Читать книгу The Common Core Companion: Booster Lessons, Grades 3-5 - Leslie Blauman - Страница 10

As Kelly Gallagher (2015) points out in his book In the Best Interests of Students, “Remember that good teaching is not about ‘covering’ a new list of standards; good teaching is grounded in practices proven to sharpen our students’ literacy skills” (p. 3). The spirit of this book is just that: I want to help you center your instruction on what we know works in developing learners’ capacity to read, write, listen, and speak. To that end, the Big Ticket practice at work is connecting reading and writing. A reading lesson is followed by a companion writing lesson, or vice versa, so that students benefit from seeing the yin and yang of these two processes. A mountain of research supports instruction that helps students see both reading and writing as reciprocal processes. When we teach students to read like writers and write like readers, each endeavor makes much more sense to kids.

In addition, the lessons and learning integrate select core practices. These are the research-based practices that have proven to be worthwhile. So for each lesson sequence, I’ve handpicked the core literacy practices most relevant to the lessons and learning. What follows is the master list of them (go to www.corwin.com/thecommoncorecompanion to find definitions of each one).

Sequence 1 includes

 Gradual release model

 Co-construct

 Turn and talk

 Graphic organizers

 Reflection

 Explicit teaching

 Responsive teaching

 Student ownership

 Anchor charts

 Metacognition

 Tying content to real-world examples

Sequence 2 introduces

 Modeling

 Scaffolding

 Annotating texts

 Using text evidence

 Process writing

 Highlighting

 Annotating texts

 Using text evidence

 Rubrics

 Feedback

Sequence 3 includes

 Turn and talk

 Mentor texts

 Mini-lessons

 Independent reading

 Reading journals

 Conferring

 Feedback

 Coaching

 Process writing

 Independent writing

 Book clubs

 Anchor texts

 Student ownership

 Independent reading

 Revisiting texts

 Connecting across the curriculum

Sequence 4 introduces

 Mentor texts

 Mini-lessons

 Modeling

 Peer work

 Anchor charts

 Annotating texts

 Graphic organizers

 Scaffolding

 Rubrics

Sequence 5 includes

 Guided practice

 Co-construct

 Mentor texts

 Modeling

 Graphic organizers

 Using text evidence

 Revisiting texts

 Peer work

I decided not to take the time in this book to call on the carpet practices that don’t have much evidence to support them, but I encourage you to do a makeover of your reading and writing block and consider retiring practices that seem, well, tired. By tired, I mean they don’t really move the needle on students’ skills or engagement or carry weight in terms of helping you to know your readers and writers. Rewards-driven reading routines, for example, are a no-no. Worksheets and word searches are two other common time zappers. See Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss’s No More Independent Reading without Support for more insights on ineffective and effective reading practices. For writing, some common ways in which writing is shortchanged in schools include not allowing for student choice or only writing to prompts, jumping from activity to activity without a focus or focusing instruction only on the mechanics, or writing classes that don’t address the workshop model, which allows for a focus lesson, independent work, and a closure (Fletcher and Portalupi 2001; Gallagher 2011; Graves 1994; Ray 2001; Routman 2005). These are writing routines that have no research support.

Students need to be writing across the curricula, and often. Reading is often described as the invisible process that therefore needs lots of think alouds and teacher demonstrations to make it “visible,” but I would argue that a writer’s process needs an equal amount of modeling.

What’s the through line of the core practices that do work? I’d say it’s authenticity. Yep, that’s another term used so often it loses meaning, so I’ll define it for myself and for this book as meaning being respectful of students’ maturity. Children don’t need or want cutesy, and their nose for busywork is sharper than a hound dog’s. Be authentic with them instead. They want to feel they are in the same reading club and the same writing club as you are. So as you will see in these lessons, share the books and other texts that you truly adore. Share the op-eds, reviews, sports stories, news that irritated you, or inspired you—and they will follow suit. Share pieces of writing you’ve received or done that have something to teach them. Tell them about what’s hard or easy for you as a writer. Ask them for permission when you want to share what they have written with others. This last point leads into the third facet of integration that drives this book: peer models.