Читать книгу Your Literacy Standards Companion, Grades 9-12 - Jim Burke - Страница 9

One cannot benefit from or use a standards document that demands more time than a teacher or administrator has each day; thus, I seek here to share with you, my fellow educators, these indispensable resources: concise translations of the standards I currently use in my classroom in California, the Common Core standards, along with detailed correlation indexes showing readers in key non–Common Core states exactly which pages of this book have relevant information for them. I created this book in part for myself, to make my job easier as I plan my lessons every evening, write my books, or prepare the workshops I give around the country.

What I offer you here is a compass of sorts to help you—whether you are an administrator or teacher, department chair or district curriculum supervisor, a professor, or a student teacher training to join us in this richly rewarding enterprise called education—understand and make better use of your standards. Here you will find several features I have designed and refined with the help of many teachers, curriculum supervisors, and superintendents with whom I have met and worked around the country in recent years. Because California has adopted the Common Core standards, these standards are naturally the basis for my plan. Still, I think you’ll find the features, in combination with the correlation indexes at the front of this book, will provide you with a working compass to navigate your own state standards.

Additional key features, each developed with you in mind, include the following:

A one-page overview of all the Common Core anchor standards. The anchor standards form the spine that holds the K–12 ELA standards together. The anchor standards encompass each aspect of English Language Arts: reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language. Beginning in kindergarten and running through grade 12, each grade-specific standard builds incrementally to college and career readiness. If you are in a non–Common Core state, your state standards will be different in specifics, but their purpose and organization are similar. Designed for quick reference, this one-page document offers all users an overview—a place where you can get the lay of the land, no matter what state you’re in or what grade you teach.

Side-by-side anchor standards translation. How do anchor standards translate to the classroom? The anchor standards for each category—reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language—appear at the start of each section as a two-page spread with the original Common Core anchor standards on the left and, on the right, their matching translations in more accessible, classroom-friendly language. While the specifics of your standards may differ, you’ll undoubtedly find the real-world explications relevant and useful to your situation.

A new user-friendly format for each standard. Instead of the four reading standard domains—literature, informational, social studies, and science and technical subjects—spread throughout the Common Core State Standards document, here you will find the first reading standard for grades 9–10 and 11–12 and the four different domains, for example, all on one page. This allows you to use the book to see at a glance what Reading Standard 1 looks like in grades 9–10 across different text types and subject areas, but also, equally important, shows you what that same informational text standard looks like across grade levels from 9–12 to be sure your curriculum honors the challenge to increase complexity as students move from grade to grade. If you are in a non–Common Core state, the indexes cross-referencing your state standards will point you to the relevant pages.

Parallel translation/what students do. Each standard opens to a two-page spread that has the original Common Core standards on the left (all gathered on that one page for each standard) and a parallel translation of each standard mirrored on the right in more accessible language (referred to on these pages as the “Gist”) so you can concentrate on how to teach the standards instead of how to understand them, for while they are admirably concise in their original form, they are, nonetheless, remarkably dense texts once you start trying to grasp exactly what they say. These Gist pages align themselves with the original Common Core, so you can move between the two without turning a page as you think about what they mean and how to teach them. Also, beneath each translation of a standard appears a brief but carefully developed list of questions you can teach your students to ask as a way for them to meet that standard. These are meant to be very practical questions students can ask themselves or which you, in the course of teaching them, can pose. Note also that the more advanced requirements added to the 11–12 grade standards are bolded for emphasis, quick reference, and ease of use. Again, if you are in a non–Common Core state, the indexes cross-referencing your state standards will direct you to the pages directly relevant to you.

Instructional techniques/what the teacher does. These methods and activities, based on current literacy research, offer teachers across subject areas specific, if concise, suggestions for how to teach that specific standard, the activities specifically linked to the demands of the standard.

Academic vocabulary: key words and phrases. Each standard comes with a unique glossary since words used in more than one standard have a unique meaning in each. Any word or phrase that seemed a source of possible confusion is defined in some detail.

Planning notes/teaching notes. Each standard offers two pages designed to give you a place to transition your curriculum over to your new standards or to make notes about what to teach and how. These pages can serve as a place to capture ideas for yourself or for grade-level teams, departments, schools, and district curriculum offices or for students, teachers, and their professors in a methods class at the university. They can also be copied for additional planning.