Common Core English Language Arts in a PLC at Work®, Grades 9-12. Nancy Frey
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The texts students will encounter in college and in job-training programs are highly complex. Students need stamina to negotiate pages of information-laden readings and the syntactical confidence to comprehend what they read. They need to bring a broad range of background knowledge and a robust vocabulary to these readings. They need to be independent readers who know what to do when understanding breaks down. The problem for most high school teachers is that, in their heart of hearts, they believe it is not their job to “fix” students who can’t read. Somebody else along the way has dropped the ball, making his or her job almost impossible. Teachers need to explore this assumption before they can make progress toward helping students meet the Common Core State Standards.
Will aligning curriculum to the Common Core turn our high schools into test-prep factories and our collaborative teams into benchmark assessment generators? Nothing in the Common Core recommends that approach. The standards place a high priority on a rich and rigorous literature curriculum along with a focus on informational texts. The standards also insist that literacy instruction is the shared responsibility of the entire school community, which is difficult to achieve since many content-area teachers already insist they have too much material to cover to spend instructional time focusing on literacy. Teachers need to recognize that reading and writing about different disciplines, such as history and science, deepen students’ understanding of what they are learning. Teachers also need to admit that some classroom practices have pushed students away from literacy rather than toward it. Instead of creating lessons that invite students to dig in and explore a text, many teachers make them answer questions rather than encouraging them to come up with their own. Literacy is an important building block for many other skills.
Such literacy of the standards must be assessed, however. That’s why the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) come in. PARCC and SBAC’s standards-based performance assessments are modeled on authentic, integrated reading and writing tasks. They offer students texts worth reading and tasks that challenge them to analyze the claims writers are making. Usage and mechanics in writing will be measured not with multiple-choice items but through student writing. If the assessment consortia are able to achieve their own lofty goals, these tests will be models for good instruction.
The Common Core anchor standards provide high schools with a clear destination—college and career readiness—and working in collaborative teams, focusing on student performance, and using common assessments are steps in the right direction on the path. If you or your collaborative team members think the Common Core’s outcomes are unrealistic, read them through the lens of a parent. Would you want your child to know and be able to do what is described? Do you want your child challenged by these rigorous expectations? If the answer is yes, as school teachers, we need to want the same goals and to work toward the same goals for all our students. Let Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey lead the way.
—Carol Jago, Past President, National Council of Teachers of English;
Associate Director, California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA
INTRODUCTION
The investment of time and expertise by schools and districts to make the transformation into an effective Professional Learning Community (PLC) at Work™ is about to pay off once again. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts (CCSS ELA) represents a significant change in how the education profession looks at curriculum, instruction, and assessment. In addition, the implications for implementation of the CCSS ELA will have ramifications for years to come. As new research on best practices related to the Common Core State Standards is conducted and disseminated, educators will need to interpret these results and determine how best to put them into practice. The PLC process offers an ideal foundational system for doing so. This process provides the necessary conditions and support to accomplish the work of ensuring continuous improvement. Ongoing professional development is embedded into the process, because teachers work as members of high-performing collaborative teams. Becoming a PLC is a process of reculturing a school; the concept is not just another meeting (DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker, 2008; Frey, Fisher, & Everlove, 2009). Effective districtwide or schoolwide PLCs have the following six characteristics (DuFour et al., 2008; DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2010).
1. Shared mission, vision, values, and goals all focused on student learning: The mission defines why the organization exists; the vision defines what the organization can become in the future; the values consist of demonstrated attitudes and behaviors that further the vision; and the goals are markers used to determine results and assess progress. A thriving PLC immerses itself in the behaviors necessary to the development of these concepts.
2. A collaborative culture with a focus on learning: Collaboration, an essential ingredient in the PLC process, enables people to work interdependently to improve teaching and learning.
3. Collective inquiry into best practice and current reality: Collective inquiry is the process through which PLC educators strive to build shared knowledge about research and what works in their classrooms.
4. Action orientation: An action orientation is characteristic of successful PLCs that learn by doing and recognize the significance and necessity of actions that engage their members in planning learning tasks, implementing them, and evaluating results.
5. A commitment to continuous improvement: Continuous improvement is a cyclical process that PLCs use to plan, implement, and check to determine the effectiveness of their efforts to improve teaching and learning.
6. Results orientation: Results are what count for PLCs; they are the measurable outcomes that reveal the success of the collaborative efforts to improve teaching and learning. Results outweigh intentions.
Visit www.allthingsplc.info for a glossary of PLC terms.
These six characteristics must be woven into the fabric of the school; they have to become part of the air that teachers, parents, students, and administrators breathe. In creating this culture, PLCs must reach agreement on fundamental issues, including (DuFour et al., 2008):
• What content students should learn
• What common and coherent assessments to develop and use in order to determine if students have learned the agreed-on curriculum
• How to respond when students do or don’t learn the agreed-on curriculum
To accomplish these three tasks, teachers need adequate time to collaborate with their colleagues. We are not suggesting that scheduling time for teachers to collaborate is easy, but without dedicated time, teams will not develop the collaborative structures needed to support student learning, especially if teachers are going to address the Common Core State Standards in grades 9–12. As part of their collaborative team time, teachers in PLCs engage in inquiry into student learning. The following four critical questions of a PLC highlight and provide a foundation for the work of collaborative planning teams (DuFour et al., 2008).
1. What do we want our students to learn?
2. How will we know when they have learned it?
3. How will we respond when some students don’t learn?
4. How will we extend and enrich the learning for students who are already proficient?
Professional Development