them to listen again.
“This time we’re going to listen to Roethke read his poem,” he says, “and I want you to listen closely as you follow along in the reading. There’s a stumble somewhere in this poem. It’s subtle, but it’s there.”
With that, he plays the online metronome and an audio file of the author twice.
“Did you hear the stumble, when he misses the beat? Talk with your table about where you think it is,” he instructs them.
Within a few minutes, some of the tables have reached consensus. One of these tables says, “‘At every step you missed.’”
“Let’s listen again to see if we can hear it, now that you know where to find it,” says Mr. Ngo. He plays the recording and the metronome. “Roethke’s helping us visualize this scene,” he says, “and he’s using the sounds of the language to let us feel unbalanced for just a moment.”
A Collaborative Planning Team in Action
Before delving into the main purpose of this chapter, which is to examine the Common Core State Standards for reading in grades 9–12, we want to comment on Mr. Ngo’s curricular decisions and the contributions of his collaborative planning team, composed of the English faculty in all four grades, toward this effort.
Working together, Mr. Ngo and his collaborative planning team developed a consistent and coherent approach for planning the instructional unit by taking the following actions.
• Examining the text exemplars list in appendix B of the CCSS (NGA & CCSSO, 2010c) to gain a sense of the text complexity appropriate for high school English students
• Identifying texts they currently use in their classrooms and redistributing across the grade levels as needed
• Creating a list identifying a range of informational texts and literary readings that represent a progression of complexity throughout the school year
• Matching identified texts to concepts and content to be taught in English across the grade levels
• Developing lessons to be delivered and common formative assessments to be administered
• Discussing findings with one another during their weekly meetings to plan interventions for students in need of extra supports, including those who struggle to read and comprehend grade-level texts
• Developing a classroom observation schedule so they could spend time in one another’s classrooms
In other words, Mr. Ngo didn’t develop and teach this unit on memory alone. He relied on the collective strengths of his collaborative planning team to develop this unit and analyze student outcomes. However, before the team could engage in these actions, members had to analyze the Common Core ELA standards and compare them to their existing curriculum and instruction. They used four questions to guide their analysis.
1. What is familiar in the CCSS at each grade level?
2. What appears to be new based on prior standards?
3. What may be challenging for students?
4. What may be challenging for teachers?
This initial conversation allowed the teacher team to begin analyzing its current status in curriculum and instruction. Importantly, the teachers included student learning from the outset.
“I didn’t really know what I should anticipate in terms of misconceptions or naïve understandings,” says Mr. Ngo. “The team alerted me to the fact that the students might not notice the meter and its relationship to the waltz, since a lot of them are not familiar with this dance. And they advised me that lots of kids believe this poem is about child abuse.”
Based on its initial work, the team was able to identify areas of need regarding professional development and materials acquisition and to set the stage for later decisions regarding curriculum development, data analysis, intervention, and collaborative observations. A copy of this initial tool Mr. Ngo’s collaborative planning team used appears in figure 2.1. Visit go.solution-tree.com/commoncore for an online-only reproducible of figure 2.1, which your collaborative team can use to analyze other reading standards.
Anchor Standards for Reading
The Common Core English language arts standards are organized across four strands: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language. As discussed in chapter 1, a set of K–12 anchor standards for college and career readiness frames each strand. These anchor standards articulate the overarching goals that shape the grade-specific standards and are designed to create commonality across elementary, middle, and high school. “Students advancing through the grades are expected to meet each year’s grade-specific standards and retain or further develop skills and understandings mastered in preceding grades” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 11). This structure can reduce the silo effect that can creep into education in which teachers work in isolation from their peers and curriculum is not coordinated. By viewing education across grade bands and buildings, we can begin to mirror more closely the experiences of our students and their families. The anchor standards are an attempt to foster communication across and within educational systems.
There are ten 9–12 anchor standards for reading organized into the following four domains (see NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 10).
1. Key Ideas and Details
2. Craft and Structure
3. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
4. Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity
These anchor standards are directly linked to two parts in the Reading strand at grades K–12: Literature and Informational Text. In addition, a second set of grades 6–12 Reading standards addresses literacy in history and social studies, science, and technical subjects (see NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, pp. 60–62). The anchor standards for the content areas remain the same as those articulated for English language arts. However, the grade-level standards reflect the discipline-specific applications of reading in content-area instruction. In this book, we confine our review of the CCSS to English language arts, as implemented by English teachers. We will examine each of these parts in this chapter, after first discussing the anchor standards in more detail.
Key Ideas and Details
The three anchor standards in this domain describe the explicit and implicit comprehension of readers as they glean the purposes and main points of the text. In addition, the domain emphasizes the importance of being able to follow plot, character development, and themes, all necessary for literary analysis.
Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, pp. 35, 38.
Figure 2.1: Guiding questions for grade-by-grade analysis of the Reading standards.
Visit go.solution-tree.com/commoncore for a reproducible version of this figure.
1. Read closely to determine what the text says
