to planning curriculum and deciding upon instructional methods you want each grade level teacher to use. The authors of the CCSS shared the “what,” but it’s up to us to understand the “why” and provide the “how.” Second, I would recommend that you view the standards and this companion from the vantage point of your students’ needs and readiness and make adjustments accordingly. For example, there may be times when you should refer to the standards for an earlier grade because your students are more aligned with those skills and behaviors. At other times, you’ll feel the need to advance instruction and look at the grade level ahead of the grade you teach. Both decisions are yours to make. The CCSS are guidelines and a wonderful resource for teachers whether or not your state has formally adopted them. It’s we educators, assigned with the responsibility of making the day-to-day decisions regarding what to teach, who get to plan the teaching and learning experiences that bring any standard to life.
What the Standards Expect of Us
I cannot emphasize enough that the principles of the Common Core document leave it up to us, the practitioners, to design the teaching and learning that will get students to the goals, and so we need to rise to this challenge and not let others define teaching and learning for us. As the document states,
by emphasizing required achievements, the Standards leave room for teachers, curriculum developers, and states to determine how those goals should be reached and what additional topics should be addressed. Thus, the Standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of metacognitive strategies that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning. Teachers are thus free to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identify as most helpful for meeting the goals set out in the Standards. (CCSS, 2010, p. 4)
The standards also uphold and advance the strong research base for how learners learn and progress. Students become better readers when they read. They become better writers when they write. Digging into the CCSS, you find that Reading Standard 10 requires that students read. Writing Standard 10 stipulates that students write for a variety of purposes over an extended time. One of the aspects of the standards I admire most is that they ask us to value authentic texts, purposeful writing, and real conversations around big ideas. Fiction and informational texts written by accomplished writers take center stage.
Five Principles Behind the Teaching Ideas in This Book
Jim Burke, ever wise, cautioned me that the function of Your Literacy Standards Companion is to assist educators in the task of accurately knowing the intention of each standard and developing teaching ideas that will enable students to meet each one. Period. Therefore, I have tried to refrain from interpreting the standards, adapting them, or embedding them in too detailed a set of beliefs and practices, because the standards need to succeed in many different kinds of classroom settings, from ones that use basals and other commercial programs to Montessori settings and everything in between. But, that said, I feel compelled to provide the briefest of contexts for the teaching ideas I share, so you will know where I am coming from. The following recommendations are those that I think stand the best chance of developing K–2 students into strategic, engaged learners.
1 Embrace the reading workshop and writing workshop and its many opportunities to balance and differentiate instruction. Let’s face it, when we teach the whole class we’re teaching to the middle and leaving out the students at the top and bottom thirds of the class. The workshop model allows us to give all students what they need.
2 Let students do more of the heavy lifting. The brain that does the work is the brain that learns. I don’t know who first said, “The brain that does the work is the brain that learns,” but it’s been a mantra of mine for a few years now. We tend to do too much of the work for our students. We’re often inclined to ask leading rather than generative questions, and we frequently provide too little time for students to respond and work things out on their own.
3 Identify one or two practices that can make all the difference in the world and get really good at them. Rather than trying to get good at everything, focus on one or two instructional practices that are likely to bring about the greatest progress for students—practices that push students to “own” their learning.
4 Recognize that your goal is twofold: to help students read, write, think, and converse—and to teach them how to learn. In addition to reading for meaning, writing for real purposes, talking to and learning from one another with ears and eyes wide open, students need to learn how to learn.
5 Hold fast to what you know to be true about teaching and learning, and then follow the trail—instruction that matches your belief. There, I said it again: lean heavily on the standards and the teachings throughout this book, but at the end of the day, it’s you and your students and what helps them meet the expectations of the standards that matter most. To this end, I include a note at the bottom of each planning page that deserves attention here: “The standards guide instruction; they do not dictate it. So as you plan lessons, remember: you aren’t teaching the standards, but instead are teaching students how to read, write, talk, and think through well-crafted lessons that draw from the pedagogy embedded within them. Engaging lessons often have several ELA standards within them and integrate reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language.”
A Brief Orientation to Your Literacy Standards Companion, Grades K–2
When I was asked to write this book, I was relieved to see I could follow Jim Burke’s smart format and design. He envisioned this series as something highly useful to teachers and organized each volume around the following features:
A one-page overview of all the anchor standards. Designed for quick reference or self- assessment, this one-page document offers a one-stop place to see all the English Language Arts Common Core Standards. In addition to using this to quickly check the Common Core anchor standards, grade-level teachers or the whole faculty might use the overview to evaluate which standards they know and are addressing effectively and which ones they need to learn and teach.
Side-by-side anchor standards translation. The Common Core State Standards College and Career Readiness anchor standards for each category—reading, foundational skills, writing, speaking and listening, and language—appear in a two-page spread with the original Common Core anchor standards on the left and, on the right, their matching translations in language that is more accessible to those on the run or new to literacy instruction.
A new user-friendly format for each standard. Instead of the two reading standard domains—literature and informational text—spread throughout as they are in the Common Core State Standards document, here you will find the first reading standard for grades K–2 and the two different domains all on one page. This allows you to use Your Literacy Standards Companion to see at a glance what Reading Standard 1 looks like in grades K–2 across literature and informational texts. The design makes it easy to see how the standard plays out across grade levels, so you can plan with other teachers just how to increase complexity as students move from grade to grade.
Parallel translation/what students do. Each standard opens to a two-page spread that has the original Common Core standards on the left and a parallel translation of each standard mirrored on the right-hand page in more accessible language (referred to as the “Gist”) so you can concentrate on how to teach in ways that meet the standards instead of how to understand them. These Gist pages align themselves with the original Common Core, so you can move between the two without turning a page as you think about what the standards mean and how to teach to meet them. Also, beneath each translation of a standard appears a list of what students consider. These are brief practical questions
