The Common Core State Standards do not have to mean the death of creative work produced by your students. If anything, the emphasis on textual analysis gives you more reason to explore interesting and creative ways for students to engage with texts. The more meaningful you make the classroom work, the more transferable the big ideas of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis become. A student who can read an expository text and turn it in into an engaging, listener-friendly podcast can surely identify the author’s ideas, key details, and supporting information. And in putting the information together in her own way, in creating something unique and sharing it with the world, she has learned something new, grown as a person, and possibly inspired others. In which case, your English class has all the bases covered—Common Core standards aligned and creativity encouraged and celebrated.