word choice, structure, and other features of the text to determine its main idea.

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