href="#ulink_dd0dadd4-9e61-53eb-93ab-9d702bd29726">table 1.1 (pages 17–18). To complete the remaining sections of the chart, discuss what you want to teach students thereafter and what you would expect them to be able to do, incrementally, as the school year progresses. As you come to consensus on what it means to demonstrate a partial, developmental, and with-support understanding in the skill area over time, reflect on four considerations: (1) what components students would likely know or be able to do and to what extent, (2) the level of cognitive rigor at which students could complete these components, (3) the kinds of performances or products expected for this level of understanding, and (4) whether students could produce these performances or products independently or with support. Use your answers to compose initial benchmarks for columns Q2 through Q3.
Triangulate With Student Work
Scan portfolios or other collections of student writing over time to determine students’ existing competency or likely competency in the skill areas. What do students, on average, seem to know and what are they able to do in this area? Where do they need additional or different kinds of support? Compare your findings to your initial learning progression and adjust the progression to align with anticipated student needs.
Develop an Initial Plan for Assessments, Texts, and Teaching Points
Use the quarterly benchmarks you articulated to conduct initial brainstorming or decision making about what interim assessments in each quarter might look like, which texts are likely to be at the appropriate level of complexity given the point of year and the task, and what skills you’ll need to teach to students. Continue to modify and expand these components over time.
While progressions are a useful planning tool prior to or at the outset of the school year, you can also develop them during the year in response to student progress. Because many of the skills and concepts to be taught in your selected skill clusters may not have been articulated fully in your team’s previous work, your initial progression is not likely to be fully clear or coherent; it gains clarity as you teach and assess student learning, using the experience of trying out the elements of the progression to revise and improve the working document. As the document becomes more refined and focused, it can serve as a kind of standards-based reporting tool of student progress, enabling you to monitor and differentiate supports based on students’ progress toward proficiency in the selected standards.
2
SHIFTING TO COMPLEX TEXTS
Text complexity, as the next three chapters make clear, has upped teaching complexity. For students to read and understand grade-appropriate complex texts independently and proficiently, high school teachers must be more intentional about selecting what students read, more conscious of when they expose students to certain texts, and simply better at how they help support students’ understanding of these texts. Without a shift in teaching commensurate with the new demands for text complexity, it is unlikely that students will be college and career ready in accordance with the new criteria (Williamson, Fitzgerald, & Stenner, 2014). Texts and teaching, in other words, must both be up to standard in order to foster learning capable of meeting these new demands.
The fundamental difference between next-generation standards like the Common Core and previous iterations of state learning benchmarks is the expectation for what and how students read; it is now an actual standard, and students will be tested on it. That standard, Reading anchor standard ten, is the critical outcome of your work during a given year: it represents students’ ability to comprehend—“independently and proficiently”—appropriately rigorous texts with the appropriate intellectual rigor. This is at the core of the work, no matter the content area, but it is also a benchmark for daily instruction. What texts you select and how you support students in meeting the demands of the content are what many of the grade-level articulations of Common Core Reading standard ten defines as the “scaffolding as needed” to enable all students to engage in and do work that is up to standard (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). This is complex work, but the two principles underlying text complexity are themselves quite simple.
1. What you ask students to read must, as often as possible, be at or above what is deemed appropriate for their grade level.
2. Such texts should contain ideas and language that, beyond simply being grade appropriate, both challenge the reader and contribute to his or her intellectual growth.
Good texts are rich in language, enabling students to practice with texts in the respective grade-level text-complexity band. They are also rich in ideas, enabling students to practice learning and applying the knowledge and skills of other reading standards in your framework. By design, such texts push the limits of students’ existing comprehension and fluency skills. They require meaningful instruction and learning opportunities for comprehension. They are, then, very deliberate teaching tools, not only for their content but also for the way they may support students’ abilities to understand that content.
The Complex Text in High School
What does it mean for a text to be rigorous high school reading? Lexile scores, the measure of a text’s sophistication in terms of its vocabulary and sentence structure, give us a starting point to determine rigor: students should enter high school ready to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s (1963) “I Have a Dream” speech (roughly scored at 1070L) and exit at the end of twelfth grade capable of independently reading passages of philosophy, theory, and criticism, such as that of Stephen Jay Gould (science), Jared Diamond (social sciences), and Leslie Fiedler (English), all of which typically score above 1300L. If such a progression appears daunting, consider how dangerous the status quo has been: the typical college-bound senior leaves high school having engaged entirely or predominantly in texts 150–200 Lexile points below the range of readings they are likely to experience in college coursework; that’s the equivalent of one to two years of reading exposure they have not experienced! (See the CCSS appendix A [NGA & CCSSO, n.d.a] for a description of how and why that gap came to be.) A critical aim of next-generation standards is to narrow this gap, hence the recommendations to not only increase the level of text complexity in each grade or grade band but also to establish a range so that students experience a coherent progression of complexity across grades. Figure 2.1 displays the text-complexity ranges for all grade bands both before (light gray) and after calibration (black) with the Common Core.
Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, n.d.a.
Figure 2.1: Comparison of old and Common Core–aligned Lexile ranges.
To put it in the most basic terms: high school students need to increase their reading capacity by some 200 Lexile points between grades 9 and 12, and a full 130 Lexile points more than previously expected. In fact, the difference between the old and new expectations for grades 9–10 reading is almost 200 points alone–the low end of the old range is now the high end of fifth grade (Williamson et al., 2014).
Of course, numbers alone only provide a target or a range; they are not sufficient for determining what should be taught. Considered solely for quantitative text complexity, Ralph Ellison’s (1952) mid-20th-century masterpiece Invisible Man would be classified as a seventh-grade text and the works of Toni Morrison could be taught every year of middle school. What makes high school and college-level texts so complex is in the reading required to understand them, what Jeanne Chall (1983) speaks of as reading for multiple viewpoints and to construct a worldview; what William Perry (1999) calls multiplicity; and what Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Goldberger Tarule (1997) refer to as constructed knowledge. Such readings involve multiple levels of meaning,
