Common Lit Curriculum: An Honest Review

Visit veteran teachers at your school and ask to see their binders.  We all have them: cabinet-filling, paper-holding, dust-accruing binders full of three-hole punched documents and resources from curricula gone by.  It used to be that the curriculum was what we covered, entailing hard copy resources passed from hand-to-hand and teacher-to-teacher over time.  Those days are over, and commonality has been streamlined thanks to Common Lit.  

With Common Lit, there are no more mountains of binders, no more photocopied quizzes, no more worn out handouts.  Common Lit, for better and worse, is a warehouse of common lit articles and common lit text dependent questions available to all educators (and, likewise, all students) for easy use.  But to what degree is that a good thing?

Read on for an honest review of the Common Lit Curriculum.

Common Lit Curriculum: An Honest Review

Before my Common Lit Curriculum honest review, I have to be honest with you about my Common Lit use: before the 2023-2024 school year, I dabbled and sampled Common Lit for free and on my own. 

It seemed bountiful with resources (both texts and text-dependent questions) and with an easy-to-use interface for assigning, assessing, and analyzing student work.  But this was all at the margins, tangential to my courses, not substantial enough to be considered a full curriculum. 

Common Lit was the icing on the cake or the sprinkles on the doughnut: nice but not necessary.  Using it this way, I found Common Lit engaging and refreshing.

With Common Lit, it’s easy to search for readings (by grade, standard, theme, literary device, etc.), to assign to students (by classes or individual students), to assess student performance (by multiple choice questions and short answer responses), and to analyze data (by seeing student performance by question, standard, etc.).  

Common Lit also makes it easy to differentiate for students as educators are able to assign texts with different options for proficient and struggling learners.  For instance, for struggling leaders, you can assign “Guiding Questions,” which are primarily reading comprehension questions that students must answer in a text before they can read on in the text. 

With this, too, you can see a report of which questions were missed and how many times students missed them–important to know if you want to pinpoint difficult passages or deficient skills.

I appreciate, too, that the questions in Common Lit are text dependent, for Common Lit text dependent questions ask students to read, understand, and analyze fiction, non-fiction, and poetry related to a variety of standards and skills. 

Because of this and the other areas noted above, Common Lit was a huge time-saver for me as an educator.

• Need to find a topical article of a certain Lexile?  Done.

• Don’t have time to find a paired text for your novel?  No problem.

• Struggling to create questions for students to answer?  Common Lit’s got you.

Indeed, the warehouse of texts housed on Common Lit is remarkably wide and deep, giving educators an abundance of choice for every level of English Language Arts instruction.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the students will love every text in Common Lit.  Much like passages on a standardized test (which are meant to tax them, not interest them), texts on Common Lit don’t always engage students, which is why text-selection is so important.  

Selecting Texts

As noted above, there are many ways to search for texts.  You can even find multiple texts grouped as “text sets” like “Horror and Suspense” (which contains 37 texts) and “themes” like “Social Pressure” (which contains 88 texts).  You can even look for “book pairings” for texts to pair with books like The Outsiders or Animal Farm. 

Indeed, gone are the days of Googling “best poems for high schoolers.”  (But, I hope, the days of turning to Lindsay Ann Learning continue for years to come!) 

With Common Lit, we aren’t short on selections.  The challenge, then, becomes what to select.  Here’s where students can be helpful.

• What are they interested in reading?  

• What are they interested in learning about? 

• What authors and texts have they seen alluded to in pop culture?  

Surveying students or sharing the lists of possible texts with students can help us select texts for use in the classroom.  Common Lit makes it easy to filter a list of texts down to a theme, Lexile, genre, grade, whatever, so with that narrowed list, you can easily toss it to students and ask, what do you want to read? 

And what a powerful question that is when they are so often told what to read, which brings me to the next part of this honest review . . . 

Requiring Texts and the Dark Side of Common Lit

These days I no longer dabble in Common Lit on the margins of my courses. Instead, my district has mandated its use for PLC work and dictated its units as our units.  (They are really taking the common literally here.) 

This has dulled the luster of the platform, moving from optional use to required implementation of Common Lit 360, their “year-round” and “free research-backed curriculum.” It may be free, but it certainly cuts into the freedom of educators to select texts, plan lessons, and assess students authentically.

Common Lit 360 Review

Common Lit 360 is a collection of units (and resources) packaged together for easy consumption and implementation.  For example, for 11th grade, there’s a unit on The Great Gatsby and the American Dream, through which students read the book, explore the theme, work with vocabulary, and consider paired texts at different points in the unit/novel. 

It’s bursting at the seams with questions and resources and assignments and activities, but it’s an almost overwhelming amount of content, and in my experience, it boils down to a fairly traditional experience for students in an English Language Arts class: read the text, answer some questions. Rinse. Repeat ad nauseum.

And don’t even get me started on the lack of creativity, student voice, and choice when it comes to assessments. Or the fact that they teach that themes are morals. Or the fact that their RL.4 questions (or other, for that matter) aren’t rigorous enough in keeping with the intent of the standard. They might get the job done, but they aren’t what I would consider “high quality instructional material.”

For Gatsby, the Common Lit text dependent questions ask students about all the things you’d expect (the green light, the oculist’s eyes) which makes it familiar, traditional, and easy-to-game the system. 

To be fair, this isn’t an issue with Common Lit so much as an issue with returning again and again and again to literary classics and the canon where so much has been said, written, and posted about it that it’s hard to find an original approach to teaching it or original thinking from students related to it. 

Couple that with the fact that a school implementing Common Lit 360 could conceivably have hundreds of students reading the same texts, answering the same questions, and taking the same assessments at the same time, and you have a churning cesspool of potential cheating and shortcutting. 

Parting Thoughts

In schools where teachers close their doors and “do their own thing,” to varying degrees of benefits for students, we lose out on collective efficacy, shared responsibility. 

If PLCs operate under the mantra that students aren’t my students, they’re our students, then we need to have commonality to compare and share data, dissect and disseminate instructional strategies, and design interventions and supports for students.  These things don’t work if we go rogue.  

Perhaps, then, Common Lit provides an answer, not the answer, to helping schools and educators align their practices with best practices.  For now, I’ll do what I always do regardless of curriculum, mandate, or mantra. I’m going to be my best to do my best (even though I’m doing it in spite of Common Lit, not because of it), and you and I probably have that in common.