The TCRWP and the Common Core
The Project has now led a dozen conference days and workshops designed to help thousands of teachers, principals and superintendents analyze the Common Core Standards, understand the ways they build upon and extend best practices in reading/writing workshops, and begin designing curriculum so as to bring students to these challenging levels.
The TCRWP will soon release information on a sequence of more conference days on this topic, led by Calkins, Ehrenworth and other TCRWP staff. This document will only contain a few of the most important highlights.
The TCRWP strongly urges school leaders to take the Common Core Standards extremely seriously, using them to validate the best practices of reading-writing workshops and to engine reforms that will strengthen instruction. The TCRWP celebrates the standards for reasons such as these:
Contrast these with the previous ‘law of the land’—The National Reading Panel and NCLB—where the emphasis was on decoding, and very basic skills, with comprehension receiving short shrift, and writing being neglected entirely. The Common Core, in contrast, places an equal emphasis on reading and on writing, and spotlights higher-level comprehension skills including synthesis, interpretation, and critical reading.
The Common Core will rightly remind the world that all teachers—including science and social teachers—must support literacy, and will nudge schools to extend best-literacy practices from the language arts classroom across the entire curriculum. This is long over-due.
The Common Core wisely emphasizes the need for readers to progress up a stairway of increasingly difficulty texts. Granted, some might interpret the CCS as suggesting that a reader benefits from being channeled into a steady diet of reading texts that student cannot read with accuracy, fluency and comprehension—and there are mountains of research suggesting such a decision would not, in fact, support that reader’s progress up the stairway of text complexity. However, a well-informed teacher and school system will instead read the CCS as a rallying cry to be sure every reader has the extensive time reading just-right texts that he or see needs in order to progress towards more challenging texts.
These standards are structured in such a way that a teacher can understand the learning pathways along which a learner progresses. A teacher can look ahead to understand the big goal that fuels and enlarges any grade-specific goal, and to see what the real work of that goal involves, allowing the teacher to teach towards goals that have heft and significance. The teacher can also look towards earlier grade-level iterations of a specific goal, understanding the pathway that learners might take to enable him or her to do what the CCS hope will eventually be grade-appropriate work. This allows a teacher to study what his or her students can do, and to adapt his or her teaching so that the teacher meets students where they are and takes them as far as possible along a learning pathway. The CCS thus support differentiated and adaptive instruction.
The CCS are written in such a fashion that they can encourage teachers across a grade level to align their individual units of study, and to provide students with a spiral curriculum that revisits essential skills at increasingly challenging levels.
Like others, TCRWP leaders have analyzed the CCS to see ways in which our curriculum is already aligned to them, and to identify new frontiers that we intend to pursue in the upcoming year. This is a summary of our thoughts:
We welcome the nudge to do more work with content area literacy. Many staff members at the TCRWP and some schools have already pioneered this work, but the organization as a whole will be joining with our affiliated schools to give deep attention to content area literacy. We anticipate this will mean helping teachers develop some ‘writing-intensive’ units in the content areas (much as college students are required to take some writing intensive courses). In those courses, students will progress through the stages of developing, writing and revising nonfiction books or opinion writing (including essays). In other content-area units of study, the emphasis will be on fast-writing, including quick versions of the work students will learn to do with rigor in the writing intensive units, and also many forms of writing-to-learn. We imagine students will maintain learning notebooks for the writing-across-the-curriculum they will do, and instead of rushing from one science experiment to another, one film or lecture or reading to another, there will be more occasions for reflective, analytical thinking and writing, during which students will have five minutes to write about the ways the film or experiment changed their thinking, or the new questions they have now generated.
We heartily agree that it is critical to help students progress up a stairway of text complexity, and think most of the CCS’s suggested levels are roughly on-target. The TCRWP had already determined that some of our suggested benchmark levels need to be revised upwards by a notch, and the CCS supported that decision. The TCRWP’s new benchmark levels will be released by Labor Day. We understand why the authors of the CCS needed to choose lexile as the measuring device for text complexity—after all, they needed a tool that measured college text books and income tax forms as well as the books kindergarten students read. We also agree with the authors of the CCS that the lexile-levels, alone, are often problematic because they do not take meaning into account, and therefore will end up suggesting that The Grapes of Wrath (and A Wrinkle in Time) is a second grade level text! Teachers of K-7 students are lucky to be able to rely on Fountas and Pinnel’s text levels—these do attend not only to sentence length and complexity but also to levels of meaning. Essentially, we agree with the authors of the CCS that determining a text’s level of complexity is not a precise science, but that we are wise to work towards understanding this source of reading challenge and towards helping readers become progressively better able to read more challenging texts. Under no circumstance do we advise channeling a student to read a text that he or she cannot read with 96 (okay 95, 94) % accuracy, comprehension and fluency. It is not holding harder books that is good for kids—it’s reading them!
We are heartened by the CCS’s emphasis on three major kinds-of-writing: narrative, informational and opinion, and by the specific learning pathways and exemplar text provided to illustrate what students should be able to do within those genre. This aspect of the CCS is in perfect alignment with the TCRWP’s work, and the samples of writing feel well within reach for most TCRWP schools (although always, getting every child to challenging levels is not easy work!). This does not mean that we do not see new challenges embedded in some of the detail of the CCS’s treatment of writing—we do. Specifically, we expect to support more informational writing in the upper elementary and secondary school grades, as described above, and we expect to bring more of an emphasis on the traditions of logical argument into our already extensive work with opinion writing. We look forward to tapping the wisdom of Deana Kuhn’s work on this front, and expect to help students see a strong relationship between accountable talk and this kind of writing and thinking.
It is important to note the emphasis in the Common Core standards on higher-level comprehension. That same emphasis is embedded in the TCRWP reading units of study, and in the Heinemann publication, Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Grades 3-5. We agree that higher-level comprehension skills cannot be for the gifted older students only, but that even K-2 readers and struggling older readers can read interpretively, looking through the plot of a story to the ideas the story forwards, and thinking across fiction texts to notice ways various texts treat the same theme differently. Although the TCRWP units of study in reading have for a long while emphasized higher level reading skills, in the year ahead, we anticipate doing more to develop tools and methods for holding ourselves accountable for students actually developing these skills. As part of this, we look forward to developing and promoting performance assessments tools for tracking students’ progress towards becoming proficient at synthesis, interpretation, critical reading, and at learning to think between elements and ideas in texts. Then, too, we anticipate continuing to explore ways to embed fast-writes into the reading curriculum. The Common Core place a special emphasis on across-text work. Most TCRWP units of study end with a week of this work; we imagine devoting new attention to students’ abilities to do this comparing and contrasting work.
The Common Core K-5 Standards call for an equal amount of reading and nonfiction. The TCRWP curricular calendar already suggests devoting three of eight units of study to nonfiction reading—which is probably a greater emphasis on nonfiction reading than that which is embedded in the CCS. It is important, however, that the reading workshop is not the only forum in which students read! Obviously, it is important for students to read-to-learn in social studies, science and math classrooms. Although this is not a new message, the Common Core Standards add new clout to this message. In the year ahead, it will be a priority for schools to develop libraries of leveled books aligned to discipline-based units of study. Bibliography of materials will need to be built and open source materials located.
It is worth noting that the emphasis in the informational reading section of standards is on a particular kind of nonfiction reading. Although there surely is a place for students to ask questions, and use appendices and tables of contents to skim and scan texts to find answers to those questions, both the Common Core Standards and the Heinemann Units of Study series emphasize instead the sort of reading that one does in order to take in an entire nonfiction text. This includes understanding the main ideas and the main ways of structuring those ideas, and reading in such a manner that one could teach someone else the essential content of a nonfiction text.
The TCRWP has developed materials that document the alignment between the TCRWP Curricular Calendar and the Common Core Standards, and any interested teacher can access the alignment document. We will soon release video tapes of conference days we’ve led on this important topic.
Posted by Julia Mooney on Fri, 27 Aug 2010
