How should I use the CommonLit 360 student workbooks my school purchased?

CommonLit offers student workbooks for 360 Middle School units (grades 6 - 8). Workbooks are available for purchase for districts and schools with a School Essentials PRO Plus subscription as well as schools completing a PRO Plus pilot.

If your team has purchased workbooks, you can find information on the following:

• Workbooks & the digital platform
• Lesson planning with workbooks
• Workbooks vs. Downloadable Units

Workbooks & the digital platform

If my students are using workbooks, do I still need anything from the digital platform?

Yes. Even in a Workbooks classroom, some materials live only on the digital platform and are an important part of instruction:

• Reading Lesson Intro Slide Decks include videos, images, and graphics that support each lesson's knowledge-building, and should be used alongside the Workbook.
• Writing Lessons and Vocabulary Activities often have their own companion Slide Decks online as well.

Before each lesson, check the Lesson Overview page in the digital Teacher Copy to see whether additional materials are needed.

Am I missing out on anything by having students work on paper instead of digitally?

A handful of curriculum elements are only available on the digital platform:

• Three reading lessons have texts that are only available digitally due to print permissions. The questions and student prompts still appear in the Workbook with space to answer, so students can read the text online and write their responses on paper.
• Related Media Lessons require access to a video, referenced in the lesson. We recommend facilitating these as a whole group using a board or screen to play the video — the lesson itself still appears in the Workbook with space for students to respond on paper.

More broadly, working primarily on paper means you'll miss the automatic data collection and analysis that the digital platform provides as part of your partnership. A couple of ways to work around this:

• As an instructional team, decide together which parts of the curriculum you want students to complete online, so everyone can look at the same data during PLC time.
• Assign the digital version of a lesson before class and have students log in to submit their answers digitally, even if they also work through it on paper.

It's worth thinking through, lesson by lesson, which format works best for your students and which works best for you as the teacher for reviewing progress.

Lesson planning with workbooks

When your team uses workbooks, start lesson planning by considering:

• How your students are completing CommonLit content (Workbook, digital, or a mix)
• What planning support CommonLit has already provided — for example, the Lesson Overview in the Teacher Copy, or exemplar student answers
• Your own preferences for how you like to plan and prepare

This is the same approach we've always recommended — the only change is that you now have more options for how lessons are delivered (Workbook, digital Downloadable Unit, or printed Downloadable Unit) rather than planning lesson by lesson.

Whichever modality you and your students are using, plan from the matching Teacher Copy. A simple approach that works well: keep a printed Teacher Copy in hand while you have the digital platform open, so you can confirm you have every supporting material (Slide Decks, Unit Guides, Key Terms Glossary, etc.).

We recommend always referencing the Teacher Copy rather than relying on the student version alone — the Teacher Copy includes context about each lesson's purpose and design that the student copy doesn't show.

Workbooks vs. Downloadable Units

Why do my 6–8 workbook or downloadable unit pages look different from the materials linked on the unit page?

Workbooks were rebranded before the individual lesson-level materials were updated to match. The content is identical in both — only the visual branding differs.

As a middle school ELA teacher, is there a "best" way to use workbooks in class?

The best way to use Workbooks is whatever works best for you and your students — it can help to revisit why your school purchased workbooks in the first place as a guide.

If you prefer students to read and annotate on paper, the Workbook is built for this: it already includes margin space for note-taking and for answering the same during-reading questions students would see on the digital platform.

Some students focus better on paper than on a screen. Teachers who've used self-printed workbooks also tell us discussions tend to be more productive when students aren't behind a screen, and that collaboration can feel stronger when students are working through the same lesson together offline.

Workbooks are also useful to keep on hand for substitute lesson plans, as a backup if you run into wifi or connectivity issues, or for any other moment where a bound, professional workbook makes more sense than digital work.

As a middle school ELA teacher, what should I do with the Downloadable Unit Student Copy?

We recommend it as a backup for students who lose their Workbook — the MS Downloadable Unit Student Copy is an exact match to the printed Workbook.

It's also a helpful way to see an entire unit at a glance. Some teachers use it (along with the Downloadable Unit Teacher Copy) to plan ahead and see how lessons connect and build across the unit.

Think of the Downloadable Unit Student Copy as a digital version of the Workbook you can project on screen or use as backup, and the Teacher Copy as a planning tool — it includes answers to during-reading questions and is a good place to jot facilitation notes or reminders for future classes.