Week 3

Questions to Reflect on for Week 3 (Chapter 6, 7, 8)

• These chapters describe the CCSS’ focus on writing, a big shift from writing’s near nonexistence in the previous NCLB reforms. Schools have often approached writing instruction in a number of ways;for example, some provide about an hour every day for process writing instruction, others turn narrative writing into “creative writing” that only some students take as an elective. How does our school (or different grade levels in our district) currently approach writing instruction? How do these align with or conflict with what may be necessary for students to meet CCSS expectations?

Students take notes from reading, notes from lessons/lectures, lists, notes from small group discussions, brainstorming, brief descriptions of thought processes and problem-solving approaches, free writing, mapping/webbing/first attempts at organizing, developing questions, journal writing, prompt writing, and more.  These are all casual writing that is not easily assessed and typically don't support the standards. Our students need to make writing a habit by doing it even more often. We do teach students to plan, revise, edit and rewrite, however, our students need a planned, sequential, explicit writing program with explicit feedback.. Students will benefit from explicit instruction, practice, feedback, assessment based instruction and spiral curriculum. Well crafted, structured writing is a challenge for my students. I do see CCSS’s progression in writing steps as a plan to improve my students writing and allow them a tool they can apply to any genre

 

• In what ways will we need to rethink time, curriculum, and professional development?

The key to a smooth transition is purposeful, pragmatic professional development for educators. Districts need to help teachers master the new standards and use them to guide instruction.  These standards require a whole new level of collaboration among grade level teachers. The key to this integrated instruction approach are regular meetings where teachers work together to share their understanding of the content and how to teach it so that students can learn the material.  Where to find the time and the mindshare to effectively make the shift? Unfortunately, our school district did not take this into account. Teachers are excited about the standards but overwhelmed with the planning of new curriculum in every area.  Some teacher teams in my school have asked for professional days to plan an area such as math or language arts. Others are meeting regularly at plan/lunch time to discuss expectations for the following week. Teachers in our district are not impressed with the lack of time given to learn and plan the CCSS.

 

• What does writing across the curriculum look like currently in our school (or district)?

So much has changed in the last 16 years of my teaching with writing across the curriculum.  What has changed and what continues to change is our expectations of high school graduates. Less time has been spent on writing, low writing test scores, teachers have received little instruction in how to teach writing, are a few of the reasons writing is in need of reform. Writing across the curriculum needs to be a strategic integration of carefully designed writing tasks that serve the ends of learning, authentic communication, personal engagement and reflective authorship. Do we do this in our school?   I think most do short in class writing such as exit slips that summarize what the students did in class, reading responses to literature, or self assessment on projects going on in class. Teacher use notebooks in each subject where students explain how they get the answer to concepts and give insight to their understanding of the content taught. Some teachers have free write or journals that students can creatively write in, others have blogs or websites where students update their understanding of a particular area of learning. Having pen pals is a great way to provide an authentic context for communication.

• These chapters look in depth at the three types of writing described in the writing standards. What are your reflections on each type?

Narrative Writing is a starting point for studying Common Core standards. As students get structure with narrative writing, a teacher can use it throughout the curriculum because it is the essential component in almost every kind of writing.

 Persuasive/Opinion writing expectations are high. This will eventually lead to students refuting counterarguments.  To do this, students will need to use sources that they evaluate and analyze to formulate arguments. This is an area of weakness and will need to be addressed using best teaching practices and student assessments. They need repeated practice writing their opinions and then supporting those opinions with reasons.

 Informative writing includes a wide variety of genres. The skill that this type of writing takes includes tools for logical informed thinking. Students need to learn to sort, categorize and elaborate on information. We need to use universal expectations for this genre where teachers can collaborate on expectations.  Students need to understand the structures of this genre in order to support more developed writing.

Week 2

Questions to Reflect on for Week 2 (Chapter 4 and 5)

Both chapters describe the three categories of the Common Core reading standards: key ideas and details, craft and structure, and integration of knowledge and ideas. Which of these standards feels like new work for your school (or district)? What do you already aim to do in our curriculum?

Integration of knowledge and ideas. 

Close reading involves engaging with and examining facts and details about the text. The 

purpose is to notice features and language used. The next step in close reading is to think 

thoroughly and methodically about what the details mean. Reading has turned 

into a race with a “stopwatch” mentality. What this tells students is that to read fast is to 

be a good reader. We need to slow them down and provide the students with a focus or purpose for reading. Students need to move away from reading to accumulate information, to reading to discern ideas and concepts and analyze texts critically for their reasoning and perspective. 

Most importantly, what evidence do we have for how well our students can enact these standards independently, as independence is the expectation of the standards (see reading standard 10)?
Reading standard 10 states that by the end of fifth grade students should read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, at the high end of the grades 4-5 text complexity band independently and proficiently.  The evidence a teacher can use to see if her students are meeting expectations vary. Nashua School District implemented iReady, which will give a teacher data if their student is meeting grade level expectations. However, through observations, discussion and reflections, a teacher will need to see if the student is able to synthesis, evaluate and compare texts. 

The section Current Challenges to Implementing the Reading Standards for informational Texts (beginning on page 88) describes pressing challenges for schools to tackle to fully implement the expectations of these standards.What rings true to you from the experiences in our classrooms?
Students are not reading enough nonfiction texts along with not having a choice in what to read. Teachers/schools need to get more high interest nonfiction books along with magazines, and digital sources (blogs, discovery education, PBS) for the students to read.

How can we begin to overcome these challenges (refer to the section beginning on page 91 for suggestions)?

Different reading strategies need to be shared and used in the classroom that reinforce the standards. 

G.I.S.T. http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/gist-summarizing-strategy-content-290.html is a summarizing strategy that is a helpful graphic organizer to 

promote close reading. GIST asks students to identify the 5W’s and H (Who, What, When Where, Why and How) and then compose a 20 word “gist of what they’ve read.

For literary text, using a strategy called “Someone Wanted But So,” is a handy word phrase to direct student thinking.http://upcaliteracy.cmswiki.wikispaces.net/file/view/ELA_Summary_ORS_Module_003.pdf

This wiki site gives some great info and also ideas on how to implement. 

Along with teachers implementing different strategies, is the resources to do it with.  DonorsChoose.org allows you to earn points and receive classroom library sets. Scholastic points give teachers the ability to get multiple sets of books for low cost and use of points when students buy books. A subscription to "Time For Kids" will give a teacher numerous possibilities in standards 2-9. Summarizing and comparing texts. 

Using programs on line such as Discovery Education or PBS gives students another possibility to find information on a topic and be able to find main ideas, summarize, discuss word choice, compare ideas and much, much more.

Extra bonus: Try to create a tagxedo and embed in your blog

Additionally: please bring the title of your book study selection, and spend some time searching the Common Core site that you assigned for discussion next week.

• Also- if you have a printable copy of the Common Core bring that.

Week 1 Posting

Introduction/Chapter 1: Beginning on page 13, this chapter provides a wealth of practical steps for implementing the CCSS. One of the most essential is the suggestion to first recognize what a school is already doing well and build from there. We should avoid jumping right into it, adding bucket loads of new “compliance” initiatives, but instead build from clear strengths. So, the question is, then, What is your school (or district) already doing well?

How do we know our school (or district) is actually doing this well? More importantly, from whose perspective do we appear to be doing this well? What would administrators say about this? Teachers? Now, consider, students? Parents? How well aligned do you believe this “thing we do well” is to the grade-level expectations of the CCSS? Refer to pages 16–20 for assistance in thinking about essential

Based on NECAP results, our district reading scores have stayed the same in 2011 and 2012 with seventy-three percent of students scored proficient or better in reading.  We actually had writing scores decline 2% from 51% proficiency to 49%. For Bicentennial Elementary School, the students were 10% higher in comparison to the state and 19% higher than other schools in the district.

Based on these NECAP results, Bicentennial did very well last year in teaching student literacy.  The NECAP is the New England Common Assessment Program Grade- Level Expectations used by NH, Vermont and Rhode Island to test specifications in Mathematics, Reading and Writing. It compares results by state, district and school. 

Due to our scores in reading, Bicentennial would not be considered "a school in Need of improvement" falling into the same category of the 16 out 17 schools in our district and 2/3 of the schools in our state. We met our Adequate Yearly Progress in Reading. The No Child Left Behind act required that by 2014 all students meet proficiency requirements in both reading and math.
The Nashua Telegraph reported recently that this "neighborhood is best in city for income and education."  Property value is higher in the area with the idea that there is a high demand to live in this school district.

However, does Bicentennial meet the the grade-level expectations of the CCSS? Our recent iReady scores show that we are not meeting the expectations in vocabulary and informational text. As of last year, each grade level was still using a basil program in reading, not a thinking curriculum. We were still drilling them with skill, fill-in-the-blank, read the paragraph curriculum, not asking them to to integrate information from several texts and then explain the relationships between ideas and author's craft. Bicentennial quickly realized we needed to make some changes.  We would need to spend more time having students read more at their level/choosing with fluency, accuracy and comprehension.

Chapter 2, beginning on page 22, aims to not just describe how to read the CCSS document, but more to highlight the intellectual underpinnings of these standards. What ideas were most striking to you about this discussion?

Reading literature and the skills for reading informational texts are the same in the CC. I understood this better knowing that the common core aims to "unify reading so that readers bring the same skills to various texts." I liked the description used to show standard ways of thinking in comparison to the CC. Informational texts were thought to inform and persuade where the CC emphasizes reading to determine central ideas and analyze author's viewpoints. Again with literature skills teachers would commonly have students describe characters, thematic connections and expressive language where as the CC emphasizes reading to determine themes, elucidate figurgative language and trace narrative elements.

I like the last paragraph that states Malcom Gladwell theory that "expertise requires an investment of ten thousand hours."  I would like to look up the difference in words read by a student who reads 4 books a year, 10, 20, 40...Then relate that to the amount of vocabulary introduced and used to the student reads 40 books and how that would effect comprehension and writing.

For students to actually practice synthesizing and critical reading, students will need to read books because using a textbook of anthologies (basil) the stories are summaries or shortened versions. They will not give the student the opportunity to analyze craft, theme, or structure.

Chapter 3, beginning on page 32, talks in depth about reading standards 1 and 10, referring to a common description of these as being the crucial struts of a ladder. How are these standards currently enacted within your school (or district)

Last year the Nashua School District implemented the iReady assessment. Built for the common core, this  cross-grade-level assessment pinpoints needs down to the sub-skill level and gives teachers an action plan. Included in this assessment is a Lexile score that is a starting point for level of reading.

As a district we are rolling out units that are following the common core standards and giving direction towards the teachers. Each unit begins with a preassessment and ends with a common performance task that will be used to collect data on student/school/district performance. 

In what ways are our older students demonstrating literal comprehension as compared to our younger students? Does the teaching, as it stands now, require more sophisticated thinking across years—or are we only requiring very similar thinking (such as simply asking everyone to “provide evidence”)? Refer back to the section beginning on page 39.

The CC recognizes that students should progress towards reading complex text. The same 10 skills are included at each grade level, however, the skill changes from grade to grade. Grade 3 a student can ask and answer questions to show understanding of a text but by grade 5 they should be able to "Quote accurately from a text when drawing inferences from the text." Going away from text to self or personal responses and moving towards referencing texts in complex ways with inferencing work.

These two chapters present several points of view on the measure, the role, and instructional uses of “text complexity.” One main point of tension is around approaches for students who are reading below their grade level. What different views on how best to support students who are reading below “grade level complexity” are raised in these chapters? Are there others you have heard or read recently?

There are different views to support students who are reading below "grade Level Complexity". One way is for an entire class to read in unison with teacher generated questions for students to answer in conversation and writing. 2-3 weeks to study a novel and then 4-7 weeks to study 6-7 shorter texts. CC supports this with research that states close reading of complex text will make significant gains in reading proficiency.  Another suggestion was to continue to provide students with books at their level but given opportunities to read and comprehend grade level complex text. They should have the opportunity to read above their grade level.

The "Book Whisperer" affirms the reader in every student, allowing students to choose their own books, carving out extra reading time, modeling authentic reading behaviors, discarding timeworn reading assignments such as book reports and comprehension worksheets and developing a classroom library filled with high-interest books. Students should read more than 40 books a year!

If the CCSS document states that the standards “define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach” (6), then how will our school (or district) decide to support students reading below grade level complexity?

The CCSS defines expectations but does not show teachers how to teach. This can be overwhelming to an educator but also open many doors.  First step in supporting students is to find out their level of reading using Lexile scores or reading records. There needs to professional development offered to teachers on different programs or ways of teaching that could support them. Providing teachers with models on how to use the "Daily 5" or "Literature Circles" along with book studies on books such as the Book Whisperer. There needs to be discussions how to track levels of complexity with your students and opportunities to try different methods.  Lastly, they need to give schedules to support longer reading times and how to implement that throughout the curriculum in science and social studies. As stated by Krashen "kids who are given more time to read do better than kids who have little time to read."

What about those students already reading above grade level, such as kindergartners who enter already reading? Or sixth graders reading far above benchmark?

Teachers are learning to move away from basils and how to differentiate within the classroom or team. Having opportunities to read at the student's level in a genre they like, will encourage a love of a reading that in my opinion, has been lost for some time in the public school system. The focus on skills and data, has changed again using the CC. Students need to be given time to read at their level.  Having students read different novels but sharing and discussing a standard such as "Quoting accurately from a text when explaining what a text says when drawing inferences." does not require students to be reading the same book. The skill can be taught and discussed with independent books and either as a whole group or in small groups as shown in the "Cafe" program.