recipes, tweaking recipes after we have followed them carefully a time or two, and consistently getting good results with them from then on.
Certainly, there are teachers who can create successful lessons that neither they nor anyone else has seen before. We admire and sometimes envy them, but in our experience, they are very rare. Most good teachers we have known benefit from having effective lesson frameworks. They use their professional expertise and knowledge of their students and materials to plan, tweak, pace, and repeat lessons as necessary in order to maximize effectiveness. The lesson frameworks in this book can be seen as a set of recipes for teaching the CCSS ELA. As with culinary recipes, each framework exists because it does something the others do not. However, across all twenty, most of the standards are taught. In fact, the most important or challenging standards for reading comprehension and writing are taught in several lesson frameworks, because students benefit from repetition with variety.
Table I.4 outlines the twenty lesson frameworks (and chapters), as well as the college and career readiness anchor standards and grade-level standards that each addresses. (The grade-level standards are specifically for lesson frameworks focusing on Reading Standards for Literature and Reading Standards for Informational Text—RL and RI, respectively.)
How to Use This Book
Treat this book as you would a cookbook. Don’t feel like you should start at the beginning and read to the end. Each chapter can stand alone. Scan the brief introduction and feature box introducing the standards to each framework, and use table I.4 to find lesson frameworks that will teach something your students need right now.
Table I.4: Twenty Lesson Frameworks and the CCSS
Each chapter offers a sample lesson with tips to guide your instruction and ends with a section that breaks out the standards and explains how the lesson framework helps teach them to students. As noted, many lesson frameworks follow the phases of the gradual release of responsibility model: “I do, and you watch,” “I do, and you help,” and “You do it together, and I help.” These chapters conclude with a focus on the final phase—“You do, and I watch”—by looking at implementing the lesson framework across the year.
When you have located frameworks your students need, consider how successful they will be with them and how much they will enjoy participating in the lessons. To build their confidence (and yours!), begin with the lesson frameworks you think students will enjoy most. Mark the others they need, which might be more difficult or less engaging, and plan to use them after success with the frameworks you deemed more engaging.
We wish you every success in teaching the CCSS to all your students!
CCSS in a Guess Yes or No Lesson
Guess Yes or No is a lesson framework you can apply to any informational text. When you lead students through this lesson several times and gradually release responsibility to them, you are helping them learn the reading, speaking and listening, and language skills in the following standards.
Reading
CCRA.R.1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
RI.2.4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases in a text relevant to a grade 2 topic or subject area.
RI.3–5.4: Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases in a text relevant to a grade-level topic or subject area.
Speaking and Listening
CCRA.SL.1: Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
Language
CCRA.L.4: Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases by using context clues, analyzing meaningful word parts, and consulting general and specialized reference materials, as appropriate.
Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, 2010, pp. 10, 13–14, 22, 25.
CHAPTER 1
Guess Yes or No
In 1978, Harold Herber, a pioneer in the field of content-area reading, proposed that teachers focus students’ attention on key information in a text by presenting them with statements and having them guess which statements were true. Students then read the text, determined which of their guesses were correct, and turned false statements into true statements. Guess Yes or No is based on Herber’s anticipation-guide strategy, a prereading tool to engage students and build new knowledge.
In Guess Yes or No lessons, students learn to read closely to determine whether statements are true or false, make logical inferences, and cite textual evidence to support their responses. Before students read the text, they read the statements together, and the teacher helps them use context and morphemic clues when appropriate to determine word meanings. Using the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction, Guess Yes or No combines student trios and teacher-led conversations to discuss various aspects of the text’s content.
A Sample Guess Yes or No Lesson
Miss G.’s class is about to read an article on Japan from the student news magazine the class has a subscription to. She wants students to read the article closely and pay attention to the facts they learn about Japan. To plan the Guess Yes or No lesson, she reads the article and constructs a sheet with ten statements, some true and some false. (See figure 1.1, page 12.) She writes the false statements so that they can be turned into true statements by changing a word or two. In addition, she includes some statements that require students to make logical inferences to decide whether they are true or false. She also includes key vocabulary words students need to be able to pronounce and understand in order to fluently read the text.
Figure 1.1: Sample Guess Yes or No sheet on Japan.
This is the first Guess Yes or No lesson Miss G. has taught to her students. Miss G. follows the gradual release of responsibility model when teaching comprehension lessons. The class will watch and listen as she models how to figure out whether the first two statements are true or false. Students will help her figure out the next two as a class. Then, the students will work together in their trios to complete the final six statements. Miss G. has assigned students to trios so there is at least one good reader and one struggling reader in each trio.
TIP
Try having your students work in trios—with a few duets or quartets—if your class doesn’t divide equally by three. In many classrooms, if the group size
