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Introduction

THE NEW STANDARD

The relationship between standards and instruction can often be paper-thin—literally. We’ve all been there—drawing up a unit or lesson and then dropping the standards on top right before hitting the print button. As high school teachers, we know our students and our content—instruction is surely aligned to standards. But does our instruction address the standards? It’s not always clear.

Teaching that is up to standard is different. It starts with standards–aligned instructional goals paired to high-quality texts and content. It is learning centered, prioritizing the literacy skills and conceptual knowledge needed for students to be proficient and independent thinkers, readers, and writers in the content area you teach. It is dialogic and inquiry oriented. Student work that is up to standard is different, too: it is complex, knowledgeable, and divergent and creative, to use just a few of the descriptors from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS); it does not fit into a template. This is rigor.

And that, more than anything else in the age of the Common Core, is the major shift in both the intention and enactment of teacher practice: teaching, not just text, got complex. There is no program or textbook that provides an easy solution for the challenge of standards; there is no group of instructional strategies—new or otherwise—to readily define what it means to “do” the Common Core or other next-generation standards. The standards, it goes without saying, can’t teach themselves.

But wait until you see what’s possible with next-generation standards.

New Realities, Possible Futures

At the time of this book’s conception, those impacted most by the CCSS—teachers—were hardly on common ground; the ground, in fact, was downright shaky. Surveys reveal a majority of teachers did not like the CCSS (Henderson, Peterson, & West, 2015), were not satisfied with the professional development they had received on implementing them (Education Week Research Center, 2014), and were making few alterations to their teaching to meet new literacy demands (Shanahan & Duffett, 2013). The public and policymakers continue to squabble over the politics of the CCSS. Teachers continue to wonder where the practice of the Common Core lies. Often, very little attention is focused on the standards themselves—what they say and what they mean. Given the lack of meaningful, actionable guidance, it isn’t surprising that there is even less sustained support to actually enact standards-aligned instruction.

For many of us, then, the question continues to linger: what would it mean to leverage next-generation standards in our instruction? Not only should standards inform instruction but instruction should also fully and meaningfully address the standards. We must use what is known about standards to select and synthesize learning objectives. We must also apply strategies of expert practitioners in our fields along with our own knowledge of next-generation assessments (for example, from Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium [SBAC] and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers [PARCC]) to design authentic, high-quality intellectual work for our students. Essentially, it would mean positioning the standards so they clarify not only what to teach but also how to teach it.

For all of the talk of how transformative next-generation standards like the Common Core will be, they are only words on paper until teachers align, apply, and assess expected outcomes in their own practice. Standards matter, of course; but perhaps, more importantly, so, too, do how and why you make them matter. With limited experience teaching with them, and with limited evidence as to what works for teaching to them, shifting practice must focus on learning from practice, not simply on accumulating practices.

So, here it is: another Common Core book. This one, though, is different. It is not a book extolling the wonders of the CCSS. (Here’s a spoiler: they’re good, not great.) It’s also not a strategies book. Instead, this book is about the work of standards-aligned instruction—the design, delivery, and deepening of teaching that is up to standard. You’ll continue to see the phrase up to standard throughout this book, and with good reason; it signals that what both teachers and students do—the texts, tasks, and talk—must be worthy of the cognitive rigor of the standards. The measure for change is not magic; it’s simply the act of coming to a deep understanding of what students are expected to know and do (your standards), coupled with a deep understanding about what you know as a teacher and what you do as a leader and content expert.

Some may think the Common Core standards are flawed, that they are unclear, questionable, and insufficient. Still, by doubling down on good teaching and deconstructing and rebuilding the standards to support teacher practice, you will see that they support a vision for teaching that is both possible and full of potential. This is why the Common Core is a framework for much of this book’s discussion—not merely because it has been widely adopted, albeit not always widely loved, but also because the potential for action is so significant. This isn’t a sign that the Common Core should be embraced over and above any other framework, such as state standards or those of an organization. This book embraces teaching with standards. Regardless of the standards you use, teaching with them means you are outcome driven, are aligned to the measures students will be assessed on, and have a clear idea of what it means to be proficient in your field at a particular developmental level. So if you’re in a state or school that has not adopted the Common Core, when discussion is of specific Common Core language, consider the applications it has for enhancing your own instruction—it is the pattern that matters, not the measure being used.

Much of what it means to do the Common Core—a common expression these days—is a change in perception commensurate with changes in practice. The two are deeply intertwined. To teach ambitiously means to think ambitiously about teaching—about content, curriculum, collaboration, and the capacity of your fellow teachers. What follows is a road map of sorts for a stance to take on your journey toward ambitious teaching for learning.

The Core: Teaching for Learning

Ambitious teaching prioritizes the key ideas and problems of a given content area, emphasizes the teaching of critical-thinking skills, and supports all students throughout the learning process (see Lampert & Graziani, 2009; McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013; Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2009). Chapter 1 shows how the standards can be applied to enact this kind of instruction. The chapters that follow describe what it means to teach ambitiously in alignment with next-generation standards.

Texts

Content-area instruction that is up to standard starts with consideration of the ways students engage with texts and tasks. What is read, after all, is what is taught, including the content a text addresses, the skills it requires in order to be understood, and the opportunities it offers for students to exchange ideas with one another. Leveraging the text toward strong student engagement entails two key shifts in teacher planning and practice.

1. Selecting texts that are grade appropriate and content rich, and thus worthy of instructional time

2. Providing the right kind of instructional support for students as they are challenged by academic language, abstract ideas, and rigorous tasks related to these texts

You must pay careful attention to both the opportunities and challenges a text provides, what it means to comprehend the specific text in question (and to texts in general—in other words, the standards), and what supports are necessary to ensure students have a complete understanding of the text (Kucan & Palincsar, 2011). A text’s complexities should guide instructional decision making about how to teach it. Chapters 2–4 focus on texts.

Tasks

The task—what students are actually asked to do with or in response to reading texts—is everything. In combination with the text, it is your opportunity to address and assess multiple standards; it is also the means to craft specific kinds of instructional supports needed to complete the task. Chapter 6 shows how to craft those supports, and chapter 7 looks at the role close reading plays in supporting content-area literacy.

Task construction starts with a meaningful intellectual or interpretive problem—the kind of question or problem that is worth dedicating precious instructional minutes to, requires close reading of multiple texts, and addresses multiple standards. But its most critical component is the way in which instructional time is designed to solve it. This requires you to think deeply about how to train students to read and respond to texts proficiently and independently, develop routines for reading and rereading texts, scaffold through modeling and questioning, and provide meaningful practice and feedback opportunities. This work should not be arbitrarily fitted into four- to six-week-long units; rather, what students are asked to do must dictate the time needed, be it four days or four weeks.

Talk

Finally, we will discuss talk, which chapter 8 explores. In specifying precisely how students should participate with others in reading and understanding texts, the Common Core college- and career-readiness anchor standard [CCR] one for speaking and listening—“Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and expressively”—makes it clear that collaboration and conversation are critical to comprehension (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices [NGA] & Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], 2010). This is deliberate talk—it is not student centered for the sake of being more engaging; it is an intentional scaffold to support challenging analytical reading and writing tasks. Student-to-student conversation that is up to standard attends to students’ understanding, encourages development of arguments, and seeks to help students build consensus around complex ideas. In other words, it supports collective problem solving with the kind of rich intellectual tasks that should be at the center of content-area teaching.

Collaboration

More than a half decade after the launch of the CCSS, some may argue that there are still no Common Core experts. But expertise, as it has traditionally been defined when a new educational movement arises, is overrated. The kind of expertise needed this time is from within, not from the outside—the kind that derives from actual work with these standards and with your students. It is practice, not expert, based. And it is shared. The real work is not in your standards themselves, nor in programs or materials connected to them, but in people and the common ground they share to respond to the challenges and realize the opportunities these reforms create. Teachers, in other words, make the difference.

So the best and most critical professional learning on next-generation standards is, in fact, already occurring in your school and in your own classroom—it’s what you can learn from your own teaching and your students’ learning. Such a practice-based approach puts what you do at the center of what you learn—your experiences as the means for developing your expertise. That’s a powerful idea—teacher growth led by classroom practice and by classroom practitioners. The content and focus come out of practice and go back into practice. This reciprocal relationship, with wisdom gleaned from practice then informing the sustained use of wise practices, should be the foundation, the core, of all teacher learning. Chapters 5 and 9 detail mechanisms for building such foundations by illustrating how you and your faculty or colleagues can work together to select and prepare texts for instruction (chapter 5) and study your enactment, including the resulting student learning, of those texts (chapter 9).

Next Steps: Enacting the Standards

Before diving into this book, complete the following two exercises to prime you for the teaching and learning to come.

1. Read your standards: Focus on what the standards say students should be doing. That’s all they’re saying: they describe end-of-the year learning outcomes. You may not love them, but what matters is that you understand and align your practice with them. Take, for example, anchor standard four for reading: “Interpret words and phrases as they are used in text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). Undoubtedly, you are building students’ word knowledge in your instruction, but are you offering students opportunities to practice grasping how a key word is developed over the course of a text? That’s what Reading anchor standard four asks of high school students. Get clear on those expectations, and start thinking about alignment: What can I build on? How can I do it better? Make your starting point your teaching.

2. Read your text: Locate a passage from a content-area text that inspired or continues to inspire your love for your content—not a text on teaching your content area, but the actual content, such as a poem, a journal article, or a historical analysis. Don’t think about the content in terms of your students (yet); think of what challenged or challenges you in the content. For example, think about the last page of The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925) if you are an English teacher; the first paragraphs of “The Mysteries of Mass” (Kane, 2005) if you are a science teacher; or an excerpt from the introduction of Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005) if you are a social studies teacher. Read it again; determine what’s important or significant in it. But here’s the kicker: write down exactly what you did—the steps, the processes—to understand it. It needn’t be an elaborate description, a numbered list of steps will do, but capture every action you took, and record it in the order in which you did it.

Both of these activities will help you familiarize yourself with important information. They show you what it might mean to enact the standards. The CCSS were designed to address both content-specific reading concepts (such as sourcing and contextualization in social studies) and more general cross-content literacy skills (such as identifying and using evidence), both of which are necessary to grasp the passage you read in the second activity. You need to teach, support, and assess both. To do so, you must bring to light what it means to “read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently” (CCRA.R.10; NGA & CCSSO, 2010) and articulate how it is done. Once it is clear to you what it takes, you’ll know how to design instruction for all students in your classroom so that they achieve the same level of understanding.

A Final Note

At many points throughout the text, I refer to evidence in and from the CCSS by way of the anchor standard, the cross-grade and cross-disciplinary literacy expectations for ensuring students are college and career ready, which are notated as CCRA, followed by domain (R for Reading, W for Writing, SL for Speaking and Listening, and L for Language) and standard number. Because this book addresses the needs of teachers in multiple subject areas—English, social studies, science, and electives—and across all four grades of high school, use of the anchor standard is merely the general designation that applies to all readers; you should always refer to the corresponding grade-level and content-area standard specific to your teaching assignment to consider how the insight translates into action. Thus, if CCRA.R.2 is discussed, you’ll want to turn to, say, RH.9–10.2 if you are a social studies teacher or RST.9–10.2 if you are a science teacher to consider the implications for your classroom; what, in other words, does it specifically articulate about what your students should be doing in terms identifying, tracking, and summarizing key ideas of a text?