Tennessee has created a Guide to Close Reading that answers the following questions:
The guide answers these questions with explicit links to the standards, assessment, and lifelong literacy.
NOTE: many of the answers outlined in the Guide to Close Reading are a perfect complement to the inservice course UNR professor Dr. Steven Gehrke did with our K-6 ELA community. You can review the PowerPoint he shared here.
Finding materials that are free, vetted, and well-matched to the Common Core is a popular request. One set of free resources, that build content knowledge (shift 1) while simultaneously addressing foundational skills are the Beginning Reads, from www.textproject.org. There are 10 levels of books, with 3 sets at each level, for beginning readers and struggling readers. The books place a premium on connecting “student’s oral language knowledge with written language.” You can download the printable books here or through iTunes here.
In a Ted Talk, Sugata Mitra who started the Hole-in-the-Wall project, reveals the impetus for the modern school—which began three hundred years ago. He describes how the British Empire needed a way to keep track of an enormous expanse of territory so it created the “Bureaucratic Machine.” The Machine allowed leaders to track what was happening in disparate parts of the world and to keep the machine running it trained children to be future bureaucrats with an emphasis on three things:
Mitra notes that not a lot has changed in modern schools and he asserts that learning isn’t about making it happen, it’s about letting it happen. Mitra’s story is inspirational and a reminder that to do Common Core well, we need to perceive schools as less about having students practicing and mastering a series of discreet skills. Instead it should be about creating an environment where students learn about the world and how evidence can be used to inform and support an argument. The video can be viewed here.
At Sustaining Momentum, CASEL’s Cross-Districts Learning Event in Nashville, Tennessee, educational leaders learned how Washoe is integrating Social Emotional Learning with Common Core instruction.
The following PowerPoint was shared as well as Washoe’s SEL Standards Matrix and the Instructional Practice Guides.
In the previous post, a video of Jon Corippo is tagged describing how educators can introduce and scaffold students to the successful understanding of conflict. Further into the video, Corippo describes a process helping students with characterization. Corippo has generously shared the lesson plan and graphic organizer that accompanies the exercise with us. The video is great and the lesson moves teachers from modeling, to guided practice, to independence. The lesson can be downloaded here.
Jon Corippo, Apple Distinguised Educator and Google Certified Teacher, describes how he teaches students to identify the five types of conflict within text. Begin watching Corippo’s explanation at minute 9:55 for full context or at minute 12:25 if you simply want to see the strategy (here) and see how Corippo uses an engaging and rigorous method to get students proficient with this outcome.
The resources and methodology described in the video are all free.
Washoe County School District’s Curriculum & Instruction Department is offering a range of half-credit literacy inservice courses to support teachers with Common Core outcomes. The courses build backwards from the instructional shifts with classes on building content knowledge, shift 1 and 2; academic vocabulary, shift 6; writing to sources, shift 5; word study, shift 6; small group instruction; BAP in K-2; and close reading.
Building a Coherent Body of Knowledge begins on Wednesday and you can register for the class as well as all of the literacy courses here. You can review a complete list of the offerings here. Building Content Knowledge is described as follows:
Through a series of classes, participants will learn how shifts in practice required by the CCSS ELA reveal that teaching content is teaching reading. Participants will initially engage in group discussion, readings, and videos. Later, participants will practice a model content lesson in class and later use such a lesson in their instruction. Finally, teachers will engage in an evidence-based discussion around the instructional implications of their taught lesson and design next steps. This three afternoon class is open to all grade level teachers and highly recommended for elementary school teachers.
Bonnie Krupa, the Instructional Coach at Sparks Middle School, has created a crosswalk between the Core Actions within the Instructional Practice Guides (IPGs) and Accountable Talk Moves. The document assists in describing the explicit link between what the Common Core classroom looks and sounds like (the IPGs) and an instructional support we can put in place to get us there—Accountable Talk. You can download the crosswalk here.
In this past we have linked to resources and video presentations from Dr. Timothy Shanahan. You can review some of this work, from the former president of the International Reading Association, on CCSS topics including policy (here) the instructional shifts (here), close reading (here) and reading texts above grade level (here).
In a recent post, on his blog www.shanahanononliteracy.com, Shanahan uses the rhetorical device of a Q&A to share this concern about creating lessons matched to the standards.
One of the big problems that I have seen is the designs that try to break the standards down into parts. Thus, if a standard asks for kids to do two or three things in combination, they reduce this to doing each of those things separately—which is not the same thing. Teachers tell me that it is easier to understand and teach the parts, which I don’t doubt at all; but doing it that way tends to miss out on what the standard actually means. It is hard to carry out three actions in concert while reading a challenging text; that’s the point. You can simplify it, of course, but then you aren’t actually teaching the same standard.
The entire blog entry can be accessed here.
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) describes the ways in which children and adults develop skills for life effectiveness. It has been a point of emphasis within the ELA/literacy Common Core rollout and part of the Core Task Project and Core Task implementation Project trainings.
The Washoe County School District has created a page where practitioners can learn more about SEL including what it is and why it is important. The page lists the five areas of SEL (Self-Management, Self-Awareness, Responsible Decision-Making, Social Awareness, and Relationship Skills) and includes video of Dr. Roger P. Weissberg sharing a general overview of SEL and Paul Goren outlining the goals of SEL. You can access the page here.
Core Task Project 