Texts, Tasks, and Talk. Brad Cawn
way to engender proficient readings; in fact, multiple ways of integrating, understanding, and applying texts are needed to meet the standards.
Further details on the new text and teaching demands for each content area follow.
English
The high school English classroom remains the nexus for extensive fiction and literary nonfiction reading. The amount of literature to include and the focus on analyzing texts have not changed. The difference is that the Common Core State Standards are, in several areas, quite specific about what students should read in English coursework. For grades 9–10, they recommend “a wide reading of world literature” and “seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance” (for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”; NGA & CCSSO, 2010). In grades 11–12, they recommend “seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance” (for example, the Constitution), “seminal U.S. texts” involving “application of constitutional principles and use of legal reasoning” (for example, in U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions and dissents), “eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature,” and “at least one play by Shakespeare and one play by an American dramatist” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). The assigning of foundational and seminal nonfiction documents in English is not to remove the responsibility of their teaching from social studies teachers; rather, the idea is for students to analyze and evaluate these works as literature, looking beyond their historical context or importance and at the work itself for, as one standard says, their “themes, purposes, and rhetorical features” (RI.11–12.9; NGA & CCSSO, 2010). This opens up the possibility that students could read the same work in multiple courses, with different purposes for reading in each.
Guidance from PARCC (2012) indicates that students should read at minimum one book-length work per quarter, at least one of which should be nonfiction with the primary purpose to explain or argue. A strong memoir, such as Binyavanga Wainaina’s (2011) One Day I Will Write About This Place, can supplant a work of literary fiction. Students should read Shakespeare, whose works range between 1200L and 1400L and obviously are qualitatively rich in complexity, at least once in both the lower and upper grades of high school. While English teachers will need to devote at least one of their literary or dramatic works and some of their poetry to classic American literature (such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lorraine Hansberry, and T. S. Eliot), the best way to fully address the standards is with contemporary fiction, whose complex accounts and multiple points of view, uncertain resolutions or messages, and intricate characters best reflect the standards. Short story collections from Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies), Daniyal Mueenuddin (In Other Rooms, Other Wonders), and Louise Erdrich (“The Red Convertible”) can serve as anchor texts, or individual selections can be paired with nonfiction works or used as supplements to other literary works. Finally, students need repeated opportunities to read and respond to five-hundred- to one-thousand-word excerpts from high-quality literary nonfiction (particularly theories, critiques, analyses, and so on, in the areas of aesthetics, the humanities, and sociology), not only to access and experience college-level texts but also because the ACT, PARCC, and SBAC assessments all feature passages of this length.
Social Studies
Social studies teachers have no lack of complex texts from which to choose: most of the seminal and foundational documents of American history identified by the Common Core (such as Common Sense and The Federalist Papers) are at the high end—if not beyond—the text-complexity range for high school; many of the most well-known and highly regarded historians (such as Jared Diamond and Henry Louis Gates Jr.) are beyond the complexity as well, though more popular writers of society and culture, such as Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns) and Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City), tend to fall at the lower and middle ends of the range. Given the surfeit of quality texts, it is incumbent on social studies teachers to attend to volume and range, offering students repeated opportunities to view both primary and secondary sources of historical phenomena—speeches, essays, autobiographies, visual media, historical fiction, and so on. As with English, social studies teachers should provide many chances for students to read and respond to five-hundred- to one-thousand-word excerpts from secondary sources that reflect the readings students will see on the PARCC, SBAC, and ACT; these should be tied to—or logically connected with—the focus of study at the time of the reading.
Given these demands, it is essential that social studies teachers have a long-term vision for infusing their curriculum with literacy; this requires a consistent structure for how students engage with complex texts in the classroom. Some suggestions:
о Read a book-length text each semester—For example, you could choose to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Haley, 1965) or a collection of essays, first-hand accounts, and historical analyses of the Civil Rights era. Truly excellent historical fiction, such as Cormac McCarthy’s (1985) Blood Meridian or E. L. Doctorow’s (1975) Ragtime, is also appropriate.
о At least once a quarter, if not during each module or unit, include an anchor text that provides a conceptual or theoretical foundation from which students can analyze and evaluate the historical phenomena they are studying—Examples include Arthur Schlesinger’s (1986) The Cycles of American History, Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, and Jared Diamond’s (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel. Students should first study excerpts from such texts so they understand the core tenets of the argument, and then they should apply the key ideas or arguments of the text to examples from the textbook or other readings.
о For each topic or area of study, develop an inquiry by using a balance of primary, secondary, and textbook sources—For example, a U.S. history course could address westward expansion by looking at primary sources of the era, such as John Gast’s painting American Progress and John O’Sullivan’s (1839) “The Great Nation of Futurity” editorial, and secondary sources from a century later, such as Anders Stephanson’s (1995) Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, and Henry Nash Smith’s (1970) Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth.
The website Reading Like a Historian from the Stanford History Education Group (http://sheg.stanford.edu/rlh) is a valuable resource for social studies teachers when identifying primary sources.
Science
The challenge for science teachers when selecting and integrating complex texts into their curriculum is addressing the literary side of writing in their discipline. With their technical vocabularies and formal tones, the most common texts of the science classroom—textbooks, lab reports, and technical accounts—are often complex because they are, to borrow a word commonly used by science educators, dense with information and technical language rather than because they feature sophisticated arguments, explanations, or uses of language. Teachers need to make a very intentional effort, then, to locate and implement texts that help students analyze, synthesize, and evaluate (per the standards), and not just comprehend; they’ll also need to think critically about how to pair doing science with reading science, as the CCSS do not separate the two.
The following four shifts in science instruction tied to the Common Core standards will help science teachers integrate appropriate texts.
1. Read and review texts during laboratory exercises: At least three of the Reading standards for science (RST.9–10.3, RST.9–10.6, and RST.8) specifically address conducting or evaluating procedures and experiments in response to what is written in a text. Others (CCRA.R.7, CCRA.R.9) discuss integrating multiple sources of data, from texts and experiments, into solving problems (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). But simply reviewing a list of steps is not enough—the expectation is that students will read on-level material when engaging in the doing of science, so students will need exposure to the foundational logic of the experiment or question under investigation, such as via the original study (for example, Gregor Mendel’s [1865] “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” for an introductory focus on genetics) or the methods section of a scholarly article. Such pieces are also good for addressing vocabulary standards.