Following a number of education feeds and talking to teachers has shown me that there is a love/hate relationship in the profession for the new Common Core State Standards initiative, which has been adopted in 44 states for reading/language arts and math curricula. The standards themselves came about due to complaints from employers that high school graduates were not equipped with the critical thinking skills needed for the information-age job market. Or as I heard on the McLaughlin Group once, Harry Truman would feel right at home in many modern classrooms.
I took a course over the summer on escalating school library programs to support the Common Core, and I recently participated in a webinar discussing the importance of teaching research skills and their integration with Common Core standards. The greater emphasis on research is one change the Common Core has brought to school library programs, a change which I welcome, because what better way to learn than defining a problem, researching it and examining the results?
Another change is the greater emphasis on nonfiction texts, as the majority of adults read nonfiction in the form of web pages or newspaper or magazine articles for the information they need day-to-day, whereas fiction is primarily used for pleasure reading. Not that pleasure reading is unimportant or that there is no place for it, however, the emphasis has shifted, which is not necessarily a negative, especially given the fact that the new focus takes better into account those who prefer reading nonfiction for pleasure. This group, often comprised of boys, has been marginalized in the past.
This year I still ordered the award- winning and the popular fiction titles, but the majority of my order was nonfiction texts in most every Dewey area.
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