Sharon L. Spencer – författare

This book offers ideas that secondary teachers, university content faculty, and teacher educators can use to challenge traditional literacy practices and demonstrate creative, innovative ways of incorporating new literacies into the classroom, all within a strong theoretical framework. Teachers are trying to catch up to the new challenges of the twenty-first century. It is a superheroic feat that must be achieved if education is to stay relevant and viable. There is a lot of zip, bam, whap, and wow in the fast-paced, social networking, technological world, but not so much in the often laboriously slow-paced educational world. Where is the balance? How do teachers and students learn together, since one group has seasoned wisdom with limited technological know-how and the other uses all the cool new tools, but not in the service of learning? These are some important issues to consider in finding the balance in an unstable, fast-moving, ever-changing world.

This book is practical and useful to literacy teachers, teacher educators, and university faculty by bringing together the expertise of composition/rhetoric researchers and writers, literacy specialists, technology specialists, and teachers who are on the cutting edge of new literacies.

The Common Core Standards have recently been adopted in most states across the nation and teachers are in the process of getting to the core of these standards. Teaching to standards is not a new concept; teachers have adapted to new standards every few years for quite some time. And teachers are adaptable, as can be seen in this book. We are writing this book to demonstrate how teachers use research-based strategies to meet Common Core Standards while still focusing on students. Our goal is to help teachers visualize students in action as other teachers describe the implementation of research-based strategies in their own classrooms, show student work samples, and provide reflections of student success in achieving the standards. Many Common Core Standards books focus on the standards, but our approach focuses on strategies that engage the students in the classroom--showing how different teachers at varying grade levels have used the strategies to meet the standards. With this focus, we believe that teachers gain a new and positive perspective on approaching the new standards and see the flexibility of strategies for meeting standards across subject areas.

We have examined research on the strategies with the purpose of giving teachers a brief description of why these strategies work before giving actual examples from classrooms. We also work closely with teachers in the public schools and have our finger on the pulse of what is happening in the public schools—one of the current stressors being unpacking the Common Core Standards

This book actually focuses on practice. We begin by laying out a rationale in our first chapter---The Core Value(s) of Education. Then, each chapter focuses on a strategy, including 1) a brief description about the research supporting each strategy and 2) several examples from different grade levels, which include a description of how the strategy was used, student work samples, and a reflection on the use of the strategy. The research descriptions are fairly short because, while we believe professional educators (aka teachers, in this case) should know the research that supports practice, we know they are not typically interested in long diatribes about the research.