CommonLit Schools & Districts CommonLit 360 Bring CommonLit 360 to Your Schools with School Essentials PRO Plus

Get the professional learning, unit assessments and data tracking your team needs to successfully implement CommonLit’s comprehensive ELA curriculum!

At CommonLit, we’re committed to ensuring that all students have the reading, writing, and communication skills needed to be successful. That is why we created a comprehensive ELA curriculum, CommonLit 360. This curriculum for grades 6-12 is standards-aligned, easy-to-use, engaging, and thought-provoking.

In this blog post, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about our School Essentials PRO Plus package. This affordable package has been carefully crafted to support schools and districts that are fully implementing CommonLit 360.

At $6,500 per school, the School Essentials PRO Plus includes all of the Professional Development, aligned assessments, data tracking tools, and technical support you’ll need to ensure that teachers are supported and that students are growing.

CommonLit School Essentials PRO Plus

CommonLit 360 Unit Skills Assessments

Each 360 unit comes with two skills assessments that can be flexibly used to monitor students’ reading comprehension. Each of these digitals assessments comes with one reading passage, roughly 10 multiple choice questions, and an optional writing question.

The assessment texts are grade-level aligned and mirror the themes and topics discussed in that 360 unit. The questions students answer are based on the focus skills and standards that students have practiced throughout the unit.

These assessments are a great way for teachers and administrators to quickly and easily collect meaningful formative data that can be used to plan targeted instruction. Read more about CommonLit's Unit Skills Assessments here.

Continuous Virtual Professional Development and Consulting

At CommonLit, we pride ourselves on the support that we provide to educators. Once your team partners with us, you’ll be connected to a CommonLit account manager. Your account manager will be a former ELA teacher who is an expert in the 360 curriculum. They’ll work closely with you to create a training plan that meets your team’s specific needs.

Most CommonLit partners opt for several beginning of the year trainings. These are great opportunities to familiarize teachers with the design of the 360 curriculum and CommonLit’s digital platform. As the year progresses, we recommend more targeted trainings that focus on strategies for effectively using the curriculum. Topics include best practices for facilitating classroom discussion, lesson pacing, and utilization of data to inform future instruction.

A recent study of New York City public schools with a partnership with CommonLit resulted in an observed relationship between teachers' professional development session attendance and student growth. Students in schools whose teachers participated in professional development tended to show greater student growth over the course of the year compared to teachers who did not attend professional development sessions.


In one school, teachers attended four professional development sessions. The students in this school grew 0.62 standard deviation units – about 3x the average growth for middle schoolers! Our live, customized professional development provided in the School Essentials PRO Plus package can help foster this incredible student growth.

CommonLit’s Professional Development Portal

Scheduling team-wide professional development sessions is challenging! Teachers are extremely busy and it can feel impossible to consistently bring everyone together. This is why we also offer our Professional Development Portal. This portal includes self-paced and on-demand trainings that can be completed at any time.

CommonLit’s Professional Development Portal is essential for any school implementing the 360 curriculum. Here’s why:

  • It includes a 40-minute training for each CommonLit 360 unit. These trainings ensure that teachers start each 360 unit with a firm understanding of the unit’s content, the unit’s key writing outcomes, and key pacing considerations.
  • It also includes dozens of trainings that spotlight key best practices for lesson delivery. For example, trainings include strategies for effectively teaching CommonLit 360’s reading, writing, vocabulary lessons, and much more.
A screenshot of the professional development presentation for 6th Grade Unit 1. There is a short video on the right and discussion questions on the left.
On demand trainings come with engaging videos, tools, and activities to help educators quickly learn all about the 360 curriculum.

CommonLit Assessment Series

Teachers gain access to 3 specialized benchmark assessments — a Pre-, Mid-Year, and Post-Assessment. Each assessment includes 3 grade-level passages and 20+ multiple choice questions.

These assessments include comprehensive and easy-to-interpret data. Educators will be able to see how students are performing:

  • by standard,
  • compared to grade level expectations, and
  • compared to grade-level peers from around the United States.
A screen shot of the Assessment Series data dashboard, demonstrating how to view student performance data.
A data table showing overall student performance by standard.

When schools purchase School Essentials PRO Plus, they also gain access to school-wide data reports. With these reports, administrators can easily track student performance on all CommonLit 360 lessons, formative assessments, and benchmark assessments.

CommonLit's Canvas Integration

CommonLit’s Canvas integration is a powerful time-saver that teachers will love! This LMS integration includes 3 key benefits:

  • Teachers can seamlessly import their classes from Canvas to CommonLit.
  • Students can complete assigned reading lessons and assessments directly from their Canvas account.
  • Teachers can send student grades from CommonLit assignments back to their Canvas grade book.

With Clever, ClassLink, or Google Classroom, roster management is made easy. We will work with your team to choose the best rostering solution for your teachers and students. We’ll sync rosters and classes for your team, and students can quickly log in to CommonLit via Single Sign-On. Teachers can focus on ELA instruction (instead of resetting student passwords).

Bring CommonLit 360 to Your School or District

Gain access to school- and district-wide data reports, benchmark assessments, personalized professional development, and more with School Essentials PRO Plus. Save thousands with CommonLit.

Screenshot of CommonLit's paid packages with CommonLit SE Pro Plus package highlighted

If you would like to learn more about our paid packages, schedule a quick call. We are eager to support your team!