href="#ulink_c957169f-6469-510b-9e52-ef7f8500767f">Next Steps: Creating Learning Progressions
CHAPTER 2: Shifting to Complex Texts
The Complex Text in High School
Next Steps: Three Implications for Instruction
CHAPTER 3: Creating a Long-Term Vision for Complex Texts
Building a Text Staircase
Next Steps: Continued Conversation
CHAPTER 4: Preparing Texts for Daily Instruction
Clustering Texts for Daily Instruction
Presenting Texts in Daily Instruction
Next Steps: Modifying Mindset
CHAPTER 5: Collaborating—Reading to Teach
Planning a Walkthrough
Making Sense of the Walkthrough
Next Steps: Planning for Teaching
CHAPTER 6: Creating Rigorous Tasks
Rigorous Learning Through Rigorous Task Design
A Better Unit of Measure
Next Steps: Planning for Instruction
CHAPTER 7: Teaching Close Reading
The Everyday Work of Reading Closely
Next Steps: Prioritizing Enactment
CHAPTER 8: Setting the Standard for High-Quality Talk
Developing a Framework for Effective Student-to-Student Collaboration
Getting Started With Discussion as Instruction
Next Steps: Listening as a Kind of Teaching
CHAPTER 9: Moving Collaboration to the Core
Inquiry as Implementation: The Inquiry Cycle
Next Steps: Leading Learning
About the Author
Brad Cawn specializes in helping schools and teachers integrate and fully realize the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy across the content areas through rigorous inquiry-based instruction centered on the investigation of disciplinary texts. At the core of this support is an emphasis on the work of teaching: professional development that focuses on the design, enactment, and study of instructional practice in school.
Brad serves as an instructor at University of Michigan, where he teaches undergraduate literacy methods coursework in English, social studies, and other content areas; he also teaches graduate coursework in literacy and literacy leadership at Roosevelt University. During 2015 and 2016, he is serving as national director of research on a Gates Foundation–funded project to study exemplary instructional leadership with the Common Core. He has supported some of the largest school districts in the United States, including Los Angeles Unified School District and Chicago Public Schools, and has served as a consultant for numerous U.S. organizations, including the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the Leadership and Learning Center, and the Center for Educational Leadership.
Brad is working on future publications in the area of enhancing academic rigor and the teaching of teaching. He is a pursuing a doctoral degree at University of Michigan, where his research interests include pedagogy of teacher education and the teaching and learning of inquiry-based instruction.
To learn more about Brad’s work, visit www.learning-centered.com. Brad also keeps a blog on curriculum instruction, professional development, and teacher education concerns at www.learning-centered.com/blog.
To book Brad Cawn for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
THE NEW STANDARD
The relationship between standards and instruction can often be paper-thin—literally. We’ve all been there—drawing up a unit or lesson and then dropping the standards on top right before hitting the print button. As high school teachers, we know our students and our content—instruction is surely aligned to standards. But does our instruction address the standards? It’s not always clear.
Teaching that is up to standard is different. It starts with standards–aligned instructional goals paired to high-quality texts and content. It is learning centered, prioritizing the literacy skills and conceptual knowledge needed for students to be proficient and independent thinkers, readers, and writers in the content area you teach. It is dialogic and inquiry oriented. Student work that is up to standard is different, too: it is complex, knowledgeable, and divergent and creative, to use just a few of the descriptors from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS); it does not fit into a template. This is rigor.
And that, more than anything else in the age of the Common Core, is the major shift in both the intention and enactment of teacher practice: teaching, not just text, got complex. There is no program or textbook that provides an easy solution for the challenge of standards; there is no group of instructional strategies—new or otherwise—to readily define what it means to “do” the Common Core or other next-generation standards. The standards, it goes without saying, can’t teach themselves.
But wait until you see what’s possible with next-generation standards.
