and Expectations for Students With Special Needs
Similarly, the CCSS do not define supports for students with special needs beyond assistive technologies such as Braille, screen-reader technologies, sign language, and so on. Use of such devices is determined through an individual education program (IEP) and supersedes educational standards. These devices and approaches are more commonly used for students with sensory or motor disabilities, or in some cases, for those with mild disabilities that involve reading and learning (see “Application to Students with Disabilities,” www.corestandards.org/assets/application-to-students-with-disabilities.pdf). What has not been determined is how these supports and expectations might be adapted for students with more significant cognitive and intellectual delays and disabilities. It is likely that development of these systems will continue as general and special educators collaborate. Participation and access are priorities, and the CCSS language mirrors that used in the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (http://idea.ed.gov): “The Standards should also be read as allowing for the widest possible range of students to participate fully from the outset and as permitting appropriate accommodations to ensure maximum participation of students with special education needs” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 6).
Support and Expectations for Students Who Struggle
The Common Core State Standards do not provide specific advice about supporting students who struggle with school. Instead, there is recognition among educators that reduced expectations often cause students to fail to reach high levels of achievement. Support for students who struggle with school should be part of the ongoing conversations within collaborative planning teams. As Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, and Robert Eaker (2008) note, collaborative teams should discuss what to do when students fail to achieve the expected learning targets. During discussions, team members can identify additional instructional interventions to close the gap between students who mastered the content and those who did not, just as the tenth-grade English team did at the beginning of this chapter. This may involve reteaching content through guided instruction or targeting students for response to intervention efforts (Fisher & Frey, 2010). A pyramid of response to intervention that provides teams with systems for intervention can be helpful (Buffum, Mattos, & Weber, 2009). In this book, we focus on quality teaching for all students and encourage the development of collaborative planning teams to monitor and adapt instruction to ensure learning for all students. This systematic approach to students who struggle in school has a better potential to result in positive outcomes than reducing expectations or preventing students from accessing high-quality instruction aligned with the Common Core State Standards. That’s not to say that teachers should avoid scaffolding or support. As we will discuss in each of the teaching scenarios in this book, teaching Common Core ELA well requires a deep understanding of the content as well as skills in responding to students’ understanding and misunderstanding.
Conclusion
The Common Core State Standards for English language arts present high school English educators with challenges as well as opportunities. The shifts in our ways of thinking about literacy development are considerable, and require us to collectively look at our own practices and plan collaboratively with our colleagues. These expectations can pose a major roadblock for schools that do not have a forum for conducting this important work. It is not the kind of work that can be accomplished with a few workshops and some follow-up meetings. Determining how these changes will be implemented, as well as identifying the effective practices that have already proven to be successful, will require focused and sustained attention as educators develop curriculum, design formative assessments, and interpret results. Collaborative teams within a PLC are an ideal forum for accomplishing this work. Indeed, the major shifts described in this chapter parallel the characteristics of successful PLCs: they emphasize collaboration and communication across disciplines and grade levels, and they reward those who seek to deepen their understanding of their professional practice.
CHAPTER 2
Implementing the Common Core State Standards for Reading
KEY QUESTIONS
• To what extent does your team understand the Reading standards What is familiar? What is new? What may be challenging for students? What may be challenging for teachers?
• Examine current texts being used in grades 9–12, and assess them quantitatively and qualitatively and for reader and task demands. Which ones work? Which ones should be used in another grade or eliminated altogether?
• How will high school students be prepared for college and career reading demands?
The eleventh-grade students in Arthur Ngo’s English class are wondering about the poem he just gave them. It seems too simple. “My Papa’s Waltz” (Roethke, 1975) is easy enough to read and not all that complicated to understand, right? But Mr. Ngo has other plans.
“This is in nearly every anthology you see on 20th century American poetry,” he explains. “But why? What makes this such an enduring poem? We’re going to try to get to the root of this. I’ve got two purposes for our lesson today. One is to examine memory and speculate on whether this is a fond memory or a disturbing one. That’s connected to our overall unit on memory in literature and science. The second purpose relates to the structure of the poem itself. We’re going to look at how the form of the poem relates to the content.”
With that brief introduction to the poem, Mr. Ngo invites his students to read the poem silently and annotate as needed, especially when identifying poetic structures and content that may be confusing or troubling. He also reminds them to read the poem silently several times. While they read, he plays soft music from his laptop (he calls it “music to read by”). His students are accustomed to this, but Mr. Ngo has more in mind this time. He has chosen “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss (ClassicalMusicOnly, 2008). Without realizing it, students are listening to a waltz while reading the poem. After they have read the poem, he invites discussion.
“What’s the story of this poem?” he begins.
Over the next several minutes, they discuss the content. A large number of students remark that it’s about abuse, but he reels them in.
“That’s interpretation, and we’ll get there, but let’s slow down,” he says. “First, I just want the story.”
They describe a domestic scene of an inebriated father dancing his young son around the kitchen while a disapproving mother looks on.
“Now I’d like for you to look at the poetic structure. What are you seeing and hearing?” he asks.
Once again, they deconstruct the poem, noting the poet’s use of slant rhyme (dizzy and easy; pans and countenance), its ABAB rhyme pattern, and its use of quatrains. He draws their attention to the beat, while bringing the music’s volume back up.
“I’m playing a waltz, which has a distinctive rhythm. One, two, three, one, two, three …” he drums out. “In poetry, we call it iambic trimeter.” He adds an online metronome to mirror the beat and lowers the volume of the music a bit, saying, “Now read the poem aloud at your tables, and tell me what you notice about the meter.”
As the students fall into the recitation, he travels from table to table so he can listen to their observations and look at their annotations. As he circulates from one group to the next, he gathers informal data that he will use to formulate his next instructional steps. His observations confirm what he had anticipated: they have not yet discovered the misstep. After the class
