own clearly and expressively”—makes it clear that collaboration and conversation are critical to comprehension (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices [NGA] & Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], 2010). This is deliberate talk—it is not student centered for the sake of being more engaging; it is an intentional scaffold to support challenging analytical reading and writing tasks. Student-to-student conversation that is up to standard attends to students’ understanding, encourages development of arguments, and seeks to help students build consensus around complex ideas. In other words, it supports collective problem solving with the kind of rich intellectual tasks that should be at the center of content-area teaching.
Collaboration
More than a half decade after the launch of the CCSS, some may argue that there are still no Common Core experts. But expertise, as it has traditionally been defined when a new educational movement arises, is overrated. The kind of expertise needed this time is from within, not from the outside—the kind that derives from actual work with these standards and with your students. It is practice, not expert, based. And it is shared. The real work is not in your standards themselves, nor in programs or materials connected to them, but in people and the common ground they share to respond to the challenges and realize the opportunities these reforms create. Teachers, in other words, make the difference.
So the best and most critical professional learning on next-generation standards is, in fact, already occurring in your school and in your own classroom—it’s what you can learn from your own teaching and your students’ learning. Such a practice-based approach puts what you do at the center of what you learn—your experiences as the means for developing your expertise. That’s a powerful idea—teacher growth led by classroom practice and by classroom practitioners. The content and focus come out of practice and go back into practice. This reciprocal relationship, with wisdom gleaned from practice then informing the sustained use of wise practices, should be the foundation, the core, of all teacher learning. Chapters 5 and 9 detail mechanisms for building such foundations by illustrating how you and your faculty or colleagues can work together to select and prepare texts for instruction (chapter 5) and study your enactment, including the resulting student learning, of those texts (chapter 9).
Next Steps: Enacting the Standards
Before diving into this book, complete the following two exercises to prime you for the teaching and learning to come.
1. Read your standards: Focus on what the standards say students should be doing. That’s all they’re saying: they describe end-of-the year learning outcomes. You may not love them, but what matters is that you understand and align your practice with them. Take, for example, anchor standard four for reading: “Interpret words and phrases as they are used in text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). Undoubtedly, you are building students’ word knowledge in your instruction, but are you offering students opportunities to practice grasping how a key word is developed over the course of a text? That’s what Reading anchor standard four asks of high school students. Get clear on those expectations, and start thinking about alignment: What can I build on? How can I do it better? Make your starting point your teaching.
2. Read your text: Locate a passage from a content-area text that inspired or continues to inspire your love for your content—not a text on teaching your content area, but the actual content, such as a poem, a journal article, or a historical analysis. Don’t think about the content in terms of your students (yet); think of what challenged or challenges you in the content. For example, think about the last page of The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925) if you are an English teacher; the first paragraphs of “The Mysteries of Mass” (Kane, 2005) if you are a science teacher; or an excerpt from the introduction of Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005) if you are a social studies teacher. Read it again; determine what’s important or significant in it. But here’s the kicker: write down exactly what you did—the steps, the processes—to understand it. It needn’t be an elaborate description, a numbered list of steps will do, but capture every action you took, and record it in the order in which you did it.
Both of these activities will help you familiarize yourself with important information. They show you what it might mean to enact the standards. The CCSS were designed to address both content-specific reading concepts (such as sourcing and contextualization in social studies) and more general cross-content literacy skills (such as identifying and using evidence), both of which are necessary to grasp the passage you read in the second activity. You need to teach, support, and assess both. To do so, you must bring to light what it means to “read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently” (CCRA.R.10; NGA & CCSSO, 2010) and articulate how it is done. Once it is clear to you what it takes, you’ll know how to design instruction for all students in your classroom so that they achieve the same level of understanding.
A Final Note
At many points throughout the text, I refer to evidence in and from the CCSS by way of the anchor standard, the cross-grade and cross-disciplinary literacy expectations for ensuring students are college and career ready, which are notated as CCRA, followed by domain (R for Reading, W for Writing, SL for Speaking and Listening, and L for Language) and standard number. Because this book addresses the needs of teachers in multiple subject areas—English, social studies, science, and electives—and across all four grades of high school, use of the anchor standard is merely the general designation that applies to all readers; you should always refer to the corresponding grade-level and content-area standard specific to your teaching assignment to consider how the insight translates into action. Thus, if CCRA.R.2 is discussed, you’ll want to turn to, say, RH.9–10.2 if you are a social studies teacher or RST.9–10.2 if you are a science teacher to consider the implications for your classroom; what, in other words, does it specifically articulate about what your students should be doing in terms identifying, tracking, and summarizing key ideas of a text?
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FIVE ESSENTIALS TO TEACHING WITH NEXT-GENERATION STANDARDS
The Common Core and other next-generation standards are neither the salvation nor the destruction of education. As standards go, the Common Core and other newer standards frameworks are okay. They are better than most previous standards, to be sure; they are not, however, perfect. But standards don’t need to be perfect; they only need to be useful to teacher work—all of the things teachers do to ensure their instruction is up to standard. The Common Core or any other standards framework is, after all, not an initiative; standards are just learning objectives, occasionally vague, and by no means comprehensive. Most importantly, they are nothing without great teaching. The only initiative in the CCSS is what you or others push to do with the standards.
While your literacy standards likely dictate very little about what classroom instruction should look like, they’re organized and articulated in ways that, when read closely, provide a framework for what instruction could be. Grab your standards: let’s get to work! We will begin by exploring five key ideas for teaching with next-generation standards.
1. Defining daily instruction
2. Reading closely versus close reading
3. Prioritizing critical reading
4. Prioritizing writing
5. Integrating language standards into reading and writing
Remember
