Texts, Tasks, and Talk. Brad Cawn

Brad Cawn specializes in helping schools and teachers integrate and fully realize the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy across the content areas through rigorous inquiry-based instruction centered on the investigation of disciplinary texts. At the core of this support is an emphasis on the work of teaching: professional development that focuses on the design, enactment, and study of instructional practice in school.

Brad serves as an instructor at University of Michigan, where he teaches undergraduate literacy methods coursework in English, social studies, and other content areas; he also teaches graduate coursework in literacy and literacy leadership at Roosevelt University. During 2015 and 2016, he is serving as national director of research on a Gates Foundation–funded project to study exemplary instructional leadership with the Common Core. He has supported some of the largest school districts in the United States, including Los Angeles Unified School District and Chicago Public Schools, and has served as a consultant for numerous U.S. organizations, including the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the Leadership and Learning Center, and the Center for Educational Leadership.

Brad is working on future publications in the area of enhancing academic rigor and the teaching of teaching. He is a pursuing a doctoral degree at University of Michigan, where his research interests include pedagogy of teacher education and the teaching and learning of inquiry-based instruction.

To learn more about Brad’s work, visit www.learning-centered.com. Brad also keeps a blog on curriculum instruction, professional development, and teacher education concerns at www.learning-centered.com/blog.

To book Brad Cawn for professional development, contact [email protected].

Introduction

THE NEW STANDARD

The relationship between standards and instruction can often be paper-thin—literally. We’ve all been there—drawing up a unit or lesson and then dropping the standards on top right before hitting the print button. As high school teachers, we know our students and our content—instruction is surely aligned to standards. But does our instruction address the standards? It’s not always clear.

Teaching that is up to standard is different. It starts with standards–aligned instructional goals paired to high-quality texts and content. It is learning centered, prioritizing the literacy skills and conceptual knowledge needed for students to be proficient and independent thinkers, readers, and writers in the content area you teach. It is dialogic and inquiry oriented. Student work that is up to standard is different, too: it is complex, knowledgeable, and divergent and creative, to use just a few of the descriptors from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS); it does not fit into a template. This is rigor.

And that, more than anything else in the age of the Common Core, is the major shift in both the intention and enactment of teacher practice: teaching, not just text, got complex. There is no program or textbook that provides an easy solution for the challenge of standards; there is no group of instructional strategies—new or otherwise—to readily define what it means to “do” the Common Core or other next-generation standards. The standards, it goes without saying, can’t teach themselves.

But wait until you see what’s possible with next-generation standards.

New Realities, Possible Futures

At the time of this book’s conception, those impacted most by the CCSS—teachers—were hardly on common ground; the ground, in fact, was downright shaky. Surveys reveal a majority of teachers did not like the CCSS (Henderson, Peterson, & West, 2015), were not satisfied with the professional development they had received on implementing them (Education Week Research Center, 2014), and were making few alterations to their teaching to meet new literacy demands (Shanahan & Duffett, 2013). The public and policymakers continue to squabble over the politics of the CCSS. Teachers continue to wonder where the practice of the Common Core lies. Often, very little attention is focused on the standards themselves—what they say and what they mean. Given the lack of meaningful, actionable guidance, it isn’t surprising that there is even less sustained support to actually enact standards-aligned instruction.

For many of us, then, the question continues to linger: what would it mean to leverage next-generation standards in our instruction? Not only should standards inform instruction but instruction should also fully and meaningfully address the standards. We must use what is known about standards to select and synthesize learning objectives. We must also apply strategies of expert practitioners in our fields along with our own knowledge of next-generation assessments (for example, from Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium [SBAC] and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers [PARCC]) to design authentic, high-quality intellectual work for our students. Essentially, it would mean positioning the standards so they clarify not only what to teach but also how to teach it.

For all of the talk of how transformative next-generation standards like the Common Core will be, they are only words on paper until teachers align, apply, and assess expected outcomes in their own practice. Standards matter, of course; but perhaps, more importantly, so, too, do how and why you make them matter. With limited experience teaching with them, and with limited evidence as to what works for teaching to them, shifting practice must focus on learning from practice, not simply on accumulating practices.

So, here it is: another Common Core book. This one, though, is different. It is not a book extolling the wonders of the CCSS. (Here’s a spoiler: they’re good, not great.) It’s also not a strategies book. Instead, this book is about the work of standards-aligned instruction—the design, delivery, and deepening

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