Texts, Tasks, and Talk. Brad Cawn
the phrase up to standard throughout this book, and with good reason; it signals that what both teachers and students do—the texts, tasks, and talk—must be worthy of the cognitive rigor of the standards. The measure for change is not magic; it’s simply the act of coming to a deep understanding of what students are expected to know and do (your standards), coupled with a deep understanding about what you know as a teacher and what you do as a leader and content expert.
Some may think the Common Core standards are flawed, that they are unclear, questionable, and insufficient. Still, by doubling down on good teaching and deconstructing and rebuilding the standards to support teacher practice, you will see that they support a vision for teaching that is both possible and full of potential. This is why the Common Core is a framework for much of this book’s discussion—not merely because it has been widely adopted, albeit not always widely loved, but also because the potential for action is so significant. This isn’t a sign that the Common Core should be embraced over and above any other framework, such as state standards or those of an organization. This book embraces teaching with standards. Regardless of the standards you use, teaching with them means you are outcome driven, are aligned to the measures students will be assessed on, and have a clear idea of what it means to be proficient in your field at a particular developmental level. So if you’re in a state or school that has not adopted the Common Core, when discussion is of specific Common Core language, consider the applications it has for enhancing your own instruction—it is the pattern that matters, not the measure being used.
Much of what it means to do the Common Core—a common expression these days—is a change in perception commensurate with changes in practice. The two are deeply intertwined. To teach ambitiously means to think ambitiously about teaching—about content, curriculum, collaboration, and the capacity of your fellow teachers. What follows is a road map of sorts for a stance to take on your journey toward ambitious teaching for learning.
The Core: Teaching for Learning
Ambitious teaching prioritizes the key ideas and problems of a given content area, emphasizes the teaching of critical-thinking skills, and supports all students throughout the learning process (see Lampert & Graziani, 2009; McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013; Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2009). Chapter 1 shows how the standards can be applied to enact this kind of instruction. The chapters that follow describe what it means to teach ambitiously in alignment with next-generation standards.
Texts
Content-area instruction that is up to standard starts with consideration of the ways students engage with texts and tasks. What is read, after all, is what is taught, including the content a text addresses, the skills it requires in order to be understood, and the opportunities it offers for students to exchange ideas with one another. Leveraging the text toward strong student engagement entails two key shifts in teacher planning and practice.
1. Selecting texts that are grade appropriate and content rich, and thus worthy of instructional time
2. Providing the right kind of instructional support for students as they are challenged by academic language, abstract ideas, and rigorous tasks related to these texts
You must pay careful attention to both the opportunities and challenges a text provides, what it means to comprehend the specific text in question (and to texts in general—in other words, the standards), and what supports are necessary to ensure students have a complete understanding of the text (Kucan & Palincsar, 2011). A text’s complexities should guide instructional decision making about how to teach it. Chapters 2–4 focus on texts.
Tasks
The task—what students are actually asked to do with or in response to reading texts—is everything. In combination with the text, it is your opportunity to address and assess multiple standards; it is also the means to craft specific kinds of instructional supports needed to complete the task. Chapter 6 shows how to craft those supports, and chapter 7 looks at the role close reading plays in supporting content-area literacy.
Task construction starts with a meaningful intellectual or interpretive problem—the kind of question or problem that is worth dedicating precious instructional minutes to, requires close reading of multiple texts, and addresses multiple standards. But its most critical component is the way in which instructional time is designed to solve it. This requires you to think deeply about how to train students to read and respond to texts proficiently and independently, develop routines for reading and rereading texts, scaffold through modeling and questioning, and provide meaningful practice and feedback opportunities. This work should not be arbitrarily fitted into four- to six-week-long units; rather, what students are asked to do must dictate the time needed, be it four days or four weeks.
Talk
Finally, we will discuss talk, which chapter 8 explores. In specifying precisely how students should participate with others in reading and understanding texts, the Common Core college- and career-readiness anchor standard [CCR] one for speaking and listening—“Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and expressively”—makes it clear that collaboration and conversation are critical to comprehension (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices [NGA] & Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], 2010). This is deliberate talk—it is not student centered for the sake of being more engaging; it is an intentional scaffold to support challenging analytical reading and writing tasks. Student-to-student conversation that is up to standard attends to students’ understanding, encourages development of arguments, and seeks to help students build consensus around complex ideas. In other words, it supports collective problem solving with the kind of rich intellectual tasks that should be at the center of content-area teaching.
Collaboration
More than a half decade after the launch of the CCSS, some may argue that there are still no Common Core experts. But expertise, as it has traditionally been defined when a new educational movement arises, is overrated. The kind of expertise needed this time is from within, not from the outside—the kind that derives from actual work with these standards and with your students. It is practice, not expert, based. And it is shared. The real work is not in your standards themselves, nor in programs or materials connected to them, but in people and the common ground they share to respond to the challenges and realize the opportunities these reforms create. Teachers, in other words, make the difference.
So the best and most critical professional learning on next-generation standards is, in fact, already occurring in your school and in your own classroom—it’s what you can learn from your own teaching and your students’ learning. Such a practice-based approach puts what you do at the center of what you learn—your experiences as the means for developing your expertise. That’s a powerful idea—teacher growth led by classroom practice and by classroom practitioners. The content and focus come out of practice and go back into practice. This reciprocal relationship, with wisdom gleaned from practice then informing the sustained use of wise practices, should be the foundation, the core, of all teacher learning. Chapters 5 and 9 detail mechanisms for building such foundations by illustrating how you and your faculty or colleagues can work together to select and prepare texts for instruction (chapter 5) and study your enactment, including the resulting student learning, of those texts (chapter 9).
Next Steps: Enacting the Standards
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