Common Core English Language Arts in a PLC at Work®, Grades 9-12. Nancy Frey
teams to complete different forms for each shift in focus. The reason for this is simple: the team learns to integrate the stages as a habit of interaction when it names each stage each time. It also provides a record that the team can use to review past efforts to improve student achievement. School systems are very good at documenting when things are going wrong and not so good at recording successes. Using a tool like the one in figure 1.2 provides a record of success that team members can review when they need to revisit a successful time in the past.
The remainder of the logistics portion of the form focuses on the team’s discussion, including the development of pacing guides, teaching strategy implementation, and peer advice and coaching. During some of the meetings, the team will develop common assessments or review the results of an assessment. We recommend that teams use the “Item Analysis Summary” portion when they are discussing assessment results, since there are a number of specific decisions to be made in terms of intervention and changes in practice.
Teachers are able to have these types of conversations because they understand the power of PLCs and the conceptual shifts represented in the Common Core State Standards for English language arts. They also know the specific standards for their grade level and how these are developed across grades 9–12. In this chapter, we will discuss these major shifts represented in the CCSS, especially their implications for teaching English language arts. In addition, we will highlight what is not included in the standards.
Source: Adapted from Fisher & Frey, 2007a. Reprinted with permission. Learn more about ASCD at www.ascd.org.
Figure 1.2: Collaborative team meeting record.
Visit go.solution-tree.com/commoncore for a reproducible version of this figure.
The Common Core State Standards
The adoption of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts extends a trend in U.S. education to collaborate across organizations in order to obtain better learning results. Standards-driven policies and practices have yielded notable results, especially in our collective efforts to articulate purposes and learning outcomes to our stakeholders (Gamoran, 2007).
This in turn has led to improved alignment among curriculum, instruction, and assessment. But the years have also exposed weaknesses of this system, many of which are related to the disjointed efforts of individual states trying to put their own standards in motion. No matter how effective the process or product, states simply could not share them with other states, as no standards were held in common. Consequently, states, like Arkansas and Arizona, could not pool human and fiscal resources to develop common materials and assessments.
As standards-based assessments rose to prominence in the 2000s, a mosaic of testing results made it virtually impossible to fairly compare the effectiveness of reform efforts across states. The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers sought to rectify these shortcomings by sponsoring the development of a shared set of standards each state could agree on. Beginning in 2010, state boards of education began adopting these standards in English language arts and mathematics. In 2012, nearly all the states adopted them and began work on determining timelines for implementation, as well as methods for assessment.
In an effort to capitalize on new opportunities for collaboration among states, two assessment consortia are developing standards-based assessments. Both the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) consist of representatives from states working to develop assessments of the standards. Some states belong to both and will eventually determine which instruments they will use. While these efforts are a work in progress, common themes are emerging from both consortia. For one, it is likely that a significant part of the tests will be computer based. In addition, it is anticipated that benchmark assessments will play a prominent role in order for schools to better identify students who are falling behind. Perhaps the biggest shift in these assessments has to do with the ELA standards themselves. (Visit www.parcconline.org or www.smarterbalanced.org for more information.) In the next sections, we will outline five major changes to how we view literacy teaching and learning.
Shift One: Focus on Reading and Writing to Inform, Persuade, and Convey Experiences
The Common Core ELA standards reflect a trend in literacy that has been occurring since the 1990s: a deepening appreciation of the importance of informational and persuasive texts in a student’s reading diet, or the range of reading genre and materials students encounter across the year. (For now, we will focus our discussion on informational texts, with further attention to persuasive texts featured later in the argumentation section of this chapter.) The reasons for increasing informational text usage are often related to the need to improve content knowledge (Johnson, Watson, Delahunty, McSwiggen, & Smith, 2011) and to meet increased demand in digital environments (Schmar-Dobler, 2003).
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), sometimes called “the nation’s report card,” has steadily increased the use of informational text passages on its assessments of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students across the United States. In keeping with this initiative, the CCSS ELA recommend an evenly divided reading diet of literary and informational texts by the fourth grade (see table 1.1), gradually increasing throughout middle and high school. Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean that students in grades 9–12 should no longer be allowed to read narrative text; nothing could be further from the truth. Narrative remains essential as a means of conveying ideas and concepts through story. However, just as a nutritional diet limited to only one or two foods cannot provide sufficient nourishment, neither should we limit the types of texts used (not just stacked on the bookshelves) in the classroom. Furthermore, it is helpful to measure the use of informational texts across the school day, not only in the English classroom, in which teachers use a greater volume of literary texts.
Table 1.1: Grade Distribution of Literary and Informational Passages in the 2009 NAEP Framework
| Grade | Literary Texts | Informational Texts |
| 4 | 50 percent | 50 percent |
| 8 | 45 percent | 55 percent |
| 12 | 30 percent | 70 percent |
Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 5.
Just as the reading diet of learners needs to be expanded, so does their writing repertoire. A key practice is to link the reading of expository texts with the original writing in the same genre, as the link between reading and writing abilities is strong for secondary learners (Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000). However, writing instruction at the secondary level must accurately reflect the forms and processes learners will use in postsecondary experiences. A telling example is the 2004 study of 1,650 Harvard students from their freshman year until graduation. Nancy Sommers and Laura Saltz (2004) find that students had to make profound changes in their approaches to writing. First, they had to shed the notion that writing was about completing an assignment and instead embrace the idea that writing is an essential part of the thinking process. Second, they found that the five-paragraph essay format they had learned in high school had no place in college. Third, they noted that their required readings demanded critical analysis, rather than simple summaries. Sommers and Saltz (2004) note, “One freshman observed: ‘These assignments