Arizona
Arkansas
Colorado
Florida
Georgia
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Louisiana
Maryland
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Nebraska
New Jersey
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
Tennessee
Utah
Virginia
West Virginia
I am a full-time fourth-grade teacher and bring to this book my expertise as an intermediate-grade teacher who has also worn other hats of district literacy coordinator, PEBC (Public Education and Business Coalition) Lab teacher, and literacy consultant, spending time in classrooms in just about all 50 states. As a teacher, I can look down the hall at third grade, and up the hall to fifth grade, to help you know and name what the standards are asking of intermediate-grade teachers in particular.
As I write this revised introduction, I could tell you all sorts of stories about implementing the standards or how students, parents, and administrators responded to the testing, but the biggest takeaway in the years since the CCSS were enacted is that my students, and maybe all students, can rise to the challenge of becoming accomplished readers, writers, and thinkers. The biggest change that the CCSS nudged me to make? I am teaching students to cite evidence in a more deliberate way since implementing the standards. Students write more about their reading in more detail with specific examples from text to support their thinking. Overall, I think that is a positive change!
Whether you are in a place using the CCSS or your own state’s standards, the important thing is to translate the standards into learning outcomes in age-appropriate, best-practice ways. That’s why I’m so gratified when teachers who have used this book say to me how much they love the What the Student Does and What the Teacher Does pages most. Anyone can sit at a computer and find lists of standards, but what makes Your Literacy Standards Companion special is that it helps educators confirm the daily practices that have the most impact on student learning.
As I think is the case in designing state standards, the authors of the Common Core State Standards focus on the “what,” and leave it to the capable practitioners to design the teaching and learning that will get students to the goals:
By emphasizing required achievements, the Standards leave room for teachers, curriculum developers, and states to determine how those goals should be reached and what additional topics should be addressed. Thus, the standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of metacognitive strategies that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning. Teachers are thus free to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identify as most helpful for meeting the goals set out in the standards. (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices [NGA Center] & Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], 2010)
The standards also uphold and advance the strong research base for how learners learn and progress. Students become better readers when they read. They become better writers when they write. Digging into the CCSS, you find that Reading Standard 10 requires that students read. Writing Standard 10 stipulates that students write for a variety of purposes over an extended time. And don’t we want our students—of all ages—doing lots of actual reading and writing and thinking? Here are a few sentences from the standards that should woo any of us:
Students who meet the Standards readily undertake close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature. They habitually perform the critical reading necessary to pick carefully through the staggering amount of information available today in print and digitally. They actively seek the wide, deep, and thoughtful engagement with high quality literary and informational texts that builds knowledge, enlarges experience, and broadens worldviews. (NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010, p. 3)
And you know what? This is what students want, too! They don’t want canned lessons, teachers reading from scripts, random worksheets tied to a commercial program or downloaded off the Internet. They want to engage. It doesn’t matter about socioeconomics, or race, or whatever factors you want to insert here: kids of all ages want, almost clamor for, the same thing. They want rigor and choice and someone who helps them think and learn and communicate with others. They want someone who listens to them, validates where they are, and then moves them forward.
Our students want us teachers to bring texts, rich discussions, complex ideas, and emotions into their lives in the safety of the classroom culture. Last year I read R. J. Palacio’s novel Wonder aloud to the class. I looked up after I’d read the final sentence in one of the last chapters to see more than half the class in tears. Then the tears turned to cheers at how the protagonist overcame such incredible odds. This is a book that unfolds gradually, but without spoiling it, the main character, August, is unlike any other child, and my students empathize with him because he’s ostracized due to genetics giving him the short straw. The principal is presenting year-end awards and uses Henry Ward Beecher’s words on greatness. “‘Greatness,’ wrote Beecher, ‘lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength. . . . He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts.’” As the principal finishes, the last sentence reads, “So will August Pullman please come up here to receive this award?” My students understood—Auggie’s quiet greatness, his outlook on life, his perseverance all prevailed. And they had lived with August throughout the adversity.
This book will stay with my students. The story, the lessons, the empathy. This is one of many powerful books we read from a list that could go on and on. But they will remember Auggie Pullman perhaps most of all. “Thank you for making me go to school,” Auggie said.
I want all our students to say that—every day! And I believe that the Common Core standards can create the kind of conditions in our classrooms that lead students to say that, to revere school. The standards are “bookish” and “intellectual,” and, despite or because of their rigor, they’re about ensuring students’ engagement.
So before I move on to an overview of how this book is organized, I want to give you a metaphor of how I envision this book serving you. Jim Burke uses a metaphor of a compass in his introduction of Your Literacy Standards Companion, a wonderful metaphor.
For this book, I offer you this image:
Source: Courtesy of clipart.com.
The image was sent by a friend of mine as I was working on the final section of this book, with a
