Читать книгу Common Core English Language Arts in a PLC at Work®, Grades 9-12 - Nancy Frey - Страница 9

CHAPTER 2

Implementing the Common Core State Standards for Reading

KEY QUESTIONS

• To what extent does your team understand the Reading standards What is familiar? What is new? What may be challenging for students? What may be challenging for teachers?

• Examine current texts being used in grades 9–12, and assess them quantitatively and qualitatively and for reader and task demands. Which ones work? Which ones should be used in another grade or eliminated altogether?

• How will high school students be prepared for college and career reading demands?

The eleventh-grade students in Arthur Ngo’s English class are wondering about the poem he just gave them. It seems too simple. “My Papa’s Waltz” (Roethke, 1975) is easy enough to read and not all that complicated to understand, right? But Mr. Ngo has other plans.

“This is in nearly every anthology you see on 20th century American poetry,” he explains. “But why? What makes this such an enduring poem? We’re going to try to get to the root of this. I’ve got two purposes for our lesson today. One is to examine memory and speculate on whether this is a fond memory or a disturbing one. That’s connected to our overall unit on memory in literature and science. The second purpose relates to the structure of the poem itself. We’re going to look at how the form of the poem relates to the content.”

With that brief introduction to the poem, Mr. Ngo invites his students to read the poem silently and annotate as needed, especially when identifying poetic structures and content that may be confusing or troubling. He also reminds them to read the poem silently several times. While they read, he plays soft music from his laptop (he calls it “music to read by”). His students are accustomed to this, but Mr. Ngo has more in mind this time. He has chosen “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss (ClassicalMusicOnly, 2008). Without realizing it, students are listening to a waltz while reading the poem. After they have read the poem, he invites discussion.

“What’s the story of this poem?” he begins.

Over the next several minutes, they discuss the content. A large number of students remark that it’s about abuse, but he reels them in.

“That’s interpretation, and we’ll get there, but let’s slow down,” he says. “First, I just want the story.”

They describe a domestic scene of an inebriated father dancing his young son around the kitchen while a disapproving mother looks on.

“Now I’d like for you to look at the poetic structure. What are you seeing and hearing?” he asks.

Once again, they deconstruct the poem, noting the poet’s use of slant rhyme (dizzy and easy; pans and countenance), its ABAB rhyme pattern, and its use of quatrains. He draws their attention to the beat, while bringing the music’s volume back up.

“I’m playing a waltz, which has a distinctive rhythm. One, two, three, one, two, three …” he drums out. “In poetry, we call it iambic trimeter.” He adds an online metronome to mirror the beat and lowers the volume of the music a bit, saying, “Now read the poem aloud at your tables, and tell me what you notice about the meter.”

As the students fall into the recitation, he travels from table to table so he can listen to their observations and look at their annotations. As he circulates from one group to the next, he gathers informal data that he will use to formulate his next instructional steps. His observations confirm what he had anticipated: they have not yet discovered the misstep. After the class shares their thoughts on the connection between the meter and the action in the poem, Mr. Ngo asks them to listen again.

“This time we’re going to listen to Roethke read his poem,” he says, “and I want you to listen closely as you follow along in the reading. There’s a stumble somewhere in this poem. It’s subtle, but it’s there.”

With that, he plays the online metronome and an audio file of the author twice.

“Did you hear the stumble, when he misses the beat? Talk with your table about where you think it is,” he instructs them.

Within a few minutes, some of the tables have reached consensus. One of these tables says, “‘At every step you missed.’”

“Let’s listen again to see if we can hear it, now that you know where to find it,” says Mr. Ngo. He plays the recording and the metronome. “Roethke’s helping us visualize this scene,” he says, “and he’s using the sounds of the language to let us feel unbalanced for just a moment.”

A Collaborative Planning Team in Action

Before delving into the main purpose of this chapter, which is to examine the Common Core State Standards for reading in grades 9–12, we want to comment on Mr. Ngo’s curricular decisions and the contributions of his collaborative planning team, composed of the English faculty in all four grades, toward this effort.

Working together, Mr. Ngo and his collaborative planning team developed a consistent and coherent approach for planning the instructional unit by taking the following actions.

• Examining the text exemplars list in appendix B of the CCSS (NGA & CCSSO, 2010c) to gain a sense of the text complexity appropriate for high school English students

• Identifying texts they currently use in their classrooms and redistributing across the grade levels as needed

• Creating a list identifying a range of informational texts and literary readings that represent a progression of complexity throughout the school year

• Matching identified texts to concepts and content to be taught in English across the grade levels

• Developing lessons to be delivered and common formative assessments to be administered

• Discussing findings with one another during their weekly meetings to plan interventions for students in need of extra supports, including those who struggle to read and comprehend grade-level texts

• Developing a classroom observation schedule so they could spend time in one another’s classrooms

In other words, Mr. Ngo didn’t develop and teach this unit on memory alone. He relied on the collective strengths of his collaborative planning team to develop this unit and analyze student outcomes. However, before the team could engage in these actions, members had to analyze the Common Core ELA standards and compare them to their existing curriculum and instruction. They used four questions to guide their analysis.

1. What is familiar in the CCSS at each grade level?

2. What appears to be new based on prior standards?

3. What may be challenging for students?

4. What may be challenging for teachers?

This initial conversation allowed the teacher team to begin analyzing its current status in curriculum and instruction. Importantly, the teachers included student learning from the outset.

“I didn’t really know what I should anticipate in terms of misconceptions or naïve understandings,” says Mr. Ngo. “The team alerted me to the fact that the students might not notice the meter and its relationship to the waltz, since a lot of them are not familiar with this dance. And they advised me that lots of kids believe this poem is about child abuse.”

Based on its initial work, the team was able to identify areas of need regarding professional development and materials acquisition and to set the stage for later decisions regarding curriculum development, data analysis, intervention, and collaborative observations. A copy of this initial tool Mr. Ngo’s collaborative planning team used appears in figure 2.1. Visit go.solution-tree.com/commoncore for an online-only reproducible of figure 2.1, which your collaborative team can use to analyze other reading standards.

Anchor Standards for Reading

The Common Core English language arts standards are organized across four strands: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language. As discussed in chapter 1, a set of K–12 anchor standards for college and career readiness frames each strand. These anchor standards articulate the overarching goals that shape the grade-specific standards and are designed to create commonality across elementary, middle, and high school. “Students advancing through the grades are expected to meet each year’s grade-specific standards and retain or further develop skills and understandings mastered in preceding grades” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 11). This structure can reduce the silo effect that can creep into education in which teachers work in isolation from their peers and curriculum is not coordinated. By viewing education across grade bands and buildings, we can begin to mirror more closely the experiences of our students and their families. The anchor standards are an attempt to foster communication across and within educational systems.

There are ten 9–12 anchor standards for reading organized into the following four domains (see NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 10).

1. Key Ideas and Details

2. Craft and Structure

3. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

4. Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

These anchor standards are directly linked to two parts in the Reading strand at grades K–12: Literature and Informational Text. In addition, a second set of grades 6–12 Reading standards addresses literacy in history and social studies, science, and technical subjects (see NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, pp. 60–62). The anchor standards for the content areas remain the same as those articulated for English language arts. However, the grade-level standards reflect the discipline-specific applications of reading in content-area instruction. In this book, we confine our review of the CCSS to English language arts, as implemented by English teachers. We will examine each of these parts in this chapter, after first discussing the anchor standards in more detail.

Key Ideas and Details

The three anchor standards in this domain describe the explicit and implicit comprehension of readers as they glean the purposes and main points of the text. In addition, the domain emphasizes the importance of being able to follow plot, character development, and themes, all necessary for literary analysis.

Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, pp. 35, 38.

Figure 2.1: Guiding questions for grade-by-grade analysis of the Reading standards.

Visit go.solution-tree.com/commoncore for a reproducible version of this figure.

1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text. (R.CCR.1)

2. Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas. (R.CCR.2)

3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text. (R.CCR.3) (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 10)

Craft and Structure

The three anchor standards in this domain discuss the reader’s ability to analyze texts at the micro and macro levels. Readers should attend to the author’s craft in how he or she purposefully uses word choice, literary techniques, and organizational structures to shape the text; a character’s voice and experiences; or the interaction between the choice of genre and the information shared.

4. Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone. (R.CCR.4)

5. Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole. (R.CCR.5)

6. Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text. (R.CCR.6) (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 10)

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

In this domain, anchor standards seven through nine are dedicated to the content within and across texts, in print and in digital environments. Anchor standard seven (R.CCR.7) is also closely tied to the Writing anchor standard domain Research to Build and Present Knowledge (see NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 21), as well as the Speaking and Listening domain Comprehension and Collaboration (see NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 24). Anchor standard eight (R.CCR.8) on argumentation is not addressed in the Literature part as it is not applicable to these text types.

7. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words. (R.CCR.7)

8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence. (R.CCR.8)

9. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take. (R.CCR.9) (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 10)

Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

The tenth and final anchor standard for reading has arguably been the predominant topic of discussion about the CCSS ELA.

10. Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently. (R.CCR.10) (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 10)

The Common Core ELA and its appendices devote a considerable amount of space to this standard, noting that students’ use of complex texts has diminished since at least the 1970s, while texts used in college and the workplace have not (Chall, Conard, & Harris, 1977; Hayes, Wolfer, & Wolfe, 1996; NGA & CCSSO, 2010b). The CCSS advocate for a staircase approach to systematically raising reading comprehension and critical thinking through the purposeful use of complex texts that require students to stretch their cognitive and metacognitive abilities (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a). For students who struggle with reading, this means that they must be taught with complex texts and asked to read increasingly complex texts across the year. It is important to note, however, that the text alone should not be the only scaffold; instruction is critical for these students to progress and accelerate.

Text complexity is defined across three dimensions: (1) quantitative measures, (2) qualitative factors, and (3) reader and task considerations. Quantitative factors, using a mixture of word length, sentence length, and syllables, are familiar to high school educators. In addition, many readability formulae calculate the number of difficult words that appear in a text by comparing these to grade-level lists. Examples of quantitative measures include the Fry Readability Formula, Dale-Chall Readability Formula, and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Index (see Fisher, Frey, & Lapp, 2012), as well as commercial ones such as ATOS (used by Accelerated Reader), Source Rater (Educational Testing Service), Pearson Reading Maturity Scale (Pearson Education), Degrees of Reading Power (Questar), and Lexile (MetaMetrics). Table 2.1 compares these readability scales. Published quantitative reading scores can provide a platform for professional learning communities to begin their examination of which texts to use with their students.

Table 2.1: Text Complexity Ranges Within Grade Bands

Source: CCSSO, 2012.

The Lexile measures used in the CCSS have been revised; consequently, the measures in table 2.1 differ from those provided in appendix A of the Common Core for ELA (see NGA & CCSSO, 2010b, p. 8). For example, the original range for the grades 9–10 band was 960–1115L compared to the revised range of 1050–1335L. Similarly, the original range for the 11–CCR grade band was 1070–1220L compared to the revised range of 1185–1385L. Lexile measures are based on word frequency (semantic difficulty) and sentence length (syntactic complexity), both of which have been shown to be effective predictors of text difficulty (Lennon & Burdick, 2004).

While quantitative reading formulae are calculated by machine, qualitative factors require a human reader. Computers use mathematical formulae to estimate difficulty. Teachers and parents focus on ideas that will confuse the reader or be inappropriate for students at a given age. Furthermore, teachers use their knowledge of text structures to identify areas of difficulty that will require instruction.

Qualitative factors of texts include the following (Fisher, Frey, & Lapp, 2012; NGA & CCSSO, 2010b).

• Levels of meaning and purpose: Such as the density and complexity of the information, use of figurative language, and stated and implied purposes

• Structure: Such as the text’s genre, organization, narration, and use of text features and graphics

• Language conventionality and clarity: Such as its use of English language variations and registers

• Knowledge demands: Such as the assumed background knowledge, prior knowledge, cultural knowledge, and vocabulary knowledge

Qualitative factors can make a text more or less complex, and cannot be measured quantitatively. For example, Spoon River Anthology (Masters, 2007), a book often used in high school curricula, does not have a Lexile score because of its extensive use of poetic verse, rendering it unsuitable for quantitative measures. But the personal epitaphs of its 212 characters, all buried in a small-town cemetery, make it a complex read for adolescents. Assessing text complexity using these factors is an excellent task for members of a collaborative planning team who are experienced with using a text and are familiar with its structure.

Using the rubric in table 2.2, members of an eleventh- and twelfth-grade English team meet to discuss informational texts for use in their classrooms. They turn their attention to The Story of Art (Gombrich, 2006), an informational text on art history and criticism. The team identifies several aspects of the book that would affect its complexity. The book’s subject matter draws extensively on the background knowledge of readers in regard to historical themes. Team members note that although the book has a conversational tone and is intended for adolescent readers, its subject matter would be unfamiliar to some students.

Table 2.2: Qualitative Factors of Text Complexity

Source: Adapted from Fisher, Frey, & Lapp, 2012.

Visit go.solution-tree.com/commoncore for a reproducible version of this table.

In addition, references to the many figures in the thousand-page book disrupted the reading. For example:

But in appreciating these works, we must not forget how quickly the fashions they reflected became obsolete while the paintings have retained their appeal: the Arnolfini couple in their finery, as painted by Jan van Eyck, figure 158, would have cut funny figures at the Spanish court as painted by Diego Velázquez, figure 266, and his tightly laced Infanta, in her turn, might have been mercilessly mocked by the children portrayed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, figure 305. (Gombrich, 2006, p. 465)

The team notes that it would be helpful for students to preview the plates in advance of the reading and then refer to them again as they encountered these references in the text. By recognizing what made the text more complex, the teachers were able to design their instruction around reading this informational text, which allowed them to identify the extensive background knowledge of history while addressing the text’s unique organizational structure.

The third dimension for determining text complexity concerns the match between the reader and the task (NGA & CCSSO, 2010b). Factors that are internal to the reader include his or her cognitive capabilities, motivation, knowledge, and experiences. The task demand also influences the relative difficulty of the text. Teacher-led tasks such as an interactive read-aloud provide a high degree of scaffolding and make an otherwise difficult text much more comprehensible. Peer-led tasks, such as a small-group literature circle discussion, provide a moderate level of scaffolding as students collaborate to understand the task. Individual tasks, such as independent reading, provide the least amount of scaffolding and place most of the responsibility on the reader. In order for students to progress toward increasingly more complex texts, they need a mixture of all of these tasks (Fisher, Frey, & Lapp, 2012). An overreliance on one level of task difficulty occurs at the expense of others and can stymie a student’s progress. This is an ongoing discussion that collaborative planning teams should have as they design instruction with specific students in mind.

The anchor standards, and the grade-level standards that follow them, are far too complex to teach in a single lesson, or to teach in isolation. Keeping this concept in mind is important as collaborative team members examine these standards for in-depth reading. It is the interaction of these standards within and across domains that makes them powerful. To divide and then reassemble them as isolated lessons will undermine the enduring understandings the standards articulate. The overarching goal should be to teach the habits of effective communicators and to avoid isolated strategy instruction (Frey, Fisher, & Berkin, 2008).

In the following sections, we will examine the Reading strand’s parts—Literature and Informational Text—across grades 9–12. The grade band is an essential vantage point for viewing and discussing the CCSS, precisely because it prevents the silo effect that can occur when grade levels operate independently from one another. While grade-level planning must occur in the collaborative teams, the work of the school’s professional learning community should first and foremost foster communication and collaboration across grades in order to maximize the potential that the anchor standards afford. This horizontal collaboration ensures that all grade-level teams understand their role in relationship to teaching toward the anchor standards.

Reading Standards for Literature in Grades 9–12

This part is linked directly to narrative text types—poems, drama, and stories, including mythology, fantasy, and realistic fiction. Although nonfiction biographies and autobiographies often use a narrative structure, they are situated as a type of informational text. Students in high school English are traditionally exposed to a high volume of literature, although genres like poetry and drama are often reserved for specific genre studies units and are used more rarely across the school year. Table 2.3 contains sample titles from the text exemplars in appendix B of the Common Core State Standards (NGA & CCSSO, 2010c).

Table 2.3: Text Exemplars for Literature Texts in Grades 9–12

Genre	Grades 9–10	Grades 11–12
Stories	Bradbury (2012): Fahrenheit 451	Morrison (1994): The Bluest Eye
Drama	Fugard (1982): “Master Harold” … and the Boys	Soyinka (2003): Death and the King’s Horseman
Poetry	Poe (1984): “The Raven”	Neruda (2005): “Ode to My Suit”

Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, 2010c.

The standards for literature for each grade level are drawn directly from the anchor standards and are organized in the same manner: Key Ideas and Details, Craft and Structure, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, and Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity. We invite you and your collaborative team to discuss the standards using the four-part protocol described in figure 2.1 (page 29): (1) What is familiar? (2) What is new? (3) What may be challenging for students? (4) What may be challenging for teachers? (Visit go.solution-tree.com/commoncore for an online-only reproducible you can use to conduct analyses of other standards with your collaborative team.) We will share observations of our own to seed your discussions.

Key Ideas and Details in Literature

Table 2.4 (page 38) lists the grades 9–12 standards for this domain. The standards contain many expected elements, as well as some more challenging demands that have implications for instruction. Anchor standard one (R.CCR.1) emphasizes the importance of citing substantial evidence directly from the text in order to support explicit and inferential levels of meaning. An important skill in rhetorical writing and speaking is the ability to link textual evidence to claims, and this standard requires students to link multiple examples to their claim. Anchor standard two (R.CCR.2) challenges students to look more broadly across the text to locate central themes, connect them to details, and to further summarize the text. These are expanded in anchor standard three (R.CCR.3), in which students in ninth and tenth grades examine complex characters for stated and unstated motivations. In eleventh and twelfth grades, students also consider the author’s choices in the purposeful development of the story—in other words, the author’s craft and artistry.

Table 2.4: Literature Standards for Domain Key Ideas and Details, Grades 9–12