What is the status of collaborative teams at your school? Acknowledging the reality of your school’s commitment to an effective PLC process is a critical first step that can establish the future direction for collaborative professional growth. Recall the six characteristics of effective PLCs (pages 1–2) and consider the extent to which your PLC embodies these characteristics. If you want to delve deeper into your school’s PLC status, you can explore where your school would place on the PLC continuum: pre-initiating, initiating, implementing, developing, and sustaining (DuFour et al., 2010). Visit www.allthingsplc.info and search the Tools & Resources section for helpful PLC reproducibles, such as the PLC continuum reproducible “Laying the Foundation of a PLC” from Learning by Doing (DuFour et al., 2010).
2. How are your students performing? Are there areas of need in terms of curriculum development? Are there areas of need in terms of instruction? Are there areas of need in terms of assessment? These questions address key topics for your PLC to consider as you focus on the current status of your school’s language arts programs in relation to the expectations of the Common Core ELA standards. Discussions with your collaborative team will enable you to gain insight into where you are and where you need to go to support and advance your students’ language development.
We’ve designed this book to guide the conversations that are necessary to fully implement the Common Core State Standards. As such, it should serve as a resource that you return to regularly to consider the ways in which student learning can be improved. The anchor standards and the grade-level expectations are the outcomes expected of us as teachers. Common Core English Language Arts in a PLC at Work, Grades 9–12 provides the process to get there.
CHAPTER 1
Using Collaborative Teams for English Language Arts
KEY QUESTIONS
• To what extent does your team understand the conceptual shifts represented in the Common Core State Standards for English language arts?
• How often are informational texts used in instruction across the day?
• To what extent do teachers at your school use complex texts?
• Do students routinely discuss and develop texts that feature formal argumentation, claims, and evidence?
• To what extent do teachers at your school focus on speaking and listening activities?
• In what ways do teachers at your school develop academic vocabulary and language?
The tenth-grade English faculty meet to discuss the results of a common formative assessment they had administered the previous week. Together they had developed a pacing guide for an interdisciplinary unit called “Survival of the Fittest.” Their students studied the laissez-faire capitalism of Herbert Spencer in their world history class, while in biology they read excerpts from Charles Darwin on natural selection as well as contemporary articles on this principle in moths and algae and its impact on the treatment of antibiotic-resistant infections. The English classes offered a range of informational and narrative texts for students to read and discuss in their literature circles, including Life of Pi (Martel, 2001), Into Thin Air (Krakauer, 1998), the dramatic version of Les Misérables: A Play in Two Acts (Hugo, Meurice, & Hugo, 2009), and The Perfect Storm (Junger, 1997). Their target text (the one selected for in-class supported reading instruction) was The Odyssey (Homer, 2011). Their purpose was to examine the enduring theme of survival across genres, whether in mythology, magical realism, drama, or contemporary nonfiction accounts.
Unlike most previous state standards, the Common Core State Standards require an integrated approach to lesson development in which teachers build students’ competence toward multiple standards simultaneously. As an example, the teachers’ four-week unit focused on the following standards in reading literature (RL), writing (W), speaking and listening (SL), and language (L):
• Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text. (RL.9–10.2)
• Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation. (W.9–10.7)
• Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9–10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively. (SL.9–10.1)
• Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings. (L.9–10.5) (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, pp. 38, 46, 50, 55)
The purpose of the team’s common formative assessment was to determine if students could draw evidence from a short piece of text to support their analysis. Teachers asked the students to read the preface from Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (Hillenbrand, 2010). The passage recounts a scene from the life of Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic athlete whose plane was shot down over the Pacific in 1943. On their twenty-seventh day floating on several rafts that had been tied together, he and his wounded colleagues clung to life, while the sharks circled. The sound of a plane overhead briefly raised their hopes, which quickly turned to horror when they realized it was a Japanese bomber attacking them. Zamperini and the men hurled themselves into the water to escape the machine gun fire. Believing the bomber had left, they dragged themselves back into the one surviving raft, but the bomber returned to attack once more, and the other men were too weak to go back in the water. Zamperini alone went overboard. The passage ends with a cliffhanger: “the sharks were done waiting. They bent their bodies in the water and swam toward the man under the raft” (p. xviii).
Students were instructed to read the passage, write a brief summary (no more than two hundred words), and then cite two examples from the passage that manifested social or biological selection.
Following the formative writing assessment, the members of the collaborative planning team meet and focus their attention on answering two of the key questions that guide their school’s professional learning community: (1) how will we respond when some students don’t learn, and (2) how will we extend and enrich the learning for students who are already proficient?
“I had lots of kids ask me if they could read the book,” chuckles Rob Mansfield. “Maybe we should add it to next year’s unit.”
Others nod in agreement, and Lauren Harrison, the department chair, invites each of the tenth-grade teachers to share their results. As each speaks, she catalogs the scores on the whiteboard. Mitch Ellison says, “Seventy-two percent of my students scored a 4 or better on our six-point holistic writing rubric. I took a closer look at the papers of those who scored 3 or lower to see if there was any pattern. Within that group, 64 percent had difficulty with citing two examples in the text that supported their claim.”
“Any other patterns?” asks Ms. Harrison. “What troubles did the other students have?”
Mr. Ellison continues, “Here’s where it starts to get a little confusing for me. Broadly, I’d say it’s conventions, but that’s pretty general. I don’t know that I have any useful information that can help the ones who had trouble.”
For the next twenty minutes, members of the team share their results, and Ms. Harrison
