Texts, Tasks, and Talk. Brad Cawn
Read your standards: Focus on what the standards say students should be doing. That’s all they’re saying: they describe end-of-the year learning outcomes. You may not love them, but what matters is that you understand and align your practice with them. Take, for example, anchor standard four for reading: “Interpret words and phrases as they are used in text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). Undoubtedly, you are building students’ word knowledge in your instruction, but are you offering students opportunities to practice grasping how a key word is developed over the course of a text? That’s what Reading anchor standard four asks of high school students. Get clear on those expectations, and start thinking about alignment: What can I build on? How can I do it better? Make your starting point your teaching.
2. Read your text: Locate a passage from a content-area text that inspired or continues to inspire your love for your content—not a text on teaching your content area, but the actual content, such as a poem, a journal article, or a historical analysis. Don’t think about the content in terms of your students (yet); think of what challenged or challenges you in the content. For example, think about the last page of The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925) if you are an English teacher; the first paragraphs of “The Mysteries of Mass” (Kane, 2005) if you are a science teacher; or an excerpt from the introduction of Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005) if you are a social studies teacher. Read it again; determine what’s important or significant in it. But here’s the kicker: write down exactly what you did—the steps, the processes—to understand it. It needn’t be an elaborate description, a numbered list of steps will do, but capture every action you took, and record it in the order in which you did it.
Both of these activities will help you familiarize yourself with important information. They show you what it might mean to enact the standards. The CCSS were designed to address both content-specific reading concepts (such as sourcing and contextualization in social studies) and more general cross-content literacy skills (such as identifying and using evidence), both of which are necessary to grasp the passage you read in the second activity. You need to teach, support, and assess both. To do so, you must bring to light what it means to “read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently” (CCRA.R.10; NGA & CCSSO, 2010) and articulate how it is done. Once it is clear to you what it takes, you’ll know how to design instruction for all students in your classroom so that they achieve the same level of understanding.
A Final Note
At many points throughout the text, I refer to evidence in and from the CCSS by way of the anchor standard, the cross-grade and cross-disciplinary literacy expectations for ensuring students are college and career ready, which are notated as CCRA, followed by domain (R for Reading, W for Writing, SL for Speaking and Listening, and L for Language) and standard number. Because this book addresses the needs of teachers in multiple subject areas—English, social studies, science, and electives—and across all four grades of high school, use of the anchor standard is merely the general designation that applies to all readers; you should always refer to the corresponding grade-level and content-area standard specific to your teaching assignment to consider how the insight translates into action. Thus, if CCRA.R.2 is discussed, you’ll want to turn to, say, RH.9–10.2 if you are a social studies teacher or RST.9–10.2 if you are a science teacher to consider the implications for your classroom; what, in other words, does it specifically articulate about what your students should be doing in terms identifying, tracking, and summarizing key ideas of a text?
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FIVE ESSENTIALS TO TEACHING WITH NEXT-GENERATION STANDARDS
The Common Core and other next-generation standards are neither the salvation nor the destruction of education. As standards go, the Common Core and other newer standards frameworks are okay. They are better than most previous standards, to be sure; they are not, however, perfect. But standards don’t need to be perfect; they only need to be useful to teacher work—all of the things teachers do to ensure their instruction is up to standard. The Common Core or any other standards framework is, after all, not an initiative; standards are just learning objectives, occasionally vague, and by no means comprehensive. Most importantly, they are nothing without great teaching. The only initiative in the CCSS is what you or others push to do with the standards.
While your literacy standards likely dictate very little about what classroom instruction should look like, they’re organized and articulated in ways that, when read closely, provide a framework for what instruction could be. Grab your standards: let’s get to work! We will begin by exploring five key ideas for teaching with next-generation standards.
1. Defining daily instruction
2. Reading closely versus close reading
3. Prioritizing critical reading
4. Prioritizing writing
5. Integrating language standards into reading and writing
Remember that the guidance in this chapter is built around the Common Core. If you are not using the CCSS, you can also review your own standards with the following key ideas in mind.
Key Idea 1: Defining Daily Instruction
The first thing to locate in your standards and organize curriculum around are the articulations that address literacy every day in your classroom. In the Common Core, these are Reading standard ten, the text-complexity standard, and Reading standard one, the evidence standard; responding in writing using evidence, Writing standard nine, supports this reading work. Reading anchor standard one invokes both process (“read closely”) and product (“determine what the text says”); it identifies both explicit and inferential comprehension as the result of reading, and text evidence as the means by which students demonstrate such comprehension. It also calls for students to have repeated opportunities to read closely to “support conclusions drawn from the text.” The kinds of conclusions they draw are encompassed in Reading standards two through nine, which detail the particular kinds of analysis and evaluation students must do to understand complex texts. Picture, if you will, a ladder: the sides of the ladder are Reading anchor standard one and Reading anchor standard ten, which set the foundation that coursework is based on engaging complex texts, and that students do so by using evidence from these texts to demonstrate their comprehension. These sides support the rungs, anchor standards two through nine, which address certain kinds of evidence and uses of evidence in order to demonstrate more sophisticated levels of understanding (NGA & CCSSO, 2010).
The use of the word analysis in the grades 9–10 and 11–12 standards of Reading standard one illustrates this ladder relationship: it means students are to regularly engage in identifying evidence, understanding the meaning of that evidence, and using that evidence to explain accounts, processes, concepts, and so on. From this foundation, teachers can then focus on the standards at the highest cognitive level of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (2002):
о Analyzing and strategic thinking (CCRA.R.2–6, CCRA.W.2)
о Evaluating (CCRA.R.8, CCRA.W.1)
о Synthesizing or extended thinking (CCRA.R.7, 9; CCRA.W.7–8)
What are the implications of this structure for instruction? Look to the title of this book, Texts, Tasks, and Talk, to help build your instructional ladder. Start with the text—grade-appropriate complexity in language and content, with the goal of helping students read proficiently and independently (CCRA.R.10). Concurrently, align tasks to help students ascertain and analyze the specific features of the text (CCRA.R.2–9) to literally and inferentially comprehend; finally, use deliberate talk to help students articulate this comprehension in discussion (CCRA.SL.1) and writing (CCRA.W.9).
Key Idea 2: Reading Closely Versus Close Reading
The chatter surrounding close reading—the intensive multiday study of the language and meaning of a single text—would suggest