the Common Core. If you are not using the CCSS, you can also review your own standards with the following key ideas in mind.
Key Idea 1: Defining Daily Instruction
The first thing to locate in your standards and organize curriculum around are the articulations that address literacy every day in your classroom. In the Common Core, these are Reading standard ten, the text-complexity standard, and Reading standard one, the evidence standard; responding in writing using evidence, Writing standard nine, supports this reading work. Reading anchor standard one invokes both process (“read closely”) and product (“determine what the text says”); it identifies both explicit and inferential comprehension as the result of reading, and text evidence as the means by which students demonstrate such comprehension. It also calls for students to have repeated opportunities to read closely to “support conclusions drawn from the text.” The kinds of conclusions they draw are encompassed in Reading standards two through nine, which detail the particular kinds of analysis and evaluation students must do to understand complex texts. Picture, if you will, a ladder: the sides of the ladder are Reading anchor standard one and Reading anchor standard ten, which set the foundation that coursework is based on engaging complex texts, and that students do so by using evidence from these texts to demonstrate their comprehension. These sides support the rungs, anchor standards two through nine, which address certain kinds of evidence and uses of evidence in order to demonstrate more sophisticated levels of understanding (NGA & CCSSO, 2010).
The use of the word analysis in the grades 9–10 and 11–12 standards of Reading standard one illustrates this ladder relationship: it means students are to regularly engage in identifying evidence, understanding the meaning of that evidence, and using that evidence to explain accounts, processes, concepts, and so on. From this foundation, teachers can then focus on the standards at the highest cognitive level of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (2002):
о Analyzing and strategic thinking (CCRA.R.2–6, CCRA.W.2)
о Evaluating (CCRA.R.8, CCRA.W.1)
о Synthesizing or extended thinking (CCRA.R.7, 9; CCRA.W.7–8)
What are the implications of this structure for instruction? Look to the title of this book, Texts, Tasks, and Talk, to help build your instructional ladder. Start with the text—grade-appropriate complexity in language and content, with the goal of helping students read proficiently and independently (CCRA.R.10). Concurrently, align tasks to help students ascertain and analyze the specific features of the text (CCRA.R.2–9) to literally and inferentially comprehend; finally, use deliberate talk to help students articulate this comprehension in discussion (CCRA.SL.1) and writing (CCRA.W.9).
Key Idea 2: Reading Closely Versus Close Reading
The chatter surrounding close reading—the intensive multiday study of the language and meaning of a single text—would suggest it is the de facto method of implementing the Common Core. But neither the term nor the lesson concept is anywhere in the standards themselves. What the Common Core does say, although a bit simplistically, is useful: high school students should “read closely” (CCRA.R.1) and, as stated in the introduction to the CCSS, “comprehend as well as critique”—that is, they should be reading to literally, inferentially, and critically understand the text itself (NGA & CCSSO, 2010).
Reading closely, then, means students are constantly being taught how to engage rich content and then use these methods and the texts to solve content-area problems; it means that multiple ways of integrating, understanding, and applying texts are needed to meet the standards, including but not limited to close reading. In fact, all of the things expected in a close reading—the focus and intensity of looking closely at a text, applying the passage, discussing the content among peers—becomes the essential work of the classroom, not a separate or obligatory task. Learning to read complex content-area texts is the mechanism for, not the supplement to, developing disciplinary literacy. In other words, literally every day has to be a close reading day.
Key Idea 3: Prioritizing Critical Reading
While next-generation assessments such as the PARCC and SBAC place significantly greater emphasis on the most cognitively demanding learning standards than did previous state assessments (Herman & Linn, 2014), teachers I observed while researching for this book often told me they were challenged in finding time to effectively address the intertextual analysis (CCRA.R.7, 9), argument evaluation (CCRA.R.8), and research inquiry (CCRA.W.7–8) work so prominent on the new assessments.
So, why not start with the most rigorous anchor standards? In the Common Core, these are the Reading anchor standards under the domain Integration of Knowledge and Ideas and the Writing anchor standards under the domain Research to Build and Present Knowledge. To integrate is synonymous with to synthesize, and, indeed, in two of these three anchor standards for each strand, students are expected to derive new understanding by comparing multiple treatments of a topic or text. The verb evaluate, the most cognitively demanding work in the original Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy, appears in two out of the three of these anchor standards in the Integration of Knowledge and Ideas domain. This is true across text type (Literary and Informational) and subject area (ELA, social studies, and science and technical subjects). These standards emphasize formation of “coherent understanding” of essential disciplinary concepts (RH.11–12.9, RST.11–12.9) and “address a question or solve a problem” (RI.11–12.7, RST.11–12.7, RH.11–12.7; NGA & CCSSO, 2010). To do so, students in all high school grades and in all content areas need to make sense of “various accounts of a subject” (RI.9–10.7) or “multiple sources of information” (RI.11–12.7, RH.11–12.7, RST.11–12.7). Nearly every standard for grades 9–10 and 11–12 in this strand asks that students engage in multiple cognitive demands to demonstrate proficiency. The same is also true of Speaking and Listening anchor standards two and three, which involve texts as well (albeit multimodal ones or with the original intention of being seen or heard rather than read).
Traditionally, a teacher might position such learning objectives as the culmination of comprehension work; however, it’s best to think of them as a foundation or template for your task design, underlying all the work you do in your classroom. To start, your instructional activities should either “address a question or solve a problem” (RI.11–12.7, RH.11–12.7, RST.11–12.7); evaluate the claims, evidence, and reasoning of texts (CCRA.R.8); or compare and synthesize multiple texts as a means of deepening understanding of the key concepts and skills of the content area (R.9; NGA & CCSSO, 2010). Starting with one of these processes not only makes critical thinking primary but also centers the work of your classroom on learning how to read in critical and complex ways, moving away from teaching generic comprehension strategies (such as summarizing) and toward helping students navigate the specific complexities of content-area problems and texts.
Key Idea 4: Prioritizing Writing
Most guidance on teaching writing defaults to organizing instruction by genre, as the Common Core and other next-generation standards are themselves organized. The results are unit plans and curriculum maps in which genres are taught in isolation, as if argumentation, for example, is only to be used in October and April, expository writing in November, narrative in September, and so on. This is an arbitrary and counterintuitive organizing principle, most especially because the common forms of high school writing—the literary analysis essay, the lab report, the document-based question (DBQ)—incorporate both expository and argumentative components. Furthermore, in college and career, students will be asked to solve tasks authentic to the discipline or professional context in which they are situated, not based on genre. Writing standards one through three, which dictate students should compose responses in the three core academic genres (argumentative, expository, and narrative), provide useful guidance on the features and structure of students’ written responses, but they do little to clarify the thinking and tasks necessary to produce that writing.
