a year in your class; the responsibility to articulate what that knowing and doing means in September, October, and so on is your own. This progression requires a map of how students might learn the essential skills and knowledge of the standards, a kind of hyper-focused scope and sequence map that could support teaching points and serve as a rubric for students to monitor their progress toward proficiency toward the standards.
Table 1.1 provides a visual representation of such a progression for analyzing and assessing arguments (CCRA.R.8; one of the key critical-thinking benchmarks in the Common Core) and evaluating point of view and reasoning using evidence (CCRA. SL.2; an objective that cuts across all content areas). The example models the grades 9–10 band. Here, the explicit language of the standards serves as the fourth-quarter benchmark. Specifics about the texts analyzed (CCRA.R.10) and the kinds of performances students will complete to demonstrate proficiency (CCRA.W. 10, CCRA. SL.4) clarify what it means to succeed independently over time. Teachers deconstruct the standards into individual skills and then backmap these skills across the year so that students continually engage with the standards in ways that increase the quality and complexity of the work in step with their development. At the same time, however, teachers also map out developmentally appropriate performance opportunities with the whole standard to ensure practice opportunities remain complex. Teachers sequence texts, too, so that Lexile complexity, a quantitative measure of the difficulty of the text’s language and syntax, increases over the course of the year (1080L–1305L) and that students are exposed to increasingly complex kinds of texts. Differentiation can occur in both skill and text, depending on student readiness.
Table 1.1: Sample Learning Progression for Analyzing and Assessing Arguments, Grades 9–10 (RI.9–10.8, SL.9–10.3)
Visit go.solution-tree.com/commoncore for a reproducible version of this table.
Because the literacy standards are organized and articulated similarly across the content areas, a progression like the one in table 1.1 can be leveraged by the entire school with minor adaptions—such as changing the text types—to ensure students are getting consistent practice in these skills and performances in all of their coursework. By honing in on specific skill clusters that address multiple standards, teachers remove the need to obsessively unpack or sequence individual standards; rather, by focusing on the most complex and worthy learning skills across the standards—such as argumentative writing—you identify the teaching points that could enhance student learning in all aspects of their literacy.
Next Steps: Creating Learning Progressions
For a learning progression to be useful to instruction, the process of creating it needs to be instructive. For that to occur, three elements are necessary: (1) all educators enacting the learning must be involved, (2) there must be time to fully develop the progressions and then monitor and revise during and after implementation, and (3) there must be a process that leverages the key tools for teaching—the standards, student work, and the texts—for making strategic decisions. Such a process ensures everyone understands the expectations for students and also builds buy-in for actually enacting practice that supports students in achieving the expectations. What’s described in the following six steps is a continual process.
Determine Priorities
Using the guidance provided earlier in the chapter, home in on the critical areas students need to master in order to be college and career ready: for example, analyzing ideas and language in texts, synthesizing evidence from multiple sources in order to solve problems, reading grade-level texts independently, and so on. Identify the literacy standards that address this skill area and place these in the Q4 column of your progression—these represent the priorities for the year. (Visit go.solution-tree/commoncore for a blank reproducible version of table 1.1.)
Identify Outcomes
Determine the key cumulative behaviors and performances of the skill cluster by articulating what the summative proficiency of this skill should be—for example, an eight- to ten-page research report or engagement with an independent reading text at the high end of the grades 9–10 band for twenty or more minutes. There may be multiple ways of assessment for each cluster. Place these outcomes in the potential work products row.
Note that while Q4 performances are likely to involve formal essays or other longer or larger tasks, that doesn’t mean similar kinds of performances can’t be assigned in previous quarters. For example, students might still write an argumentative essay during the first semester or throughout the year; the difference would be that the demands and expectations for their performance—for example, the number and complexity of texts to be used, the writing components expected, and so on—would be less.
Define Ambiguous Language
The language in some of the standards is not likely to be practice ready; in other words, it may not be clear what engaging in the behavior or performance looks like in practice, for either your instruction or the student’s work. Writing standard one for grades 9–10, for example, has a number of elements in which the descriptors, while generally comprehensible, give us little information about what it would mean to teach these skills. To determine what instruction should look like, first work with your colleagues to identify those words or phrases in the standard that need further clarity (see bolded language in figure 1.1).
Note: The elements that are not practice ready are in bold.
Source for standards: NGA & CCSSO, 2010.
Figure 1.1: Example of non-practice-ready language in the Common Core.
Teacher teams should have a lot of questions about language from this standard: What is a precise claim exactly? What does it mean to create cohesion? How do the standard’s requirements compare to the writing students normally produce? What would be needed for all students to be able to achieve proficiency in these skills over time? The answers to these questions go a long way toward recognizing student needs while learning to write and what that learning might look like over time.
Once the potentially confusing language has been identified, the teams come to consensus on the specifics of what proficient student work would look like in this particular area. For example, a precise claim is a claim directly addressing a specific literary element and its effects, rather than a list thesis indicating several literary elements. When it’s clear what it would mean to perform up to standard in this area, consider the following.
о How does this performance goal compare to that of a typical performance of your students?
о What would it mean to learn and practice this skill over time?
о How might this skill or performance be articulated or taught to students?
Agree on Interim Benchmarks and Expectations
Start with Q1, think about what your students know and can do: what is their starting point, and what, as a result, is yours? Articulate what you think are the essentials of learning in this skill area during the first forty to fifty days of school; write these in
