Texts, Tasks, and Talk. Brad Cawn
students need to master in order to be college and career ready: for example, analyzing ideas and language in texts, synthesizing evidence from multiple sources in order to solve problems, reading grade-level texts independently, and so on. Identify the literacy standards that address this skill area and place these in the Q4 column of your progression—these represent the priorities for the year. (Visit go.solution-tree/commoncore for a blank reproducible version of table 1.1.)
Identify Outcomes
Determine the key cumulative behaviors and performances of the skill cluster by articulating what the summative proficiency of this skill should be—for example, an eight- to ten-page research report or engagement with an independent reading text at the high end of the grades 9–10 band for twenty or more minutes. There may be multiple ways of assessment for each cluster. Place these outcomes in the potential work products row.
Note that while Q4 performances are likely to involve formal essays or other longer or larger tasks, that doesn’t mean similar kinds of performances can’t be assigned in previous quarters. For example, students might still write an argumentative essay during the first semester or throughout the year; the difference would be that the demands and expectations for their performance—for example, the number and complexity of texts to be used, the writing components expected, and so on—would be less.
Define Ambiguous Language
The language in some of the standards is not likely to be practice ready; in other words, it may not be clear what engaging in the behavior or performance looks like in practice, for either your instruction or the student’s work. Writing standard one for grades 9–10, for example, has a number of elements in which the descriptors, while generally comprehensible, give us little information about what it would mean to teach these skills. To determine what instruction should look like, first work with your colleagues to identify those words or phrases in the standard that need further clarity (see bolded language in figure 1.1).
Note: The elements that are not practice ready are in bold.
Source for standards: NGA & CCSSO, 2010.
Figure 1.1: Example of non-practice-ready language in the Common Core.
Teacher teams should have a lot of questions about language from this standard: What is a precise claim exactly? What does it mean to create cohesion? How do the standard’s requirements compare to the writing students normally produce? What would be needed for all students to be able to achieve proficiency in these skills over time? The answers to these questions go a long way toward recognizing student needs while learning to write and what that learning might look like over time.
Once the potentially confusing language has been identified, the teams come to consensus on the specifics of what proficient student work would look like in this particular area. For example, a precise claim is a claim directly addressing a specific literary element and its effects, rather than a list thesis indicating several literary elements. When it’s clear what it would mean to perform up to standard in this area, consider the following.
о How does this performance goal compare to that of a typical performance of your students?
о What would it mean to learn and practice this skill over time?
о How might this skill or performance be articulated or taught to students?
Agree on Interim Benchmarks and Expectations
Start with Q1, think about what your students know and can do: what is their starting point, and what, as a result, is yours? Articulate what you think are the essentials of learning in this skill area during the first forty to fifty days of school; write these in the Q1 column of table 1.1 (pages 17–18). To complete the remaining sections of the chart, discuss what you want to teach students thereafter and what you would expect them to be able to do, incrementally, as the school year progresses. As you come to consensus on what it means to demonstrate a partial, developmental, and with-support understanding in the skill area over time, reflect on four considerations: (1) what components students would likely know or be able to do and to what extent, (2) the level of cognitive rigor at which students could complete these components, (3) the kinds of performances or products expected for this level of understanding, and (4) whether students could produce these performances or products independently or with support. Use your answers to compose initial benchmarks for columns Q2 through Q3.
Triangulate With Student Work
Scan portfolios or other collections of student writing over time to determine students’ existing competency or likely competency in the skill areas. What do students, on average, seem to know and what are they able to do in this area? Where do they need additional or different kinds of support? Compare your findings to your initial learning progression and adjust the progression to align with anticipated student needs.
Develop an Initial Plan for Assessments, Texts, and Teaching Points
Use the quarterly benchmarks you articulated to conduct initial brainstorming or decision making about what interim assessments in each quarter might look like, which texts are likely to be at the appropriate level of complexity given the point of year and the task, and what skills you’ll need to teach to students. Continue to modify and expand these components over time.
While progressions are a useful planning tool prior to or at the outset of the school year, you can also develop them during the year in response to student progress. Because many of the skills and concepts to be taught in your selected skill clusters may not have been articulated fully in your team’s previous work, your initial progression is not likely to be fully clear or coherent; it gains clarity as you teach and assess student learning, using the experience of trying out the elements of the progression to revise and improve the working document. As the document becomes more refined and focused, it can serve as a kind of standards-based reporting tool of student progress, enabling you to monitor and differentiate supports based on students’ progress toward proficiency in the selected standards.
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SHIFTING TO COMPLEX TEXTS
Text complexity, as the next three chapters make clear, has upped teaching complexity. For students to read and understand grade-appropriate complex texts independently and proficiently, high school teachers must be more intentional about selecting what students read, more conscious of when they expose students to certain texts, and simply better at how they help support students’ understanding of these texts. Without a shift in teaching commensurate with the new demands for text complexity, it is unlikely that students will be college and career ready in accordance with the new criteria (Williamson, Fitzgerald, & Stenner, 2014). Texts and teaching, in other words, must both be up to standard in order to foster learning capable of meeting these new demands.
The fundamental difference between next-generation standards like the Common Core and previous iterations of state learning benchmarks is the expectation for what and how students read; it is now an actual standard, and students will be tested on it. That standard, Reading anchor standard ten, is the critical outcome of your work during a given year: it represents students’ ability to comprehend—“independently and proficiently”—appropriately rigorous texts with the appropriate intellectual rigor. This is at the core of the work, no matter the content area, but it is also a benchmark for daily instruction. What texts you select and how you support students in meeting the demands of the content are what many of the grade-level articulations of Common Core Reading standard ten defines as the “scaffolding as needed” to enable all students to engage in and do work that is up to standard (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). This is complex work, but the two principles underlying text complexity are themselves quite simple.
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