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The Common Core

Implications for Teacher Educators

What Has Happened to Public Education while your Students have been in College

• Nearly every state set common expectations for what students should know and be able to do.

• Unlike previous standards, these standards are tied to college and career readiness, and students who meet the standards are expected to be able to go on to postsecondary education without the need for remedial classes.

• These standards are internationally benchmarked, and match the expectations of the highest-performing nations.

• These standards are tied to evaluation of teacher efficacy.

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Standards

Key Ideas and Details:CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.1Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.2Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.3Analyze how the author unfolds an analysis or series of ideas or events, including the order in which the points are made, how they are introduced and developed, and the connections that are drawn between them.

Craft and Structure:CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.4Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language of a court opinion differs from that of a newspaper).

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The Asks (Finn Jr. & Porter-Magee, Common Core in the Schools: A First Look at Reading Assignments 2013 )

The Common Core asks

• That text be central to the English Language Arts curriculum

• Teachers to assign texts that provide language complexity appropriate to grade level

• That students have substantial experience reading informational text

Many still

• Try to fit texts to skills, instead of grounding skills instruction in appropriate texts

• Assign texts based on students’ present reading prowess, especially in elementary school

• Need to use more non fiction text in the classroom, especially at the middle and upper level.

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6 Shifts in ELA/Literacy

• Balancing Informational and Literary Text

• Building Knowledge in the Disciplines• Staircase of Complexity• Text-based Answers• Writing from Sources• Academic Vocabulary

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Instructional Shifts Demanded by the Core

Why We Can’t Fake It

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ELA/Literacy Shift 1: Balancing Informational and

Literary Text

What the Student Does… What the Teacher Does…• Build content knowledge

• Be Exposed to the world through reading

• Apply strategies

• Balance informational & literary text

• Scaffold for informational texts

• Teach “through” and “with” informational texts

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ELA/Literacy Shift 2: Knowledge in the Disciplines

What the Student Does… What the Teacher Does…• Build content knowledge through text

• Handle primary source documents

• Find Evidence

• Shift identity: “I teach reading.”

• Stop referring and summarizing and start reading

• Slow down the history and science classroom

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Principal’s Role:

• Hold teachers accountable for building student content knowledge through text

• Support and demand the role of all teachers in advancing students’ literacy

• Give teachers permission to slow down and deeply study texts with students

ELA/Literacy Shift 3: Staircase of Complexity

What the Student Does… What the Teacher Does…• Re-read

• Read material at own level to enjoy meeting

• Persevere to understand

• More complex texts at every grade level

• Give students less to read, let them re-read

• More time on more complex texts

• Provide scaffolding & strategies

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ELA/Literacy Shift 4: Text-Based Answers

What the Student Does… What the Teacher Does…• Find evidence to support their argument

• Form own judgments and become scholars

• Conduct reading as a close reading of the text

• Engage with the author and his/her choices

• Facilitate evidence-based conversations about text

• Plan and conduct rich conversations

• Keep students in the text

• Identify questions that are text-dependent, worth asking/exploring

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Principal’s Role: • Support and demand that teachers work through and tolerate student frustration with

complex texts and learn to chunk and scaffold that text

• Provide planning time for teachers to engage with the text to prepare and identify appropriate text-dependent questions.

• Hold teachers accountable for fostering evidence based conversations about texts with and amongst students.

ELA/Literacy Shift 5: Writing from Sources

What the Student Does… What the Teacher Does…• Generate informational texts

• Make arguments using evidence

• Organize for persuasion

• Compare multiple sources

• Spend much less time on personal narratives

• Present opportunities to write from multiple sources

• Give opportunities to analyze, synthesize ideas

• Develop students’ voice so that they can argue a point with evidence

•Give permission to reach and articulate their own conclusions about what they read

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Principal’s Role:

• Support , enable, and demand that teachers spend more time with students writing about the texts they read – building strong arguments using evidence from the text

ELA/Literacy Shift 6: Academic Vocabulary

What the Student Does… What the Teacher Does…

•Use domain specific words across content areas

•Build content vocabulary through reading

•Develop students’ ability to use and access words

•Sequence texts so that students encounter vocabulary within a particular domain over and over in increasingly complex contexts

•Be strategic about the new vocabulary words

•Work with words students will use frequently

•Teach fewer words more deeply

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Principal’s Role:

• Shift attention on how to plan vocabulary meaningfully using tiers andtransferability strategies

• Demand the spiraling of increasingly complex texts within particulardomains

What this Means for Your Students

• Reasons for becoming a teacher• Favorite books• Favorite teachers• How they were taught to write• What they were taught to read for• How they and their peers were placed• Roles of teacher and students• Expectations

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64.8

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77.4

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67.9

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34.4

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36.8

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41.3

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53.2

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37.2

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40.6

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64.2

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43.1

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66.4

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55.1

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50.4

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17.7

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21.2

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31.1

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Asian Black Hispanic AmericanIndian/Alaskan

Native

White Total Public

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

The Statistics of SuccessThe ELA proficiency results (NYS Levels 3 or 4) for race/ethnicity groups across grades 3-8 reveal the persistence of the achievement gap

“Students living in poverty often have a gap in their knowledge of words and knowledge about the world.”

-David Liben

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The Teacher Lounge

• It matters where you place them.• The attitudes about the Common Core and its

Implementation vary……Greatly.• The New Uncomfortable• Keeping students first in the classroom• Developing a mature perspective• Empowerment with local control

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Options

• Take apart a module• Close-Read the appendices – particularly

Appendix A

• http://achievethecore.org• www.engageny.org

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