Common Core : Paradigmatic Shifts [1 ed.] 9781443875776, 9781443872638

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Common Core

Common Core Paradigmatic Shifts By

Jocelyn A. Chadwick

Common Core: Paradigmatic Shifts By Jocelyn A. Chadwick This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Jocelyn A. Chadwick All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7263-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7263-8

To our parents, Londell Kelso and Lucille Brown Chadwick, and Robert Donald and Barbara Pels Grassie who continue to guide us and speak to us. I also dedicate this book to “My Best Thing,” always and forever— adamantine.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables and Illustrations ................................................................... ix List of Abbreviations ................................................................................... x Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Preface ....................................................................................................... xii Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Rodrigo Joseph Rodríguez Section One: The Shift: Standards and the Core Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 A Brief Overview—Where Did They Come From? Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 18 Standards vs. Common Core State Standards Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 31 The Cross-Curricular Component—Its History, Its Re-Emergence, Its Controversy Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 57 Teaching Research and Critical Thinking Skills: Research to Build and Present Knowledge Section Two: Creating a Protean Learning Environment Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 72 Collaborative Learning Communities Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 100 Re-visioning Delivery: How We Teach; Expectations— Teachers and Students

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 110 Student-Teacher Engagement—CLCs Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 117 Models—Twelve Teachers’ Narratives from Around the Country, Sharing their Expertise Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 155 Maintaining Quality of Instruction: The Core Standards are Decidedly Not Curriculum Section Three: Challenges: Instruction Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 166 Cross-Curricular Content—Social Studies, Science, and Humanities Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 174 Technology, Databases, and Media Reflections and Resources ....................................................................... 202 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 204 Index ........................................................................................................ 210

LIST OF TABLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Table: “What Oklahoma Standards Do and Not Do,” Ex. 2-11 Table: 2005 TEKs, Grade 6-Reading Comprehension, Ex. 3-27 Table: Common Core State Standards: Reading Standards for Literature: Grade 6, including Key Ideas and Details, Craft and Structure, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, Ex. 3- 28,29,30 Illustration: 2014 NCLE Report on teacher preparedness for implementing CCSS cross-curricular requirement, Ex. 3-31 Illustration: 2014 NCLE Report on student preparedness for learning CCSS cross-curricular requirement, Ex. 3-31 Illustration: Robert Marzano’s: “Critical and Creative Thinking Process,” Ex. 5-61 Image: Title page of Daniel Defoe’s, Journal of the Plague Year, Ex. 6-67 Image: From Michelangelo: Quest for Genius art exhibit in the Ontario Art Gallery, Ex. 6-68 Table: Robert Marzano’s Figure 2.6 “Research Results for Cooperative Learning,” Ex. 7-70

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE TEXT

ADE AGO CCSS CLC DOE ELA ESEA ESL IRA MLA NASA NCES NCLB NCLE NCSS NCTE NSTA PLC SpEd

Association of Departments of English Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, Canada) Common Core State Standards Collaborative Learning Community US Department of Education English language arts Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) English as a Second Language International Reading Association Modern Language Association National Aeronautics and Space Administration National Center for Education Statistics No Child Left Behind Act (2002) National Center for Literacy Education National Council of Social Studies National Council of Teachers of English National Science Teachers of America Professional Learning Community Special Education

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the participation, collaboration, observation of the eleven English language arts, mathematics and social studies teachers around the country, this book would never have been possible. In addition, the many conversations and panels to which I have listened and contributed and in which I have participated, I thank for providing an ongoing, protean tapestry-perspective. I must acknowledge my first teaching experience and collaborations: Irving Senior High School, Irving, Texas. The administration, the English department, and amazing students—these experiences did indeed show me what could be accomplished for students. In addition, I must acknowledge the inestimable contribution Dr. Kimberly Parker’s students made to this book, for at the end of the day, education is about our students. And finally, I want to thank my collaborators, John E. Grassie, Patricia Taggart Munro, and Judith A. Purvis. In so many ways, their belief in this project and dedication to seeing it through made this book possible. Jocelyn A. Chadwick Cambridge, MA

PREFACE

What Common Core State Standards: Paradigmatic Shifts is not: this exploration of the Core is not an exploration into assessment, the argument for or against formative and summative evaluation, an assessment on educators, politicians, and policymakers, or railing against vendors. This exploration of the Core is not seeking to praise any one person or to vilify any one person with regard to this phase of education reform. While Common Core State Standards addresses both English language arts and Mathematics and this exploration of standards does apply to both, the focus of this book lies with English language arts. My rationale for this focus lies not only with the early focus by standards-makers but also because to this day, English language arts—the courses themselves, the skills, and the foci—thread through all other content areas and are a required core content area K-12. Rather, this exploration of Common Core State Standards aims to be a part of the conversation the Core ignited, literally, across the United States. It is my hope that the contents of this book and the contributions by teachers and their students will shed some light on this issue, will foment reflection about how and why we teach, and will enable us as educators to assert more voice and guidance in the educational-policy movements that have always been with us and will continue to be, even after the Core gives way to a “new and improved approach.” It is the ultimate aim of this exploration to say, resoundingly, YES, WE CAN! Yes, we can provide for all of our students a consistent, coherent, cohesive learning experience for college and career quilting each state without sacrificing our individual uniqueness, without compromising our students’ individual uniqueness, and with leaving our siloed content areas to collaborate and share “across the aisle,” for the sake and future of our students.

INTRODUCTION RODRIGO JOSEPH RODRÍGUEZ

Underneath the cut of bright and dazzling cloth, pulsing beneath the jewelry, the life of the book world is quite serious. Its real life is about creating and producing and distributing knowledge; about making it possible for the entitled as well as the dispossessed to experience one’s own mind dancing with another’s; about making sure that the environment in which this work is done is welcoming, supportive. —Toni Morrison, 2008, p. 190

Years ago, while studying at Kenyon College, I read Toni Morrison’s speech upon her acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She presented her remarks on November 6, 1996. Nearly twenty years later, her speech is just as relevant today as it was then to communicate the need for a larger understanding of peace that requires the “dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one” (p. 187). Moreover, Morrison describes this act as a humane and necessary habit and skill, or an “activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in.” She reminds us that this kind of peace must be secured, and thus “warrants vigilance,” as the reader and writer enact and struggle to fulfill their essential labors for survival. In a similar dialogue about imagination, knowledge, and labor, I’d like to add the work of teachers, who Jocelyn Chadwick has captured and given voice to, found in the book Common Core State Standards: Paradigmatic Shifts. The reader, writer, learner, and teacher are braided in this book as we advance the standards dialogue that calls for individual and collective action—from our classroom and schools to policymaking arenas such as boardrooms and capitols—to enact change and sustain progress. We learn about the historical development, existence, and influence standards have held through the centuries and across the states in U.S. education. As a teacher educator with interests in world languages, literatures, and cultures, I am drawn to Chadwick’s argument for and vision about literacy learning standards for all children to fulfill the promise of equality and

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equity across the United States. Her commitment to “English/language arts as a coherent, central instructional strand” further advances our commitment to literacy learning and instruction that are sustaining across content areas and disciplines (Chapter 1, p. 2). Her teacher voice of experience impels us to listen, learn, and act. Namely, the dialogue she establishes on standards and relationships for quality teaching and learning assures that we are present, active, and influential in a wide range of spaces and repertoires with our students, because teachers and students learn and problem-solve together. The inclusive, conversational tone with pragmatic inquiry and reflection that Chadwick offers to experienced teachers, pre-service teachers, administrators, education faculty, librarians, parents, and researchers is refreshing, motivating, and instructional. In fact, her tone reaches a level of empowerment in various classrooms that become engaging laboratories and dramatic stages of learning and deliberation as we read on. Hers is a deliberate, holistic labor for us to experience how standards can function at higher levels of expectation in our teaching, thinking, and learning with our students. Joy and optimism appear in these chapters as reservoirs of hope and energy, which can be contagious and life changing. The voices, narratives, and perspectives provided include administrators, artists, authors, critics, historians, parents, policymakers, políticos, students, teachers, and thinkers involved at varying levels in meaning-making at the intersection of language arts and literacy. Essentially, we must face the urgent reality of a changing society Chadwick describes for us: What we need now and will need even more in the future is for our students to be thinkers who can think and act and engage so they will be able to understand and function and experience a quality of life unhobbled, unfettered by lack of knowledge, lack of ability to process, lack of ability and knowledge to connect the sometimes seemingly disparate dots across cultures, times, locations, experiences—difference. (Chapter 2, p. 15)

The research and perspectives presented in Common Core State Standards: Paradigmatic Shifts are necessary for a dialogue on the work to be done in literacy education that’s supportive, welcoming, and collaborative. In addition, the models, strategies, and reflections with resources are treasures for us to adopt and adapt in our very own prekindergarten through post-graduate classrooms with our students as well as in professional learning workshops and programs with our teaching colleagues.

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Our shared work and vision holds a big promise in the literacy lives of our students, and the generations to follow, as they strive to reach their potential to become caring, learned, and responsible citizens in diverse environments within a global society. Like the life of an enduring book, our teaching life is just as serious and significant. We have the teacher power and moral compass to awaken the “peace of the dancing mind” in our students and teacher colleagues that both Morrison and Chadwick imagine and ignite for us. Rodrigo Joseph Rodríguez, PhD Assistant Professor, English Education ProgramUniversity of Texas at El Paso

References Chadwick, Jocelyn. Common Core State Standards: Paradigmatic Shifts. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing LTD, 2015. Morrison, Toni. “The Dancing Mind.” What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. Ed. Caroolyn C. Denard. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1998, 2008. 187-190. Retrieved from http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_tmorrison.html#.VI3yR tLF-uI

SECTION ONE: THE SHIFT: STANDARDS AND THE CORE

“It was a very optimistic time: we really thought as governors, that we could really make a difference, and we could do it over a relatively short period of time. The White House was right with us,” said Thomas H. Kean, an early leader in the standards movement who took part in the event as the Republican governor of New Jersey. “We haven’t had a moment like that since, on any subject.” (“1989 Education Summit Casts Long Shadow: Historic Sit-Down Propelled National Drive for Standards-Based Accountability,” Education Week, 24 September 2014, 1:18)

As I was sitting on a plane reading Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind in the winter of 2012—with highlighter and pencil in hand—a fellow passenger asked me if I were a teacher. After I said yes, we began a conversation in which he, despite not being an educator, did most of the talking. What he said was quite revealing in light of the present focus on standards. Essentially, he explained that he and his wife accepted his extensive travel schedule primarily because it allowed them to secure excellent schools for their two children. Moreover, their consideration and subsequent purchase of a home was solely based on the schools they had determined to be best. To paraphrase this passenger, “teacher quality, rigor, standards, student engagement, and input from parents in the community,” were key factors in their decisions regarding their children’s schools. As he continued to talk, I wondered, “What happens to those students whose parents do not or cannot consider such an option for their children?” Do not all students merit the same quality of education, the best teachers, regardless of where they live? While many factors shape a child’s education, one factor that has sparked spirited conversation and focus—both pro and con—for some time, and is especially dominant now, are standards—at present, Common Core State Standards (CCSS). And because the CCSS focus heavily on literacy, they have emerged as a lightning rod for educators, politicians, parents, and business.

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Section One

So, here we are: from 1893 to the present, standards and their forerunners have surrounded us as ELA teachers—our preparation, our instruction, and our perspectives. What returns us to the subject in 2014 is not only the concern of educators and schools, but also the collective voices of parents, such as my fellow passenger. Across the country, parents are expressing concern and taking action to ensure that their children receive the best possible education. Many have expressed their opinions and have subsequently affected policy at state, federal, and community levels. Perhaps, now, as the standards’ situation appears to be curiouser and curiouser, we English language arts teachers, K-12, for ourselves should peer a bit more deeply into how we actually arrived here, reflect, think, and then speak and act on the behalf of our students—all of our students, everywhere. An example of this recommended perspective that includes speaking and acting is the new NCLE Report, Remodeling Literacy Learning Together: Paths to Standards Implementation (2014). I reference the Report here and in this first chapter because it focuses on the voices, expertise, and recommendations from over 5,000 teachers, instructional specialists, and administrators with this objective, goal, standard in mind—namely, that all students are entitled to effective, engaging, and relevant literacy learning. So, how did we get here? Perhaps, we may have already arrived…and the question now is what do we do?

CHAPTER ONE A BRIEF OVERVIEW— WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

As teachers, especially K-12 ELA teachers, we have heard and read the term, standards, for so long that as ubiquitous as the term seems, the conversation today is as though standards are new, or different to us. In reality, however, many of us are unfamiliar with the origins or original intents of the term. My curiosity about this topic really began with conversations, like the one on the plane, over Common Core State Standards. Over the past few years, I have read, written, spoken, and listened to educators (and non-educators) talk about the Core—its unpacking, its intentions, its “political subtext,” its “ham-handedness,” its rigor, its aim to remove “any semblance of what ELA teachers love to do”—namely, teach literature and the joy of reading, and instructional concerns.1 I have, at times, found myself parroting Lewis Carroll’s Alice, for the journey itself continues to evolve as curiouser and curiouser, and, like her, I have sometimes “ . . .quite forgot how to speak good English.” Right now, from what I have discerned, several positions on the Core exist: 1) Supporters of the Core who, at the same time, find themselves distancing themselves from apparent controversial persons or issues, including the name Common Core; 2) Non-supporters of the Core who find the Core intrusive and an attempt to remove instructional power from ELA teachers; 3) Politicians who support or do not support the Core based on their political stances and agenda; 4) College/university educators who are curious about the Core and want to know more about it; 5) College/university educators who view the Core as an affront to how they prepare ELA teachers. And, 6) A collective group, some refer to as “the vendors” who want to figure out how to market, redact, adjust, and create new content and content organization for Core requirements.

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Chapter One

Notice the absence of a particular constituency? I have. Over the two years I have been reading and researching to satisfy my curiosity about standards, I still miss any substantive conversations about our students— their voices, their future, their aspirations as 21st century literacy learners. Now, let me say one thing: I am absolutely no Little Mary Sunshine, nor am I naïve. Indeed, I am an English teacher. So, my curiosity put me on this path, and it has been, thus far, enlightening, frightening, and even hopeful. The aim of this book is not to explore exhaustively standards or the Core, but rather, to spark the beginning of a conversation on how we arrived here with the term “standards” and our relationship with them. In addition, I want to know why can’t we, as educators, parents, and policymakers, agree that all of our children, Pre-K-12, deserve and must have the kind of education preparedness we know they need now and as they move into the world at large? Codifying goals and objectives for public K-12 education in the United States began as early as 1892 with the Committee of Ten.2 I use the words objectives and goals because, as a reviewer-colleague cited to me, my personal reading of this document and my understanding them as standards was not necessarily so, for the actual term, standards, is not used in the Committee of Ten original document. Well, —based on a closer reading, this statement is not entirely accurate. The term does appear twice in this document in the context of standards: “From this point of view, Tables I., II, and III. may be considered to set a standard towards which secondary schools should tend; and not a standard to which they can at once conform” (The Committee of Ten: Main Report, 22). What this Report and others that followed illustrate is the ongoing effort to set goals, objectives, and standards for K-12 education.3 Another factor that emerges in these documents is the focus and identification of English language arts as a coherent, central instructional strand, particularly at the secondary level. The actual term, standards, clearly appears in A Nation At Risk, a report prepared for the Reagan administration in 1983. And educators, such as Rick Ginsberg, “Educational Reform: Overview, Reports of Historical Significance,” cite the report as the primary catalyst for ushering in the “standards period initiatives,” thereby codifying the concept and establishment of standards as a means of seeking instructional coherence. After years and years of adjusting to the “swinging pendulum” of pedagogical trends—both effective and not—and after individual states’ and districts’ efforts to conform English language arts curricula, we now share Dante’s conundrum at the obscured path. Do we embrace the idea of

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the new concept for literacy learning, or do we hold fast to the notions that have contextualized the teaching of ELA since its inception? How did we come to the point at which some view our content area as separate, practically isolated parts, not to be melded as a communicative and critical thinking whole? Many contemporary, informative articles have addressed this conundrum for an extended period of time: Jeffrey Mirel’s “The Traditional High School: Historical Debates Over Its Nature and Function,” William Sewell’s “Entrenched Pedagogy: A History of Stasis in the English language arts Curriculum in United States Secondary Schools,” H. M. Kliebard’s The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958, R. Tremmel’s “Changing the way we think in English education: a conversation in the universal barbershop,” and R. P. Yagelski’s “Stasis and Change: English education and the crisis of sustainability,” are a few. Binding each of these articles and others on this topic is the agreed notion that in order to move forward now, we must look backward and understand how English language arts at the secondary level came to be. This chapter, then, is both a flashback and a flash-forward to where we were and where we are headed in terms of teaching English language arts. As we look backwards to understand better our present, the progression of how we inherited not only the concept of standards but also the multifaceted quilt of our content area provides an interesting, sometimes hopeful journey. It is a journey that as we now stand at an instructional crossroads, we must explore deeply and then ask the hard questions with regard to standards and instructional practice. This journey necessarily takes us back more than a century ago, beginning with The Committee of Ten.

The Committee of Ten—1893 In 1892 the National Educational Association appointed the Committee of Ten with the task to create a standardized curriculum for public school students who were, as viewed by the committee, primarily not collegebound. That said, the Committee believed these students should receive the same rigorous instruction, even though many would never complete a full education, the report asserted. Led by Harvard University President Charles Eliot, along with five other university presidents, the Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, two Head Masters, and one professor, the committee meticulously created a report in response to their assigned task, and James Baker submitted the report to the National Council of Education in 1893. Within the larger committee resided nine smaller sub-

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committees, or conferences, each dedicated to a specific content area. The Committee of Ten provided each of the nine conferences, what we would today describe as guiding questions, ten of them, to focus work and discussions. Of course, English was one of the nine conferences, made up of ten men—six professors, one teacher from Michigan State Normal School, two high school teachers, and one Superintendent. While the report clearly focuses on a coalesced K-12 educational curriculum, its emphasis and specifications on English language arts emerge clearly, particularly the secondary curricular framework. What clearly emerges also from this report is the identification and delineation and codification on the core content areas, its focus primarily on the primacy of secondary education, and the purpose of this coalesced curriculum on preparation for students.4 What is interesting about the overall report lies in how the participating members actually view public school education holistically. First, public school education is decidedly not for those students who are destined to attend universities, for it was assumed the majority of these students would attend private schools. Rather, public school education, according to the Committee, should focus on those students who will attend a portion of K6 or even complete high school and become members of society at large; it is with this goal that the committees created a national curriculum. For ELA, this report sets in motion what and how we would approach our content area—our perspective, our content knowledge, and our instructional goals and approaches. The English sub-committee, the Conference, comprised of six professors, one head master, one superintendent, and two teachers, determined the following: . . . In several passages of this report the idea recurs that training in English must go hand in hand with the study of the other subjects. Thus the Conference hope for the study of the history and geography of the Englishspeaking people, so far as these illustrate the development of the English language. . . It is the fundamental idea in this report that the study of every other subject should contribute to the pupil’s training in English; and that the pupil's capacity to write English should be made available, and to be developed, in every other department. (Baker, 21).5

Over and over again, beginning with this Report, English, and now English language arts (ELA), emerges as the core content area for teaching skills that inform and support the other content areas in training students to become productive citizens of society. One thought we should carry forth from the Report of the Committee of Ten is its notion of the necessity for a national curriculum with its goal

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being to graduate students who contribute intellectually and critically to society. In a polled 98-teacher response to two of the ten guiding questions: 7. Should the subject be treated differently for pupils who are going to college, for those who are going to scientific school, and for those who, presumably, are going to neither? 8. At what age should this differentiation begin, if any be recommended? Teachers resoundingly and unanimously "declare[d] that every subject which is taught at all [italics mine] in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be, or at what point his education is to cease." (Baker, 17) 6 This point from the past does in fact inform our present; one recurring observation and comment, including from some educators, lies with the notion that the CCSS push some students beyond their capabilities and experiences. Even some of those who created the Core expressed this perspective, which will be discussed in Chapter 2. In addition, we dare not assume, much less support the dangerous pitfall of hobbling our students because we feel they cannot navigate successfully the rigors of our ELA classrooms with critical reading, critical thinking, and critical writing. Successful implementation of this goal on a national level, as this 1892 report suggests, however, lies not only with students and their environments and experiences, but also, and as importantly, with us, the ELA teachers. For us, then, one key query emerges: how do we accomplish this task within the ever-changing contexts our students and we encounter? Twenty-five years later, as the United States’ demographics began to change significantly and more students were remaining in school longer, education and its standards, particularly at the secondary level, required another revaluation and revision.

A Report of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education: Cardinal Principle of Secondary education—1918 Whereas the Committee of Ten focused on a rigorous national curriculum for all students who would complete grade twelve—all students not including immigrants, many girls, and children of color (See

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note 7)—another committee twenty-five years later would propose a completely different path for public education in the United States. As Jeffrey Mirel in "The Traditional High School" asserts, with a greater influx of immigrants, even psychologists had firm opinions about the correct path secondary education should take: It is not hard to see where the battle lines would have been drawn, even then, especially, as a wave of new immigrants was bringing tens of thousands of foreign adolescents to our shores. G. Stanley Hall, psychologist and president of Clark University, denounced the Committee of Ten's curriculum recommendations, because, he said, most high-school students were part of a 'great army of incapables . . . who should be in schools for the dullards or subnormal children.' (Mirel, 15). 7

The key criticism by Hall and others with regard to the Committee of Ten's report was identified as the report's lack of educational equity within a democracy. Whereas the Committee of Ten recommended a clearly classical and rigorous liberal arts approach, in 1918 the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education created a response: Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. With this Commission, a word with which we are now quite familiar, differentiation, emerges in order to address students’ varying abilities, interests, and goals: “The character of the secondaryschool population has been modified by the entrance of large numbers of pupils of widely varying capacities, aptitudes social heredity, and destinies in life.” (Commission on The Reorganization of Secondary Education, 6).8 Democracy, the ideal of democracy, differentiation, fulfillment, “wellbeing,” personal and social interests, leisure, and ethical character are recurring anchor-terms within this document. To this Commission, the “main objectives of education” are health, command of fundamental processes, worthy home membership, vocation, and citizenship, worthy use of leisure, ethical character. (“Cardinal Principles,” 11)9 Ironically, with both of these approaches, neither group believes that the majority of high school students are capable of or interested in tackling rigorous learning. The Committee of Ten supports the rigorous curriculum but at the same time asserts that most students will not complete the secondary level, much less attend college. The “Cardinal Principles” create differentiated tracks, ostensibly tailored to each student’s uniqueness in aptitudes and abilities, understanding all the while they are supporting exactly what contradicts their stated overall objective--education equity. While all students under the “Cardinal Principles” who complete high school will receive a high school diploma, the diplomas do

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not at all represent an equal, equitable education. Although each report with its recommendations contains unique features and appears logical, the consequences of both of these approaches, as Mirel asserts, “ . . . in reality . . . had grossly unequal impact on white working-class young people and the growing number of black students who entered high schools in the 1930s and 1940s. These students were disproportionately assigned to nonacademic tracks (particularly the general track) and watered-down academic courses.” (Mirel, 18)10 With regard to ELA, specifically, the 1892 Committee of Ten and the 1918 Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education both concurred on the import of all high school students taking four years of English. A report one year earlier influenced this position. With the 1917 report, Reorganization of English In Secondary Schools—a collaboration between the National Education Association and National Council of Teachers of English—we begin to see clearly the pivotal role English language arts would have in the secondary classroom. What distinguishes the Cardinal Principles Of Secondary Schools report from its predecessor emerges with the de-emphasis on using English at the secondary level singularly as college-prep, even though the Committee of Ten did not believe the majority of students would complete the entirety of grades 9-12. Whereas the Committee of Ten’s English report is more content-focused, the 1917 collaborative report focuses on the student as the nucleus of a process engendering “ . . . the habit of thoughtful reading and the joy of study, . . . [resulting in at the college level a student capable of] intelligence in gathering and digesting information [rather than a student imbued with] information as intelligence.” (Hosic, 7).11 In so many ways, this approach parallels what in the 21st century pedagogical strategies for ELA would be identified as relevance, language learning, and producing an “informed member of society,” objectives/goals espoused in NCTE’s 1996 Standards for the English language arts.

What Happened between 1919 and 1960? By 1852, compulsory school attendance in every state began with Massachusetts and concluded with Mississippi in 1918. Between 1919 and 1960, several education reforms developed, including the following: Congress passed the G.I. Bill, federally funding college education for veterans not only at public but also private and religious institutions in 1944. U.S. Supreme Court rejected and therefore made illegal racial segregation in government schools in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954. In 1958, Congress enacted the National Defense Education

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Act, thereby providing federal funds to local public schools for science, mathematics, foreign language education, and guidance counseling. Congress enacts ESEA, also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, in 1965, providing federal funding for local public schools.12 As these earlier reports placed what we would eventually identify as standards reform at the core of educational conversation, the 1940s and the 1960s saw the United States experience a huge demographic influx, the Depression, the conclusion of one World War and the onset and conclusion of another, and the seeming surety of the American Dream via the new middle class. Education was, indeed, once more the subject of revision and re-tooling. This time, however, once the revisions began, no one realized we would remain, almost perpetually, in a state of a protean revising as we teach mode.

Other Reform Markers: Secondary Schools for American Youth (1944); The American High School Today (1959); A Nation at Risk (1980) Between 1944 and 1983, educational studies and revisions of K-12 education, and of ELA, continued to chisel and define what researchers deemed appropriate national standards. Among the critical studies, L.A. Williams’ Secondary Schools for American Youth (1944), James B. Conant’s The American High School Today (1959) and the pivotal A Nation At Risk Report (1983) under the Reagan administration provide an interesting and revealing look into how the concept, and eventually, the term itself, standards settled firmly into the educational fabric. From Williams’s perspective, the primary problem with secondary education’s not being as effective emerged because of “ . . . youth from every race and every nationality that now live within these United States. These youth bring with them all the traditions, customs, points of view, attitudes, intellectual status, social and civic training, and the like to be found in the entire population. [In essence,] the high school population has . . . become increasingly representative of all occupational groups and is almost a true cross section of the total population.” (Williams, 119). 13 William finally concludes, “ . . .the fact is that a very great proportion of present high school students are incapable of learning so-called liberal subjects as they are at present organized.” (Williams, 120).14 While the majority of Williams’s analysis explores and deconstructs what he identifies as “how secondary schools have become an organic part of public schooling,” the secondary portion of his book deconstructs

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curriculum, courses, assessment management, and core (basic) courses vs. common courses. His assessment is the following: The student population in today’s high schools is as varied, as rich and as poor, as cultured and as crude, as industrious and as lazy, as frugal and as spendthrift, as healthy and as ill, as is the total population whose children they are. The high school finds that its pabulum of verbal symbolisms, its emphasis upon academic learning and scholarly pursuits, and its insistence upon intellectual refinements produce only irritation, stubborn resistance, or open revolt . . .. It is this heterogeneous and conglomerate mass of youth which the high school has to receive and try to fashion into a citizenry imbued with ideals of freedom, justice, square dealing, thrift, frugality, self-reliance, civic responsibility, respect for property, conformity, to law and order; in short, to make them into citizens capable of governing themselves and others like themselves. (Williams, 497-98).15

Although Williams’s text deconstructs minutely the problems, as he perceives them, he fails, however, to outline any clear path to address the challenge he has described. In addition, his views on high school as a preparation for college entrance are equally didactic and exclusionary: “It is no kindness to direct toward a college career—or any other career—a youth whom biology [italics mine] has disqualified for that career. Youths and parents alike may be greatly disappointed, but that is far easier to bear than the disillusionment which would follow failure in the ill chose career.” (Williams, 525).16 Fifteen years later, James B. Conant’s The American High School Today: A First Report to Interested Citizens (1959) buttresses Williams’s position. Essentially, Conant’s report, with regard to English, parallels the aforementioned studies and reports. Conant’s essential thesis on which he anchors the study emerges with his distinction between comprehensive vs. college preparatory schools, with a focus on the comprehensive schools that include his delineations of ability grouping (Conant, 49). 17 It is Conant’s assertion that 80-85% of the student population is not collegefocused but vocational and therefore should not receive the caliber of instructional rigor the other 15-20% should receive. For English, these comprehensive high schools focus on composition because with these skills, students may be better prepared for what he identifies as “marketability” or trade courses (Conant, 51-55). 18 An interesting counter-point to Conant’s report emerged with James D. Koerner’s “The Tragedy of The Conant Report” in 1960. That Koerner was adamantly opposed to Conant’s assessment and recommendations for comprehensive schools is more than evident early in

12

Chapter One

the article: “I had his recommended program, almost item for item, in English, “social studies,” “vocational education,” and all the rest. Only what I had was not education. Neither was it training. Not was it even “adjustment.” It was an unspeakable abomination.” (Koerner, 121). 19 Ironically, while being passed from disconnected vocational program to vocational program, no one noticed Koerner’s penchant for books and intellectual rigor. He describes this oversight, employing sobering and persuasive rhetoric: It is not so much that they disbelieve is students’ intellectual capacitates (though they do in considerable measure) but that they believe other things, particularly Mr. Conant’s ‘marketable skills,’ are more important for most students . . . I would suggest to Mr. Conant that nobody has the right to assume that any student will not go to college. Nobody has the right to assume, because a student may think he will not go to college, that he should not be educated. Nobody has the right to encourage or coerce students into becoming anything less than they might become—and nobody knows, least of all the students themselves, what they might become. In short, nobody has the right to shut intellectual doors . . .. [T]he idea that most young people cannot even be introduced to vast stretches of mankind’s hard-won stock of knowledge and understanding must continue to be named for what it is—a doctrine of educational defeat. (Koerner, 124).20

What Koerner reveals in this article is the core of the argument up to this time, regarding educational standards, as well as the position ELA plays on both sides. From the nineteenth century and the middle part of the twentieth, secondary education always includes English, but the focus of all the reports asserts that the majority of students do not require any substantive sort of intellectual rigor or exploration or discovery, particularly if they do not follow a college path. Gender, class, and ethnicity are key components in these early decisions and views. In addition to Koerner, one can only wonder with such an insular and separate perspective, what would have happened to Steve Jobs and other entrepreneurs of the world who customized and blended their paths? By the time A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform: An Open Letter to the American People: A Report to the Nation and to the Secretary of Education emerges from the Reagan administration, it appears public education, especially secondary education, is in line for significant revision and rethinking once more. With this report, we begin to see elements taken from the previous studies and reports but also more contemporary-driven objectives for all students—that also includes the notion of tracking, or as Conant identified, ability grouping.

A Brief Overview—Where Did They Come From?

13

Key findings included, establishment of “the core modern curriculum” comprised of 4 years of English, 3 years of mathematics, 3 years of science, 3 years of social studies, one half-year of computer science, and for college-bound students, 2 years of foreign language. (Department of Education, 32).21 The report’s recommendation specifically for English for all students is more global and more rigorous than previous reposts and studies: The teaching of English in high school should equip graduates to: (a) comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and use what they read; (b) write wellorganized, effective papers; (c) listen effectively and discuss ideas intelligently; and (d) know our literary heritage and how it enhances imagination and ethical understanding, and how it relates to the customs, ideas, and values of today’s life and culture. (Department of Education, 33).22

According to the report, the ultimate aim now for English at the secondary level is to enable and empower students to develop and exercise requisite skills for modern times: critical thinking honed through reading and writing and discussing and listening, cultural and historical understanding and appreciation through experience with varied literatures.

Codification and National Revision: No Child Left Behind and CCSS One codified response to the “At Risk” report emerged in 1996 with NCTE’s Standards for the English language arts. NCTE provides an ELA roadmap for standards—a road map that still guides ELA curriculum development to this day. Among its attributes, the NCTE standards’ guide tackles what no other report, survey, or study did in the past, namely, the earnest inclusion of all students. All students should be expected to and encouraged to attain as much as they can. In addition to this mission, the document foreshadows the 21st century emphasis on cross-curricular importance, critical thinking in a global community, and the importance of relevance in a student’s learning. In short, the NCTE document redefines literacy learning: “Although the standards focus primarily on content, we also underscore the importance of other dimensions of language learning. In particular, we believe that questions of why, when, and how students grow and develop as language users are also critical and must be addressed by those who translate the standards into practice.” (NCTE and IRA, 2).23 The standards this document set forth focus on what is identified as “the expanded

14

Chapter One

definition of literacy”: “reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and visually representing.” (NCTE and IRA, 6).24 Success of this instructional position would necessarily include, according to the document, “a broad range of texts,” including literary, informational, academic texts, studentproduced texts, speeches, newspapers, and a vast array of other digital and media sources. (NCTE and IRA, 13).25 With reference to the import of ELA and its relationship with other core content areas, the assertion is that “English language arts is important not only as subjects in and of themselves, but also as supporting skills for students’ learning in all other subjects.” (NCTE and IRA, 7).26 As discussions and “re-tooling” of education continued, two other developments in conjunction with NCTE’s Standards have had a profound impact on K-12 education and particularly on ELA curriculum and instruction: the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) 2001 and Common Core State Standards (CCSS), 2009. Like the NCLB, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), continues to seek, it asserts, “ a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.”(United States Department of Education, 2001).27 ELA remained a focal point, as it had in other reports and studies. Funding for ESEA continues to be subject to political parties and their agendas, however. To further solidify English language arts’ import in other content areas, science and social studies developed parallel core standards in 2014 that state specifically the necessity for these content areas to foment and sustain skills students learn in ELA.

Notes 1

The following articles and discussions on these issues illustrate some of the ongoing conversations: Stan Karp. “The Problems with the Core,” rethinking schools, 28, no. 2 (2013), rethinkingschools.org; Julie Borowski, “Top 10 Reasons to Oppose Common Core,” Freedomworks (July) 2013, freedomworks.org; Catherine Gerwertz, “Success of Standards Depends on Translation for Classroom,” Education Week: Math, Literacy, & Common Standards: Mapping out the landscape of academic content and instruction in the common-core era. 31, no. 29 (2012): s6-s11. Also available online: edweek.org; Jeff Baxter, “The Standards Are Working In My Classroom,” Education Week: Commentary. 34, no. 5 (2014): 23; Liana Heitan, “Under Common Core, Teachers Band Together to Build Math Coherence,” Education Week: Making Sense of the Math: Common-Core Math In Practice. 34, no. 12 (2014): s10-s11. Also available educationweek.org; Micahel Q. McShane, “The controversial Common Core,” American Enterprise Institute

A Brief Overview—Where Did They Come From?

15

(November 2013): aei.org; Adrienne Lu, “Q&A: Common questions about the Common Core,” USAToday (3 December 2013), usatoday.com. 2 James Baker; hereafter cited by last name and page number. The import of the Report of the Committee of Ten lies in not only its initial vision of expectations for secondary education, of which English is a integral part, but also the report provides an insight into how the committee members viewed the majority of American children. 3 Other early reports, studies, and surveys include Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools (1917), Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (1928), Secondary Schools for American Youth (1944), The American High School Today (1959) which will be explored later. 4 Baker, 51. “. . . the duties of life that small portion of children in the country--a portion small in number, but very important to the welfare of the nation--who show themselves able to profit by an education prolonged to the eighteenth year, and whose parents are able to support them while they remain so long at school. . . . A secondary school programme intended for national use must therefore be made for these children whose education is not to be pursued beyond the secondary school. The preparation of a few pupils for college or scientific school should in the ordinary secondary school be the incidental, and not the principal object. (Baker, 51). 5 Baker, 51. Committee of Ten, “Requirements For Admission To College,” the committee asserts only an “insignificant percentage” of students will complete secondary and move onto college. The Committee’s perspective of secondary education’s purpose was to provide an educational curriculum for students, who would, more than likely, not remain in school until their 18th year. 6 Baker, 17. “A Simplification of Programmes” from Report of the Committee of Ten: quite interestingly, by the time the Committee did elicit input from teachers, their resounding agreement that all children should receive the same caliber of education foreshadows pedagogical positions today. 7 Mirel’s article keenly identifies the positives and negatives of the early reports. 8 Cardinal Principals of Secondary Education, 6. Hereafter cited as “Cardinal Principals” and page number. This report is the first to address differentiation and its necessity in public education, along with the continued assertion that English represents an essential component in a child’s education, particularly at the secondary level. 9 “Cardinal Principals,” 11. The focus on leisure and ethics and citizenship are also closely related to ELA in this report. 10 Mirel, 18. What is particularly disturbing but accurate with Mirel’s article lies in the educational inequity. 11 James Hosic, Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools; hereafter cited by last name and page number. One core idea revealed in The Preface lies with a sentence that presages our present, global focus on just what kind of students do we as ELA teachers seek to produce: “ What college teachers delight to find is not so much information as intelligence, intelligence in gathering and digesting information.” Today we routinely identify this goal as critically thinking students

16

Chapter One

and our pedagogical approaches as inquiry-based. See also Section IX. Report of the Committee on Literature in the Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Grades (Senior High School), 63-84. 12 For more information on these initiatives, please see the following: http://www2.ed.gov/policy/landing.jhtml?src=pn; http://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/get-involved/federal-courtactivities/brown-board-education-re-enactment/history.aspx 13 L.A. Williams, Secondary Schools for American Youth, 119; hereafter cited by last name and page number. Diversity and all it entails, to Williams, creates its own set of seemingly insurmountable issues for American education. 14 Williams, 120. It is here Williams begins to hone his vocational-focused thesis. 15 Williams, 497-98. Williams’s disdain for the majority of America’s high school students makes it clear beyond any doubt. 16 Williams, 525. It would appear from Williams’s positions that students who do not fit into his acceptable biological paradigm would have little or no success beyond his limited definition, simply because of their culture, race, or ethnicity. 17 James Conant, American High Schools Today: First Report to Interested Citizens, 49. Hereafter cited by last name and page number. 18 Conant, 51-55. In this section, “ Recommendation 7: Diversified Programs for the Development of Marketable Skills,” Conant outlines in detail how he defines marketable skills. It should be noted that the distinction between how we see today, ELA classes functioning as vehicles preparing students to enter a global culture, economy, marketplace, for example, is starkly different from Conant’s description. 19 Koerner, 121. Koerner’s article is both impassioned and persuasive significantly due to his first-person account. 20 Koerner, 124. Koerner’s view here also provides a rebuttal to Williams’s views in Secondary Schools for American Youth. 21 Department of Education, 32; hereafter cited as DOE and page number. In this section of the report, “Recommendation A: Content,” English language arts is clearly positioned as a consistent requirement, not only for K-6 but a requirement for 9-12. 22 DOE, 33. In this section of the report, “Recommendation A: Content,” specific recommendations emerge with regard to all content areas. For ELA, the recommendations reflect a blend of the Committee of Ten, the collaborative 1917 report from NEA and NCTE, and Cardinal Principles. 23 National Council of Teachers of English and International Reading Association; hereafter cited by NCTE and/or IRA with page number. In this section, “Setting Standards in The English language arts: Defining the Standards,” NCTE and IRA introduce concepts that would remain within ELA pedagogical approaches such as literacy learning. 24 NCTE and IRA, 6. It is with NCTE and IRA that the term literacy begins to encompass a broader concept. 25 NCTE and IRA, 13. To underscore and support a broader concept of literacy, a wider and broader concept of text was required.

A Brief Overview—Where Did They Come From?

17

26 NCTE and IRA, while some assume that CCSS have introduced a new concept of cross-curricular melding with ELA, the concept, however, is anything but new. Teaching across the disciplines, teaching/writing across the curriculum, among other terms, have all described the notion that ELA is not a series of isolated, required courses that have no relationship or impact on other content areas. 27 DOE, “Laws and Guidance for ESEA.” Located in the “Statement of Purpose,” this statement echoes the Committee of Ten and “Cardinal Principles” in broad strokes. ed.gov

CHAPTER TWO STANDARDS VS. COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS

“The Sept. 27-28, 1989, gathering at the University of Virginia concluded in a haze of bipartisan camaraderie with Mr. Bush commending his future presidential opponent, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, for his role in helping bring about consensus. But big questions loomed amid the fanfare: Exactly what should those education goals be, and what steps should the federal government and states take to reach them? Who should foot the bill for any new policies directed at the goals? And, perhaps most important: How should the nation measure progress toward those goals, and who is best positioned to do that measurement?” (“1989 Education Summit Casts Long Shadow: Historic Sit-Down Propelled National Drive for Standards-Based Accountability,” Education Week, 1). “These standards are not a panacea. We know that translating the common standards into curricula, meaningful teaching, learning, and accountability will take a lot of hard work. This move to more rigorous standards may mean we see lower student test scores for a time as the curricula are implemented for all grade levels. But if we are to make sure every student is college- and career-ready, this work is essential . . . “. (“A Common Cause for the Common Core,” Education Week, 21 Jan 2014.

The standards vs. Common Core State Standards context will describe and illustrate standards’ disparities that did, and in some cases, yet exist, within state educational curricula, thereby establishing a most unequal educational experience countrywide. Whereas some states require rigorous standards, for example, others require less. The chapter will explore the difference—both perceived and real--between CCSS and state-specific standards. On one issue, anyone who is interested in and concerned about K-12 education, and most recently, the renewed push toward focus on Pre-K-12 education, must acknowledge: not all states and their districts have equitable standards for all students that prepare those students for college and career. This revelation is not only not new news, it is as old as the

Standards vs. Common Core State Standards

19

initial attempts to codify standards themselves. As a nation, we talk much about education and our belief that every child deserves an equal education; this idea and belief permeated Brown v. Board of Education, and it arises each time we discuss immigrant children and their education, and Native Americans and their education in the United States. That said, many questions still all go back to the parent I met on the plane—concern for one’s own child, or children. Parents, including policymakers, whose children are in private or charter schools engage in conversation about public education devoid of any substantive, personal concerns in actuality, for their children are ensconced in schools where rigor and preparedness and excellence are expected. And, yes, they certainly have every right to do so. However, so do parents who cannot afford private schools, who may not be able to secure the lottery ticket that affords their child or children the opportunity to attend the excellent charter school, who cannot afford to shop for the best district within a state and perhaps, having to pay out-of-district fees for the privilege. What about the students in rural towns, students in economically depressed towns, students in questionable areas, and students of immigrants from all geographies? Since beginning this research, I have continually asked myself and other teachers and some parents and grandparents, do you really think all high school diplomas at this moment in time are equal? Are all of your children when they graduate up to the challenges posed both in and outside the classroom? Can all our children, who graduate from high school read, write, think, speak, listen, and act critically? No, I am not subscribing to clones, but don't the parents whose children attend the private and charter schools have these expectations? Yes, they do. And if they do, should not the parents whose children do not attend these institutions of learning expect the same result? If they should, how can individual states and the United States assure parents and our children that such is the truth, the aim? As Chapter One illustrated, we have been moving to some degree in this direction but not entirely and not consistently. Rufina Hernández elucidates further on this concern with, as she describes, a fierce sense of urgency and earnest passion: But we all pay the price for sending millions of young adults into the world without even the minimum preparation a high school diploma represents, whether that toll is measured in a lower national economic output, a public support system needed to keep families from further slipping into poverty, or another generation born on society's lowest and least-secure rung. And the difficult truth is that when talent and potential are wasted on this scale, we all bear some responsibility . . ..

20

Chapter Two Today's education system is fragmented and inefficient. An 8th grader whose family moves from one state to another in search of better job opportunities may find different academic expectations for 8th graders in her new school. And too many kids learn from experience to equate "education" with rote learning that appears to have little relevance to their lives and dreams. This is especially true for kids from low-income communities and communities of color . . .. And we can, by embracing the rigorous, grade-appropriate central concepts at the heart of the common-core standards. These concepts will further challenge educators to tailor their teaching to the individual students in their classes and communities, creating a better, more engaging learning environment. Although the nation's high school graduation rate was at a 20-year high during the 2009-10 academic year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the unfortunate truth is that we still had states with graduation rates in the 70 percent and 60 percent ranges for Latino and black students, respectively, and even lower for Native students. According to the NCES, in 2007-08, an estimated 1.7 million students graduated from high school needing remedial courses in basic math and English to prepare them for college-level classes . . .. 1

With the advent of the Obama administration, the effort to rely on ESEA as a springboard to another different direction in education reform emerged with Common Core State Standards. The primary difference with the Core, and what would emerge as a point of controversy, lay with its focus on a national core curriculum for all students in lieu of state-bystate, and sometimes district-by-district, standards implementation: The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt. The standards are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter credit bearing entry courses in two or four-year college programs or enter the workforce . . .. High standards that are consistent across states provide teachers, parents, and students with a set of clear expectations that are aligned to the expectations in college and careers. The standards promote equity by ensuring all students, no matter where they live, are well prepared with the skills and knowledge necessary to collaborate and compete with their peers in the United States and abroad… Unlike previous state standards, which were unique to every state in the country, the Common Core State Standards enable collaboration between states on a range of tools and policies, including: the development of textbooks, digital media, and other

Standards vs. Common Core State Standards

21

teaching materials aligned to the standards and the development and implementation of common comprehensive assessment systems to measure student performance annually that will replace existing state testing systems; and changes needed to help support educators and schools in teaching to the new standards. (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers, 2012). 2

In addition to this focus, is a mandatory approach to cross-curricular instruction; in the case with ELA, social studies and science are blended, when appropriate, with ELA and utilize the areas of focus from the NCTE document, referred to in chapter one regarding the critical areas of literacy learning: reading, writing, speaking, listening, language, media and technology. When research and the writing for this book began in January 2013, 45 states had signed on to implement the Core; five others: Texas, Alaska, Nebraska, and Virginia, never adopted it. Minnesota adopted the English portion of the Core because they felt their mathematics standards met and exceeded what the Core’s mathematics recommended. Since that time, many developments have occurred. For example, some early adopters of the Core, such as Indiana and Oklahoma, have created their own state standards that parallel quite closely the CCSS but are decidedly not identified as CCSS. As a matter of fact, if one were to look at the Oklahoma DOE site, one would see identical objectives of the Core, including its focus on cross-curricular and college and career-readiness. However, one would also see the parts of the Core that emerged as political touchstones and partisan hobbyhorses, such as no federal mandates and no mandated teaching. Interestingly, the Oklahoma DOE places these distinctions on its website—front and center—literally: What Oklahoma Academic Standards Do • Do focus on deep thinking, conceptual understanding, and realǦworld problem solving skills • Do set expectations for students to be College, Career, and Citizenship ready • Do incorporate literacy in Science, Social Studies, and Technical Subjects

What Oklahoma Academic Standards Do Not • Do Not dictate how teachers should teach • Do Not mandate a specific curriculum • Do Not limit advanced work beyond the standards • Do Not require the purchase or development of entirely new instructional materials ͒ 

22

Chapter Two

• Do emphasize the use of citations and examples from texts when creating opinions and arguments • Do increase rigor and gradeǦlevel expectations • Do determine the full range of support for English Language Learners and Students with Special needs.

• Do Not prescribe all that can or should be taught͒ • Do Not limit efforts to prepare students for College, Career, and Citizenship readiness͒ • Do Not prescribe interventions for students below gradeǦlevel͒

These distinctions were not written or funded by the Federal Government. Oklahoma educators and content specialists participated in the writing, review and feedback process of the Oklahoma Academic Standards. (Oklahoma Standards, http://ok.gov/sde/oklahoma-academic-standards3) Along with Oklahoma, other states such as Indiana have adjusted their state-created standards to parallel and, in some cases, exceed, the Core— which, one may observe was the overall intent of the Core’s inception from the beginning. According to Marc S. Tucker, president of The National Center on Education and the Economy, ‘What began at Charlottesville was a long march of bipartisan [movement] to fundamentally change the system,’ said Mr. Tucker, who served as an unofficial consultant to the cadre of officials involved in developing goals. ‘It had good results and bad, but it survived changes in administration in a way that few things did. It was not A Nation at Risk that did that. It was Charlottesville.’4

Tucker is correct in that the Core, along with other state-iterations, has survived in spite of the contentious and sometimes consciously misleading information regarding what the document actually states. What has continued to surprise me over the last four years with the Core is the number of people—both supporters and non-supporters who have not read the entirety of the rationale, the FAQs, and, of course, the standards themselves with attending Appendices. One must ask, how can anyone make an informed review, comment, recommendation, or build a reasonable argument when the majority of those discussing it have not read the document under scrutiny? What the Oklahoma DOE illustrates is a blend; the state has indeed taken the instructional concepts and goals of the Core, even some of its language, and fashioned, branded its own academic, core, standards, while yet maintaining its uniqueness as a state.

Standards vs. Common Core State Standards

23

Similarly, the Indiana experience points to the levels of misunderstanding, suspicion, and even confusion when the Core standards were first adopted in the state. Robert Brady, former Director of Social Studies and World Languages for Indianapolis Public Schools, recalls the controversy that began shortly after the state adopted the Core in 2010: From the moment at which the Common Core State Standards were considered as a project to the moment the governor signed the law making them Indiana’s standards, very few of us knew what the project was and what the standards were about. It took a long time for many of us to grasp how they could be quality standards especially if one was in an area such as social studies and was suddenly tasked with the English Common Core State Standards for social studies. For Indiana teachers, the Indiana Academic Standards as content standards had been fundamentally checklists of what students must know. Grasping the fact that the Common Core State Standards were descriptions of what was quality learning and instruction required reorienting one’s self with regard to what a standard was. The failure to deal with the difference in the concept of a standard was at the heart of the criticism that developed toward the Common Core State Standards.5

By March 2014, opposition to the Core reached a boiling point in Indiana and the state withdrew support for CCSS and announced it would develop new standards in English language arts and math. The new standards are designed to integrate elements of the Core and the state’s prior academic standards. (Education Week, Dec 17, 2014) From a completely different perspective, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, contextualized under the opposition from his own legislators, has made every effort to repeal the Core in its entirety in spite of the state’s support and its recognition that their present set of standards are not addressing students’ needs. During the summer of 2014, Gov. Jindal, expressed to The New York Times the following: ‘The federal government would like to assert control of our educational system and rush implementation of a one-size-fits-all set of standards that raises a lot of serious concerns,’ Mr. Jindal said at a news conference in which he announced that he had asked a testing group aligned with the standards, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, to withdraw from Louisiana. ‘We’re very alarmed about choice and local control over curriculum being taken away from our parents and from our educators.’ ‘If other states want to give up their 10th Amendment rights, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘We’re not doing that in Louisiana.’ [Mr.

24

Chapter Two Jindal’s political and legislative colleagues who disagree with him stated the following:] Mr. White and Chas Roemer, the president of the state’s education board, said they would move ahead with Common Core and Louisiana’s ties to the testing consortium because they felt Mr. Jindal lacked the authority to order the changes he announced on Wednesday. And although Mr. Roemer accused the governor of executing “a political maneuver because of his politics that are national in scope and are focused on a very particular portion of the vote in this country,” it was unclear whether the clash would escalate into a court battle.6

In addition to these concerns and arguments against the Core’s nationwide implementation, some teachers, particularly English language arts teachers, were concerned about what they believed the document championed, namely a preponderance of informational text at the expense and loss of literature and loss of teacher selected literature. As one reads the CCSS and the Appendices A (Research and Key Elements of the Standards), B (Text Exemplars and Sample Performance Tasks), and C (Samples of Student Writing)—what emerges is not exactly the language opponents of the Core have asserted. For example, a USA Today article in 2013, “Q&A: Common questions about the Common Core,” designed for an interested and curious audience who may have wanted to know about the Core but not necessarily read the documents for both mathematics and English language arts, provided a rather interesting and pointed FAQ of its own from a Pew/Stateline Staff person. Of the queries, one in particular that has received much conversation and traction from both sides is the informational text vs. literature and exemplar texts in Appendix B of the CCSS.7 This particular argument is keenly interesting and provocative and troublesome—all in one—because K-12, and now I suspect Pre-K-12, will also follow a similar path, which has always included both informational texts and literature. We have always used biographies, essays, news articles, diaries, journals, and media to illustrate and contextualize the literature we teach. For example, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Margaret Fuller’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” biographies for younger audiences on American folk heroes, letters written by George Washington, slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth, and speeches by Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon, and Toni Morrison, for example, have contributed to the instructional tapestry in many ELA classrooms around the country, depending, of course, upon the state and the district curriculum. Pairing Walt Whitman’s epic poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” with Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” with two July 4th speeches, one by Frederick Douglass and one

Standards vs. Common Core State Standards

25

by Mark Twain, for instance, provides students with a virtual threedimensional entry pathway into thinking about and exploring the idea of an individual’s worth and contribution, as well as an important sociocultural/political event that encompasses literary and informational texts, reflecting the thoughts of Americans at the time. For some teachers who approach literature and informational texts in this fashion, students experience the poetry in a completely different way than those who read the poem and respond to questions about meter, figurative language, and rhyme. If the ultimate aim of standards from PreK-12 is to enable students to think and process and act with thought, reflection, and informed purpose, then it would seem that instruction must provide the learning paths—the traditional drill and kill, list, check, True/False, fill in the blank do not even begin to address life beyond the Pre-K-12 classroom. Academic equity, implementation, teacher preparation and preparedness, curriculum design—these are some of the essential touchstones of argument and justified concern about not only CCSS but also state-specific standards, as well. Regardless of what we call them, educational standards have been with us for sometime and will continue to be with us with the aim being to conform the learning pathways for students. The problem arises, however, with consistency among states and with equal inconsistency among states; with access and exposure in some states and with limited or no access and exposure in some states. Equity, too, as Rufina Hernández stated, remains a central issue, along with the requisite support and resources, as Linda Darling-Hammond asserts: But Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University, said policymakers have ultimately failed to pair standards with increased resources for schools and richer professional development for educators. That’s something that was happening in states such as Kentucky at the beginning of the standards movement but, in her view, it hasn’t been as widespread as it needs to be in the common-core era. ‘Just getting standards and attaching them to tests, which are attached to consequences, is not really enough,’ Ms. Darling-Hammond said. Disadvantaged children, especially, need greater supports if they are going to meet more rigorous expectations, she said, which is something policymakers haven’t really addressed on a national level. ‘The inequality question never got answered,” she said.8

In agreement with Darling-Hammond, new curricula need to be written for the standards, for CCSS is solely a set of standards—decidedly not the way one should implement and teach. The exemplars are just that as well,

26

Chapter Two

according to the Core, examples that are neither encyclopedic nor dictatorial:

Selecting Text Exemplars The following text samples primarily serve to exemplify the level of complexity and quality with which the Standards require all students in a given grade band to engage. Additionally, they are suggestive of the breadth of texts that students should encounter in the text types required by the Standards. The choices should serve as useful guideposts in helping educators select texts of similar complexity, quality, and range for their own classrooms. They expressly do not represent a partial or complete reading list. (Appendix B: Text Exemplars and sample Performance Tasks, 1).

I would only add to what Darling-Hammond asserts that while some policymakers, citizens, and yes, some teachers, may think of children of color as those whom Darling-Hammond and Hernández cite, I would add children who are not of color or of immigrant parents who are poor, children who now live in cities and areas economically depressed by the Great Recession, and children who live in rural areas which may not have had access or resources before the Core—these children, too, have a right to equitable and excellent education. So, now here we are back to ELA and the question of the Core vs. standards. As the review of standards’ development reveals, we have been, as Sewell asserts in his article, “entrenched” in the same discussion not only with K-12 education but also with ELA instruction. This entrenchment, according to Sewell, continues to create among our students “…devastating outcomes of aliteracy: incompetence and antipathy.”9 The reality Sewell presents is all too frightening and compels one to ask, just how do we reverse this trend and, more importantly, if we can do so? We must ask ourselves as these ongoing pedagogical conversations continue, can we afford to allow so many students to disengage, turn off, tune out, and ultimately turn away from what ELA offers—both separately and across the core content areas? Is there any way out from our “curricular stasis” in order to embrace and create for our students a relevant, prescient, immersive instructional experience in twelve years of ELA classes? From 1893 to the present, ironically, all reports and studies support two ideas: first, national standards for education should occur; second, English should permeate all grades, particularly at the secondary level. Thus, here we stand wrenched in a seeming Gordian’s Knot of conversations spanning 120 years with no resolution in sight, as our students potentially

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suffer from Sewell’s “curricular stasis.” And, quid pro quo—if our students find themselves in a curricular stasis, where are we? I would suggest, right next to them, unable, at present, to extricate our students and ourselves. As a life-long English teacher/educator, I believe we must first ask ourselves, what is the mission of the ELA experience in the 21st century? In responding to this question, clearly we cannot rely on the very early reports and studies. For while they did see the import of English, they decidedly ignored people of color, relegated young women to homemaking, and determined that working class students would only desire vocational paths; why would any English teacher think of teaching the classics, the art or argumentation, critical thinking and reading, speaking to these students? Next, we must confront our very own “hobby-horse,” as Sterne describes in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, namely, that the goal of ELA classes is neither to foment English majors nor to compel students to love literature alone because we love literature.10 Rather, as a recent report, Remodeling Literacy Learning: Making Room for What Works states, literacy in today’s world represents a total re-visioning and, consequently, re-understanding of how we prepare and engage our students: Expectations for what it means to be literate are rising. To meet the demands of tomorrow’s world, today’s students need to be able to interpret and use a wide variety of information and texts and to be adept at using them for problem solving, analysis, and collaboration. Literacy skills that were once expected of only top-tier graduates are now needed in almost any workplace. In addition skillful literacy today encompasses habits of mind such as curiosity, engagement, and flexibility. These skills are embedded within and across traditional subject areas to the extent that being literate is foundational to every subject. The centrality of these boundary-crossing 21st century literacy skills has deep implications for how schools are structured and how educators work together day to day to meet student needs.11

Logically and rightly, after twelve years of ELA, students and parents should expect themselves and their children well prepared to think critically, to engage and understand a variety of texts, to communicate, to participate in a global community. Realistically, this aim is indeed high and should be, for we as ELA teachers should be the vanguard expecting the best from our students and from ourselves in order to accomplish the task. Is this aim really too much to ask and expect for all of our children? If we listen to and accede to individuals like Michael Cohen, who served

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in the U.S. Department of Education during the Clinton administration, we are asking and expecting too much: “People understood [in Charlottesville] these goals were high, lofty, difficult to reach.”12 Mr. Cohen’s perspective is particularly distressing because at the time of the 1989 summit, he was Director of education policy at the National Governors Association and helped in planning and reaching consensus. Do we dare to listen, though? Can we really run the risk where our children and their futures are concerned? In this sense, having standards is not the enemy, nor is the aim that all students across the United States should have access to the same caliber of educational expectations that states such as Massachusetts, New York, and California require “pie in the sky” aspirations, for example. For 120 years we have entrenched ourselves in this conversation on the necessity for standards and have acknowledged that a disparity of standards’ quality among the states does indeed exist, particularly with ELA. In 2014, social studies and science, both, as noted in Chapter 1, presented their own versions of the Core, based on the CCSS ELA. Interesting. Our task now is to understand how the standards’ past can inform our present—preserve the salient and discard the anachronistic. For example, we all agree ELA is critical for every student throughout a Pre-K-12 experience. I hope we also agree all students merit engaging, rigorous, relevant ELA classes that include both classic and contemporary works, both fiction and informational, both critical thinking and expression. I hope we as ELA teachers do not succumb to hobbling intellectually our students because we codify them, as Koerner asserts supporters of Conant’s report did to so many young people. One factor that was glaring in earlier reports and studies was the sheer lack of teachers involved in the decision-making conversations. As ELA teachers, we must be participatory; we must be more proactive and less fearful of change; we must know our content; we must collaborate— earnestly listen and share; and we must continue ourselves to be learners of our content and craft. I always marvel and wonder at graduate students who will respond, almost unanimously, when queried: “Why have you decided to teach English?” —I want to teach English to students because I love reading, and I want them to love reading. While I agree this sentiment is one factor that truly and wonderfully distinguishes English teachers, it is not, however, why one should enter the profession. Our objective should not be to “Shakespearize” our students, as Emerson says in “The American Scholar.” 13Nor should our objective be to see at the end of the academic year, miniature versions of ourselves—our thoughts and perspectives.

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Twelve years of ELA should allow us to see graduated literacy learners who can think on their own, who can make informed decisions when presented with even contradictory information, who can understand the research process in a digital world in order to explore and discover their own answers, who read a variety of texts for pleasure and work/information, and who are not afraid to be global citizens. High ideals indeed, Mr. Cohen. At this moment, we occupy a world in turmoil everyday. What we need now and will need even more in the future is for our students to be thinkers who can think and act and engage so they will be able to understand and function and experience a quality of life unhobbled, unfettered by lack of knowledge, lack of ability to process, lack of ability and knowledge to connect the sometimes seemingly disparate dots across cultures, times, locations, experiences--difference. English language arts classes have a mighty task laid out for us as teachers; we have no choice but to square our shoulders, hold our heads up, prepare, and do our appointed work consistently for our students wherever they attend school. As Emerson concludes In “American Scholar”: We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. Then shall man be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.14

Notes 1

Rufina Hernández, “A Common Cause for the Common Core, http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/01/22/18hernandez.h33.html; hereafter to be cited by last name and hyperlink. 2 This description, like A Nation At Risk, reflects an echo of the previous reports in its selection of English as one of two primary content areas on which to focus first and in its effort at national standards. 3 Oklahoma Academic Standards: Oklahoma State Department of Education, http://ok.gov/sde/oklahoma-academic-standards. 4 Alyson Klein. “1989 Education Summit Casts a Long Shadow: Historic Sit-Down Propelled National Drive for Standards-Based Accountability,” Education Week, 19. Hereafter cited by last name and page number. 5 Robert Brady, (former Director of Social Studies and World Languages for Indianapolis Public Schools), interview with author, December 2014. 6 Alan Blinder, “Governor Plans to Cut Ties to Core in Louisiana,” The New York Times, 18 June 2014, electronic edition.

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Lu, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/03/pew-statelinecommon-core/3853531/. This article, targeted to parents and other interested parties unfamiliar with or curious about the Core, contains ten questions with pro and con responses. The questions and responses, according to Pew Charitable Trust, are non-partisan. 8 Klein, 18. Speaker in this quote is Linda Darling-Hammond. 9 William C. Sewell, “Entrenched Pedagogy: A History of Stasis in the English Language Arts Curriculum in the United States Secondary Schools, 87. Hereafter cited by last name and page number. Sewell’s article highlights the lack of substantive progress we have made in the discussions and revisions of standards, particularly with regard to English language arts. 10 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 98-99. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. In this picaresque and Menippean novel, Sterne introduces, through the character Uncle Toby, the danger of allowing an enjoyment to evolve into an obsession, or hobby-horse: A man and his HOBBY-HORSE, tho' I cannot say that they act and re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind … so that if you are able to give but a clear description of the nature of the one, you may form a pretty exact notion of the genius and character of the other." 11 “Remodeling Literacy, 10. This report clearly delineates how the 21st century requires a new understanding and, consequently, new pedagogical approaches to literacy—to global literacy—with regard to our students. 12 Klein, “1989 Education Summit,” 18. 13 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 191; hereafter cited by last name and page number. 14 Emerson, 207.

CHAPTER THREE THE CROSS-CURRICULAR COMPONENT— ITS HISTORY, ITS RE-EMERGENCE, ITS CONTROVERSY

“Both skepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and practice. Their harmonious marriage within the mind of every school child ought to be a principal goal of public education” (Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1996, 306). “I believe that there is, therefore, no succession of studies in the ideal school curriculum. If education is life, all life has, from the outset, a scientific aspect, an aspect of art and culture, and an aspect of communication. It cannot, therefore, be true that the proper studies for one grade are mere reading and writing, and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or science, may be introduced. The progress is not in the succession of studies but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience. I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.” (Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” 77-80)1

The concept of cross-curricular instruction is deeply embedded in the spirit and vision of the common core state standards. And in doing so, the core reflects an academic tradition deeply rooted in American education. From the 18th century in the United States, Humanities—also later known as cross-curricular, teaching across the curriculum, across the disciplines —maintained a steadfast and prominent place in American education until the perceived need for students’ attention on the pragmatic emerged (Herbst, 17).2 Even Founding Fathers, such as Benjamin Franklin, argued and illustrated the need for an education that included both the pragmatic and the “ornamental,” as Franklin described. In his 1749 “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania,” Franklin asserted the following:

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Chapter Three As to their STUDIES, it would be well if they could be taught every Thing that is useful, and every Thing that is ornamental: But Art is long, and their Time is short. It is therefore propos'd that they learn those Things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental. Regard being had to the several Professions for which they are intended. (11)3

In his proposals, Franklin cited six areas, with his rationales, that should, he asserted, form a curriculum for the “good Education of Youth:” (* 10) Arithmetick, Accounts, and some of the first Principles of Geometry and Astronomy. The (* 11) English Language might be taught by Grammar; in which some of our best Writers, as Tillotson, Addison, Pope, Algernoon Sidney, Cato's Letters, &c. should be Classicks: The Stiles principally to be cultivated, being the clear and the concise. Reading should also be taught, and pronouncing, properly, distinctly, emphatically; not with an even Tone, which under-does, nor a theatrical, which over-does Nature. Writing (* 12) Letters to each other, making Abstracts of what they read; or writing the same Things in their own Words; telling or writing Stories lately read, in their own Expressions. All to be revis'd and corrected by the Tutor, who should give his Reasons, explain the Force and Import of Words, &c. To form their (* 13) Pronunciation, they may be put on making Declamations, repeating Speeches, delivering Orations, &c. The Tutor assisting at the Rehearsals, teaching, advising, correcting their Accent, &c. [This area parallels with contemporary motions of Speaking and Listening.] But if (* 14) HISTORY be made a constant Part of their Reading, such as the Translations of the Greek and Roman Historians, and the modern Histories of antient Greece and Rome, &c. may not almost all Kinds of useful Knowledge be that Way introduc'd to Advantage, and with Pleasure to the Student? [As sub-categories for this section, Franklin lists Geography, Chronology [which today would be historical and literary timelines], “Antient Customs.” MORALITY, (* 16) by descanting and making continual Observations on the Causes of the Rise or Fall of any Man's Character, Fortune, Power, &c . mention'd in History; the Advantages of Temperance, Order, Frugality, Industry, Perseverance, &c. &c. (* 17) Indeed the general natural Tendency of Reading good History, must be, to fix in the Minds of Youth deep Impressions of the Beauty and Usefulness of Virtue of all Kinds, Publick Spirit, Fortitude, &c. (Franklin, 12-21)

This list makes evident Franklin’s perspective of a blended curriculum in which each content area necessarily and naturally, he argued, inform the other, hence a Humanities approach, or, a cross-curricular approach.

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This period in United States education, often identified as the Permissive Era, shifted after the formation of the National Education Association (NEA), [note it was originally natl teachers assoc] 1857, in light of the increased diversity of opportunities for schooling. As the NEA attempted to codify curriculum, Humanities was not only divided by content areas but also ranked, as the Committee of Ten Report, for example, illustrates. This separation and delineation emerged, according to Herbst, in The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education, with “the rising demand for instruction in the trades, in business, surveying, bookkeeping, mensuration, and navigation ushered in academies with modern curricula in mathematics, geography, astronomy, the sciences, and modern languages. Private initiatives responded to the needs of an expanding business and trade, and began to rival the public thrust for the classical training of the commonwealth's future leadership” (Herbst, 1819).

The movement away from Humanities, cross-curricular, emerged and grew because parents, as well as other citizens, no longer viewed public education as the restricted purview of teachers, ministers, or physicians but as applicable for life-living—“ . . . tradesmen and farmers, business and merchants” (Herbst, 19). With this shift in focus, then, the pragmatics of education—training and life skills—assumed a prominent role in public education. This shift was to last right into the present. Even with the focus more on pragmatic, or “useable” education reflected in curricula, another shift was in the offing as evidenced by the Progressive Movement, articulated and championed by thinkers and educators such as John Dewey and W.E.B. Du Bois and applied by educators, such as Marie Montessori. John Dewey's "My Pedagogic Creed” (1897) and Du Bois' "On the Wings of Atalanta" from The Souls of Black Folks (1903) explore the merits of blending the now clearly distinguishable core areas into an interdisciplinary, cross-curricular approach. The objective for such a blending, each argues, allows students to explore, discover, associate beyond the individual artifact and expand notions and ideas. William James, in his Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899) formulates and takes these blended associative ideas directly to teachers during a series of lectures. These four thinkers in many ways framed and essentially codified the idea of blending content areas in order to extricate students from what they perceived as the effects of content insularity they observed. As James defines his notion of this kind of association, that he is keenly aware of his

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rhetorical purpose emerges clearly: audience is teachers; purpose is to persuade; occasion is the present state of public education: The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others. In dry prosaic and minds, almost all the mental sequences flow along these lines of habitual routine repetition and suggestion. In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is broken through with the ease at any moment; and one field of mental objects will suggest another with which perhaps in the whole history of human thinking it had never once before been coupled. The link here is usually some analogy between the object successively thought of, --an analogy often so subtle that, although we feel it, we can with difficulty analyze its ground; . . . (James, 50-51)4

In essence, this passage delineates what James, Dewey, Du Bois, and Montessori championed as the aim in teaching for all students, for teachers to create such learning experiential environments that fomented filling students “ . . . with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subjects are” (James, 12-14). The Progressive Movement in United States education viewed schools and curricula as agents championing democratic access and inclusion. Maurice Berube provides balanced insight into this movement's impact: “perhaps no educational philosophy so influenced and characterized American education as progressive education” (13).5 According to Berube and other educational theorists, even subsequent educational reform movements—the equity reform movement during the 1960s and the excellence reform movement during the 1980s—relied on components of the Progressive Education Movement. With regard to cross-curricular approaches and the Core, this reform movement sought to immerse students in instructional content and experience that would ignite and rely on students’ “. . . intellectual, social, artistic, and moral development. Intellectual development would stress critical thinking, which, defined by John Dewey, essentially meant problem solving” (Berube, 13). In light of the Core, this approach to learning aligns with the concepts of crosscurricular approaches and relevance, expressed in the Core’s “Integration of Knowledge and Ideas.” Within the framework of grades 6-12 Reading Literature, Reading Informational, and History/Social Studies/Science & Technical Subjects, the binding concept of cross-curricula’s import to literacy echoes through and defines one of the key aims of the Core itself:

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Reading Literature CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.7 Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" and Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.9 Analyze how an author draws on and transforms source material in a specific work (e.g., how Shakespeare treats a theme or topic from Ovid or the Bible or how a later author draws on a play by Shakespeare). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.7 Analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem (e.g., recorded or live production of a play or recorded novel or poetry), evaluating how each version interprets the source text. (Include at least one play by Shakespeare and one play by an American dramatist.) CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.9 Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics.

Reading Informational Texts CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.7 Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person's life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.8 Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.9 Analyze seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (e.g., Washington's Farewell Address, the Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech, King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"), including how they address related themes and concepts.

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Reading Science and Technical Subjects CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RST.9-10.7 Translate quantitative or technical information expressed in words in a text into visual form (e.g., a table or chart) and translate information expressed visually or mathematically (e.g., in an equation) into words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RST.9-10.8 Assess the extent to which the reasoning and evidence in a text support the author's claim or a recommendation for solving a scientific or technical problem. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RST.9-10.9 Compare and contrast findings presented in a text to those from other sources (including their own experiments), noting when the findings support or contradict previous explanations or accounts. As one explores not only the defined delineations of each section and then explores the content of each Standard, one also sees the blending of specific content areas, art, history, documents—both primary and secondary, and media emerge as the outline the literacy sought throughout the Core. In addition, key words, scaffolding the skills requisite for critical thinking reflect not only the aims of the Core but also philosophies and instructional strategies argued for by educators such as Edward P. J. Corbett, Rosa A. Eberly, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Robert J. Marzano, Paulo Freier , and others: assess, evaluate, analyze, demonstrate knowledge, delineate, translate, compare and contrast. At this juncture, one central query emerges: what is literacy now, through the lens of the Core vs. what it was traditionally? The term, first used in the United States in the late nineteenth century, according to the OED, referred to "The quality, condition, or states being literate; the ability to read and write. Also: the extent of this in a given community, region, period, etc."6 From the A Nation at Risk Report moving forward, however, the notion of literacy began shifting, taking into account core content areas, career paths, and daily living. This statement does distinguish itself from the more traditional view that literacy stands alone from the other content areas and that literacy ensconces itself in early learning with reading teachers alone. Even before the Core, educator theorists had explored and, in a sense, “road-tested,” the Core’s mandatory approach with initiatives like teaching across the disciplines, teaching across the curriculum, for example. With the Core, the term and expanded purview of literacy, then, begins with ELA—reading and analysis and exploration of literary components

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and speaking and listening—all clothed within a primarily literary framework. What essentially differentiates not only the definition of literacy but also its import under the instructional umbrella of the Core lies with the extension of literacy as well as protean and progressive concept of life-long learning literacy. The working concept essentially lies with the idea a student’s learning anchors on an instructional literacy that informs immediately, K-12, and continues to function as an informational resource template from which the student may draw and create new and ongoing relevance throughout college, career, and life—thus, a protean learning literacy—sparked, nurtured, fomented, and honed within the educational framework—a framework coalesced by a cross-curricular approach reliant on a blending of the core content areas. The Core's Rationale for CCSS literacy states: The skills and knowledge captured in the ELA/literacy standards are designed to prepare students for life outside and classroom [Italics mine]. They include critical-thinking skills and the ability to closely and attentively read texts in a way that will help them understand and enjoy complex works of literature. Students will learn to use cogent reasoning and evidence collection skills that are essential for success on college, career, and life. The standards also lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person who is prepared for success in the 21st century. (CCSS Rationale for literacy online) http://www.corestandards.org/otherresources/key-shifts-in-english-language-arts/

As one reads and deconstructs this statement, what emerges is the reliance on ELA and its utilization of reading fiction/nonfiction, analysis, writing, speaking and listening, to inform students' thinking, reasoning, reading, and communication in everyday living, in college, and in career paths. In addition, with this expanded perspective of learning literacy based on ELA, instruction would consistently integrate the other core content areas into ELA, and the other core content areas, beginning with mathematics, would integrate ELA skills into their instructional curricula. In 2014, for example, both National Science Teachers of America (NSTA) and National Council of Social Studies (NCSS) rolled out their Core Standards, based on CCSS and anchored on the ELA standards. Like the CCSS, their focus lay with an expanded notion of 21st century literacy— an expanded notion that weaves its way through K-12 instruction. From this view, then, literacy necessarily includes the integration of other areas, other associations, as James would contend, even from kindergarten: “From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract programme for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the

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line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these” (James, 57-59). So what does a cross-curricular approach actually look like with the Core? Let’s take an elementary, middle, and high school Core Standard for reading and create an exemplar that spans these three levels and examines what it could look like, determine whether a learning literacy synthesis does emerge, and how the instruction using the exemplar could inform college, career, and daily living. Using the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading will provide the exemplar snapshot:

Key Ideas and Details Grade 3: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.2 Recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text. Grade 6 CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments. Grade 11-12: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.2 Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.

Craft and Structure Grade 3: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.6 Distinguish their own point of view from that of the narrator or those of the characters.

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Grade 6: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.6 Explain how an author develops the point of view of the narrator or speaker in a text. Grade 11-12: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.6 Analyze a case in which grasping a point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g., satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement). Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: Grade 3: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.9 Compare and contrast the themes, settings, and plots of stories written by the same author about the same or similar characters (e.g., in books from a series) Grade 6: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.9 Compare and contrast texts in different forms or genres (e.g., stories and poems; historical novels and fantasy stories) in terms of their approaches to similar themes and topics. Grade 11-12: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.9 Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics. Using the standards above as instructional objectives teachers would use from the Core, with the selected standards, we can create a virtual unit scaffolded through elementary, middle, and high school, focusing on the theme, “Who Am I?” What this example accomplishes is to provide a visual, scaffolded roadmap of how the Core uses literature as an instructional anchor and integrates cross-curricular content to complete a variety of learning and discovery pathways. What follows is a grouping of texts—both literature and cross-curricular—that teachers could consider if they were preparing to explore a thematic unit on Identity. This theme, it should be noted, is one that would permeate an ELA curriculum from K12, maturing in complexity and depth as students mature. This list, taken

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from Appendix B: Text Exemplars and Sample Performance Tasks— literature (fiction and informational), informational (social studies, science, mathematics), humanities (texts, art, music, periodicals, documentaries, film, television, social media)—forms the first portion of the scaffolded, virtual unit. In brackets [ ] other recommended content will appear because Appendix B clearly states that the texts it contains are recommendations only, not to be construed as an exhaustive, encyclopedic list. At this juncture, seeing an example of what such a series of lessons or units comprise or look like would be effective. What follows are the beginnings of two micro units, both based on the theme of heroes—one for 3rd grade and another applicable for grades 6-8. These micro units will be further developed and explored in Chapter 5, but they are introduced here to illustrate not only the scaffolding that can occur through the Core but also the impact of cross-curricular and literature with informational texts:

Honorable Heroes Timeline: 2-3 Weeks: Grade 3 Cross-curricular Areas: ELA and Social Studies Major themes and concepts to be explored: x One hears today that young people lack heroes for models. Is that true? Do your students have heroes? Who are they? What qualities of a hero do they represent? Which historical figures would students recognize to be heroes? Are there contemporary or even local figures with similar qualities? x This thematic unit explores not only the heroes of literature but also those whose heroic actions are a part of everyday life. Using both literary characters and actual people who perform extraordinary actions in everyday life, students will learn about specific heroes, the characteristics of a hero, and the effect a hero has on our everyday life. x How do we define the term “hero,” and what characteristics or traits does a hero have? From classical Greek literature, primary traits of a hero are physical strength, bravery, courage, and loyalty, and self-sacrifice. In today’s world, we speak of sports heroes, movie heroes, war heroes, and everyday heroes. Do these heroes, both real and fictional, share common attributes that make then heroes in our minds?

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Assigned Texts (excerpts or entire text at teacher’s discretion) Mary Pope Osborn, “The One-Eyed Giant” (Book One of Tales from the Odyssey) Russell Freedman, Lincoln: A Photobiography Brian Floca, Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 Frances E Ruffin: Martin Luther King and the March on Washington Additional Texts and Resources: Fiction: Cynthia Rylant, The Lighthouse Family: The Storm Thurber, James. The Thirteen Clocks. Illustrated by Marc Simont. New York: New York Review Children’s Collection,2008. (1950) Poetry: Jarrell, Randall. “A Bat Is Born.” The Bat Poet. New York: HarperCollins, 1964. (1964) Browning, Robert. “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Illustrated by Kate Greenaway. New York: Knopf, 1993. (1888) Informational: Coles, Robert. The Story of Ruby Bridges. Illustrated by George Ford. New York: Scholastic, 1995. (1995) Hero Exemplar Gr. 6-8 Unit and completion date Heroes All Around Us Timeline: 2-4 weeks; Grades: 6-8 Cross-curricular Areas: ELA and Social Studies Major themes and concepts to be explored: x As young people engage in the study of literature, history, science, and other cross-curricular disciplines, they discover the lives and actions of historical people whose deeds qualify them as extraordinary heroes of their time and place. Such actions generally involve daring, courage, unselfish behavior, and a desire to serve the common good of all people. What students today may not realize is that the same heroic qualities of Paul Revere, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Norma Rae, to name a few, still exist in every age and in our daily life. Perhaps the definition of a hero should be one who rises to the occasion when help is needed, one who has the strength of character to put others

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before him/herself, and certainly not one who seeks personal glory. Whether in real life or in historical and literary accounting, heroes share these same attributes – qualities and actions that set an example for us to follow. x If we define a hero as one who performs brave and daring deeds to save the lives of others, one who is willing to risk his/her own life for the welfare of others, we need to know what traits characterize such a person, especially the motivation of his or her actions, and the physical and mental attributes ascribed. Do all heroic actions stem from the same personal strength of character and desire to right wrongs, to overcome problems that plague humanity, and the goal of making the daily life of every person safer and sounder? As students immerse themselves in the reading and lives of heroic persons of the past, they will recognize the same qualities of character that they also see in the heroes who are a part of their everyday life – in school, in the community, in church, in civic organizations, and in their own state and national government. x This thematic unit explores not only the heroes of past ages, whose names have become synonymous with the age in which they lived, but heroes of our contemporary world and daily life – the heroes of rescue on 9/11, the military heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the medical heroes in Africa, the political leaders who daily work for the common good of mankind, and the community heroes who work for the same common goals closer to home. What qualities of character and self-resolve do these men and women share that make them role models for young people today? Students will learn the price of heroism and the effect such actions have on the lives of common people. The study of literature, history, and science provides us with a wide array of heroes and their making. Assigned Texts (excerpts or entire text at teacher’s discretion) Fiction: Mildred D. Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry Poetry: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride” Langston Hughes, “I, Too Sing America” Nikki Giovanni, “A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs. Long” Walt Whitman, “O Captain, My Captain”

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Drama: Frances Gordon and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank: A Play Informational Texts: Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Written by Himself Winston Churchill, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Address to Parliament on May 13th, 1940 Ann Petry, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad Russell Freedman, Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott Additional Texts and Resources: Fiction: Little Women (Louisa May Alcott), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain), A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle), Dragonwings (Laurence Yep), “Eleven” (Sandra Cisneros) Film: The Flight that Fought Back (Discovery Channel), Norma Rae, Abraham Lincoln (Steven Spielberg), Harry Potter, Glory, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954-1985 (American Experience on PBS) Poetry: “Jabberwocky” (Lewis Carroll), “Chicago” (Carl Sandburg) Music: “The Rising” (Bruce Springsteen) Again, the beginnings of these two micro exemplars illustrate how the Core facilitates instructional scaffolding within a cross-curricular approach. A common theme, heroes, and yet, what we see here is how such a common theme can transcend the purview of any one content area, affecting and informing students, cross-pollinating, if you will, students’ comprehension and thinking about the concept itself—both in and outside the classroom—in school and in life. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the concept and promotion of cross-curricular approaches before the advent of the Core, particularly at the secondary level are clear and undeniable. So, what differentiates this focus now from before? What is the real issue with this instructional learning path? Well, it would appear there are two key issues: 1) the fact of such an instructional approach being required and 2) the fact that some ELA teachers feel they do not possess nor can they readily access nor do they have the requisite time to address effectively the Core's crosscurricular inclusion. For the first issue, required instructional approaches, Joe Kincheloe’s, American Standards: Quality Education in a Complex World, The Texas Case, explores Texas' resistance to any such notion of a

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required national curriculum, well before the Core. What makes this comprehensive study so interesting and compelling lies in its actual support of the cross-curricular instructional approach, critical thinking, and student engagement: Thus, teachers teaching a rigorous curriculum are reflective professionals who bring an awareness of the multiple contexts of the teaching act. Insights derived in this contextualizing activity allow teachers to engage in and share with students the higher-order cognitive activity of reframing knowledge and skills. This reframing process moves them to ask questions of belief and value: Do we believe what this author is telling us about the meaning of the short story? Do we see this description of Western expansion in the nineteenth century as a balanced account of the process? Is this a comprehensive depiction of Darwin's theory of evolution? Is the data presented in the chapter on quadratic equations worth knowing at this point in our study of math? Why is quantum mechanics not included in our physics textbook? “Elmore, 1997; McLaren, 2000” The ability to employ contextualization in the pursuit of multiple perspectives [italics mine] is an important skill of teachers who embrace standards of complexity. As students begin to see the multiple perspectives that always surround any topic, they examine such viewpoints in relation to one another. The insights derived from such an activity lead directly to cognitive growth and an appreciation of the complexity of the cosmos. (Kincheloe, 362)7

What makes this statement so interesting and provocative, at once, emerges with the seemingly targeted, yet, "open" Texas standards from 2005, for example. Much of the instructional objectives and means of accomplishment are left open to interpretation--interpretation that could possibly lead to other instructional aims. As one set of students could receive exceptional and cross-curricular instruction, another set from a different district or even within the same building could experience totally different outcomes--due, in part, because of the lack of depth and scope and specificity, another set would experience limited or no content integration, often resulting in loss of synthesis and relevance. And yet, Texas viewed a national approach to standards as ineffective: “When specific content standards are implemented on the national or the state level, the ability of teachers to take the multiple contexts of schooling and its students into account is undermined. Their capacity to study the context in which knowledge is produced and validated is subverted.” (Kincheloe, 362)

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Clearly, this position equates specificity and depth and scope with deliberatively undermining teachers' ability to teach innovatively. In addition, collaborative teaching also appears to be unnecessary, even though students are to experience "multiple perspectives that always surround any topic" and are expected to be able to "examine such viewpoints in relation to one another." (Kincheloe, 362) By comparing and contrasting the 2005 and 2009-2010 Texas Standards for ELA with the Core, we would see that a key difference lies with the specified depth and scope of each standard. The 2005 Grade 6 ELA Reading/Comprehension Standards are general with some specificity. What these standards infer is the state's reliance and trust in the quality and expertise all teachers will bring to all students in the state of Texas. Building on the same 2005 ELA Grade 6 Reading/Comprehension standards, 2009-2010 Texas standards are far more specific in scope and depth; however, these standards yet leave much to the discretion of each district and with each school within each district, and ultimately, with each English department within each school. In comparison and contrast, the Core's parallel Grade 6 Reading/Comprehension equivalent is both similar to the 2009-2010 Texas Grade 6 Reading/Comprehension and yet keenly different in scope and depth. Common among the Texas and Core Grade 6 Reading/Comprehension standards is the emphasis on close reading, decoding, inferring, and relating. The Texas standards separate all of the genres and sub-genres, almost into isolated entities. There is room to include cross-curricular content based on what the standards already contain, should districts or individual teachers elect to do so, but doing so is not a clear intent or requirement. The Core's Grade 6 Reading/Comprehension, as I stated above, parallels Texas to an extent under Key Ideas and Details, Craft and Structure, but then broadens the initial Reading/Comprehension to include the scope of literature outside of the traditional context in which it has long resided. This literacy extension occurs under Integration of Knowledge and Ideas. Let's take Grade 6 as an example and trace the same standard: 2005 TEKs-Grade 6-Reading Comprehension8 (6.10.A) use his/her own knowledge and experience to comprehend (4-8); (6.10.B) establish and adjust purposes for reading such as reading to find out, to understand, to interpret, to enjoy, and to solve problems (4-8);

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(6.10.C) monitor his/her own comprehension and make modifications when understanding breaks down such as by rereading a portion aloud, using reference aids, searching for clues, and asking questions (4-8); (6.10.D) describe mental images that text descriptions evoke (4- 8); (6.10.E) use the text's structure or progression of ideas such as cause and effect or chronology to locate and recall information (4- 8); (6.10.F) determine a text's main (or major ideas) and how those ideas are supported with details (4-8); (6.10.G) paraphrase and summarize text to recall, inform, or organize ideas (4-8); (6.10.H) draw inferences such as conclusions or generalizations and support them with text evidence and experience (4-8); (6.10.I) find similarities and differences across texts such as in treatment, scope, or organization (4-8); (6.10.J) distinguish fact and opinion in various texts (4-8); (6.10.K) answer different types and levels of questions such as openended, literal, and interpretative as well as test-like questions such as multiple choice, true-false, and short answer (4-8); (6.10.L) represent text information in different ways such as in outline, timeline, or graphic organizer (4-8); and (6.10.M) use study strategies to learn and recall important ideas from texts such as preview, question, reread, and record (6-8). 2009-2010 TEKs-Grade 6-Reading Comprehension (3) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Theme and Genre. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about theme and genre in different cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to: (A) Infer the implicit theme of a work of fiction, distinguishing theme from the topic; (B) Analyze the function of stylistic elements (e.g., magic helper, rule of three) in traditional and classical literature from various cultures; and

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(C) Compare and contrast the historical and cultural settings of two literary works. (4) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Poetry. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the structure and elements of poetry and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to explain how figurative language (e.g., personification, metaphors, similes, hyperbole) contributes to the meaning of a poem. (5) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Drama. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the structure and elements of drama and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to explain the similarities and differences in the setting, characters, and plot of a play and those in a film based upon the same story line. (6) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Fiction. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the structure and elements of fiction and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to: (A) Summarize the elements of plot development (e.g., rising action, turning point, climax, falling action, and denouement) in various works of fiction; (B) Recognize dialect and conversational voice and explain how authors use dialect to convey character; and (C) Describe different forms of point-of-view, including first- and thirdperson. (7) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Literary Nonfiction. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the varied structural patterns and features of literary nonfiction and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to identify the literary language and devices used in memoirs and personal narratives and compare their characteristics with those of an autobiography. (8) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Sensory Language. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about how an author's sensory language creates imagery in literary text and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to explain how authors create meaning through stylistic elements and figurative language emphasizing the use of personification, hyperbole, and refrains. (9) Reading/Comprehension of Informational Text/Culture and History. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about the author's purpose in cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding.

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Students are expected to compare and contrast the stated or implied purposes of different authors writing on the same topic. (10) Reading/Comprehension of Informational Text/Expository Text. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about expository text and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to: (A) Summarize the main ideas and supporting details in text, demonstrating an understanding that a summary does not include opinions; (B) Explain whether facts included in an argument are used for or against an issue; (C) Explain how different organizational patterns (e.g., proposition-andsupport, problem-and-solution) develop the main idea and the author's viewpoint; and (D) Synthesize and make logical connections between ideas within a text and across two or three texts representing similar or different genres. (11) Reading/Comprehension of Informational Text/Persuasive Text. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about persuasive text and provide evidence from text to support their analysis. Students are expected to: (A) Compare and contrast the structure and viewpoints of two different authors writing for the same purpose, noting the stated claim and supporting evidence; and (B) Identify simply faulty reasoning used in persuasive texts. (12) Reading/Comprehension of Informational Text/Procedural Texts. Students understand how to glean and use information in procedural texts and documents. Students are expected to: (A) Follow multi-tasked instructions to complete a task, solve a problem, or perform procedures; and (B) Interpret factual, quantitative, or technical information presented in maps, charts, illustrations, graphs, timelines, tables, and diagrams.9

Common Core State Standards: Reading Standards for Literature: Grade 6 Key Ideas and Details: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.1 Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal

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opinions or judgments. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3 Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution. Craft and Structure: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of a specific word choice on meaning and tone CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.5 Analyze how a particular sentence, chapter, scene, or stanza fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of the theme, setting, or plot. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.6 Explain how an author develops the point of view of the narrator or speaker in a text. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.7 Compare and contrast the experience of reading a story, drama, or poem to listening to or viewing an audio, video, or live version of the text, including contrasting what they "see" and "hear" when reading the text to what they perceive when they listen or watch. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.8 (RL.6.8 not applicable to literature) CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.9 Compare and contrast texts in different forms or genres (e.g., stories and poems; historical novels and fantasy stories) in terms of their approaches to similar themes and topics.

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Common Core State Standards: Reading Standards for Informational Text: Grade 6 Key Ideas and Details: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.1 Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.2 Determine a central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.3 Analyze in detail how a key individual, event, or idea is introduced, illustrated, and elaborated in a text (e.g., through examples or anecdotes). Craft and Structure: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.5 Analyze how a particular sentence, paragraph, chapter, or section fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of the ideas. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.6 Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text and explain how it is conveyed in the text. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.7 Integrate information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words to develop a coherent understanding of a topic or issue. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.8 Trace and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, distinguishing claims that are supported by reasons and evidence from claims that are not. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.9 Compare and contrast one author's presentation of events with that of another (e.g., a memoir written by and a biography on the same person).

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We take away from this crosswalk how differently the Core views the role and function of ELA, which would necessarily affect students in the entire country. With Texas, even with good, strong standards, the scope of those standards remains within the context of the ELA classroom itself. With the Core, the ELA classroom and its function move into a purpose keenly different and reflective of the power and import of the discipline itself. In other words, Integration and Knowledge of Ideas--a section that threads through literature, informational, and even writing, in its Research to Build and Present Knowledge view what ELA teachers can accomplish does indeed include reading literature and reading for pleasure but also includes relevance to students outside of the classroom and has had relevance to others in a variety of fields. The skills students develop in reading and writing and talking about great literature, can be utilized outside the classroom into their lives. The cross-curricular component of the Core contributes much to this instructional aim. As one whose teaching career not only began in Irving Texas but also was honed and, in a wonderful way, branded, there, I have often said years later, that while I was teaching in Irving, I assumed all districts functioned the way mine did. The English department was a strong, focused, traditional one, and yet it was a department that embraced and encouraged cross curricula instruction with text, film, music, and innovation. I have since observed that some states did not and do not subscribe to this notion. The second issue with the Core's required cross-curricular requirement lies with teachers' feeling they are not fully prepared to teach all of the content. As I stated above, for teachers who have been in districts and schools supporting such instructional approaches, what the Core is requiring poses no significant impediment, other than seeking more timeefficient methods of gathering resources, collaboration, and keeping up with the swift-moving development and growth of information. But for those teachers who do see this requirement as an impediment, it is a serious one. As the 2014 NCLE Report illustrates, “Nationwide, most teachers do not yet feel well prepared to concern the new literacy standards, especially with high needs students (NCLE, 10-11):

0%

(1) 9%

10%

20%

(2) 17%

30%

NOT AT ALL PREPARED

40% 50% 60% % of teachers

(3) 30%

70%

(4) 28%

80%

90%

(5) 16%

10

100%

VERY PREPARED

Most teachers are not yet well prepared…

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0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

17%

English language learners

18%

Students with disabilities

23%

Academically at risk students

11

…especially to help the most challenged students

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% of teachers well prepared Quite interestingly, however, they still embrace this idea from the Core; they "simply" want help. One can easily understand that while many teachers support the instructional aims of the Core, they also see its content scope and depth daunting (NCLE 2014 Report, 11). As states, districts, and schools roll out

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this part of the Core, they will continuously need to monitor and help teachers with innovative ideas and resources, for there is always something new and old to which we surprisingly have immediate access that we can bring into our ELA classes. A recent example that began in New England, anchored in Massachusetts, and expanded internationally was the civil disobedience of a grocery store's employees. By the conclusion of the workers' and managers' refusal to support the chain, the act morphed into a movement that had the unconditional support of shoppers, vendors, truckers, two governors, and the hearts of the United States and the world. As I, along with so many people, watched the Market Basket saga unfold over a five-month period, the ELA teacher in me remembered Henry David Thoreau and Civil Disobedience. Of course, I was thinking, "This will make a stellar unit for an American literature class." The Core, as it reads now with its emphasis on cross-curricular would make this idea possible and quite relevant from so many perspectives, and students would immediately see and understand a piece of informational literature they sometimes deem irrelevant as a real, instructive piece. They would be able to compare speeches, news reports from around the world, images, etc. to inform their own perspectives. Conclusions: Why should we teach ELA in isolation, virtually disconnected from the world--other content areas and the world at large? Why should we say students should read only for enjoyment and not for life-utilization? Essentially, what the Core's cross-curriculum component has done in essence is to pose to ELA teachers the "so what" factor. So what are students to do with the amazing and universal literature we fight so hard to keep and to teach, if not to transcend the walls of our classroom and our school building? As some states, such as Indiana and Kansas, in late 2013 and 2014 scrambled to distance themselves from the political fallout of the Core by changing the name of Common Core State Standards to state-branded names with essentially the same content, science and social studies rolled out their own versions of Core State Standards—College, Career & Civic Life C3 Framework For Social Studies State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards. Interestingly, both content areas based their standards on the Core, with each citing the Core's inclusion of crosscurricular literacy as one of the key components they necessarily included: “Every effort has been made to ensure consistency between the CCSS and the NGSS . . .. Connections to the English language arts (ELA) CCSS are included across all disciplines and grade bands in the final version of the NGSS” (Appendix M—Connections to the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects.”10 (NGSS, 1)

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Perhaps, the clearest proof of the efficacy of requiring cross-curricular content and instructional inclusion emerges best not with scholars, theorists, administrators, or policymakers, but with teachers and their students: . . Tameka [Grade 4] had a question about whether Kentucky was on the side of the confederacy or the Union during the Civil War. “You told us that Kentucky was still a slave state,’ she said to Stevie. “But our social studies book says it was on the Union side. And it doesn’t say anything about how they still had slavery there.” When Stevie paused to look at the book, Tameka went on, “Maybe the authors want us to forget about the slaves since Kentucky fought for the Union. Maybe they are trying to make Kentuck feel better!” . . . If we want our students to be critical thinkers, then we must do the critical analysis with them. If we want them to be aware of how different texts are positioning them, we need to show them how to put diverse perspectives next to each other and make a decision about what they want to believe. As Maloch and Bomer (2013) recommend, Stevie, “put informational texts—including a range of text types—into the hands of children” (p. 446) and engaged them in active dialogue about those texts. In this inquiry, children’s literature served as the touchstone for critically evaluating supposedly nonfiction textbooks. 11 (Leland and Bruzas, 33-34)

Out of the mouths and imaginations of babes and their teachers.

Notes 1

John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, illustrates and delineates clearly and succinctly Dewey’s essential philosophy of the nature and purpose and import of education for all students. This quote from “Article III. The Subject-Matter of Education,” lays a protean, instructional literacy learning path that does echo and resonate within the CCSS. Hereafter, cited by last name, “Pedagogy,” and page number. 2 Jurgen Herbst, 17, hereafter cited by last name and page. 3 Benjamin Franklin, 11, “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania,” hereafter cited by last name and page. It should be noted that while access to this primary resource was online, the University of Pennsylvania provide a scanned version of the actual text from which the page numbers in this chapter refer. 4 William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, 12-14; hereafter cited by last name and page. 5 Maurice Berube, American School Reform: Progressive, Equity, and Excellence Movements, 1883-1993, 13; hereafter cited by last name and page. 6 Oxford English Dictionary Online.

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http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109054?redirectedFrom=literacy. 7 Joe L. Kincheloe, “See Your Standards and Raise You: Standards Complexity and the New Rigor in Education,” American Standards: Quality Education in a Complex World, the Texas Case, 362; hereafter cited by last name and page. 8 Side-by-Side Comparison of the Texas Educational Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and Louisiana Grade Level Expectation (GLEs): English Language Arts: Grade 6. 9 “110.18. English Language Arts and Reading, Grade 6, Beginning with School Year 2009-2010,” Chapter 110. Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English Language Arts and Reading: Subchapter B. Middle School. ritter.tea.state.tx.us 10 “Appendix M-Connections to the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects,” Next Generation Science Standards. nextgenscience.org. 11 Christine H. Leland and Stevie R. Bruzas, “Becoming Text Analysts: Unpacking Purpose and Perspective,” 33-34; hereafter cited by last names and page.

CHAPTER FOUR TEACHING RESEARCH AND CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS: RESEARCH TO BUILD AND PRESENT KNOWLEDGE

As John Gerber, a longtime chair at Iowa, wisely observed more than twenty-five years ago: “English is not a neat, discrete discipline, but a congeries of subject matters that varies from place to place and time to time.” (“Report of the 2001-02 ADE AD HOC Committee on the English Major: The Undergraduate English Major,” ADE Bulletin, 72).

In addition to cross-curricular approaches, the Core requires students begin understanding and practicing critical thinking and research skills quite early. This Core requirement places on pre-service and experienced teachers in English language arts a greater responsibility not only for understanding how to pace younger learners in these skills but also for engaging and immersing older students—secondary. In addition, the chapter explores the skills teachers themselves must develop, skills quite different from their previous experiences with brick and mortar libraries, hard copy texts, and index cards. Finally, the chapter explores the nature of critical thinking and research the Core requires and this impact on pre-service and experienced teachers. This chapter will focus on three areas: x Pedagogical Rethink and Approaches x Understanding and Practicing Critical Thinking and Research Skills x Pace, Engagement, and Immersion

Pedagogical Rethink and Approaches: With the Core’s focus on and blending of writing, research skills, and critical thinking into the category “Research to Build and Present

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Knowledge” K-12, educators face a different challenge of how we have defined and practiced research and presentation. Built into the entirety of the grade span are key components, some of which could be previously unfamiliar to elementary educators, and to some secondary educators, even, outside of those who teach Gifted, Honors, or Advanced Placement (AP) courses. I know, for example, from personal experience, not any of my elementary teachers, including my Mother, would have thought research skills and presentation, immediately, without any queries, common for K-5. I am not saying they would have been adverse to the idea, but I am saying the notion itself would not have been one they would see as common. For example, this section in the Core specifically delineates short and extended research projects, a number of resources— both primary and secondary—as well as both personal narrative and objective:

Research to Build and Present Knowledge: (Grade K) CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.K.7 Participate in shared research and writing projects (e.g., explore a number of books by a favorite author and express opinions about them). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.K.8 With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.K.9 (W.K.9 begins in grade 4) Looking at the standards in this Grade K strand, we see the germinating foundation of research skills and presentation. As students progress from K-12, the Core scaffolds the complexities and intricacies of research and its presentation; by grades 11-12, the Core standards instructional aims are as follows, based on the previous research skills and presentation scaffolds:

Research to Build and Present Knowledge: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.7 Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.8 Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the strengths and limitations of each source in terms of the task, purpose, and audience; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source and following a standard format for citation. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.9 Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.9.A Apply grades 11-12 Reading standards to literature (e.g., "Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics"). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.9.B Apply grades 11-12 Reading standards to literary nonfiction (e.g., "Delineate and evaluate the reasoning in seminal U.S. texts, including the application of constitutional principles and use of legal reasoning [e.g., in U.S. Supreme Court Case majority opinions and dissents] and the premises, purposes, and arguments in works of public advocacy [e.g., The Federalist, presidential addresses]"). (Common Core State Standards Initiative) This kind of protean scaffolding requires a pedagogical rethink not only from educators in the classroom and administrating offices but also a rethink from pre-service teachers and colleges and universities—English and Communications and Education departments, as well. Within the past three years, I have attended sessions at MLA and NCTE, and I have had conversations, all focusing on how secondary teachers teach writing and research to their students. Questions such as, “Do teachers model writing and research to their students?” Or, “What is the distinction, exactly, between persuasive and argumentative writing? And, “So, why isn’t the personal narrative still a viable and effective mode?” Quite interesting to me was another factor: while all of us in the conversations and panels had one common trait—literature—not all of us, not even a majority, described undergraduate courses or tracks that addressed these skills, and no one described how, or if, their literature classes addressed writing, research, and presentation skills. It should be noted, however, that some colleges and universities do in fact blend literature, rhetoric, grammar and linguistics within an English

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major, for example; more of them, though, do not. In 2003 ADE (Association of Departments of English) published a revelatory but not entirely surprising report: “Report of the 2001-02 ADE AD HOC Committee on the English Major: The Undergraduate English Major.” The assigned committee’s charge was “to study ‘the recent decline in the number of English majors and recommend ways in which departments can address the decline and its possible underlying causes’.” 1 (68) Overall, what the report brings into full focus is the ongoing insular, siloed structure of many English departments: English is no longer homogeneous—if it ever was—or perhaps the nature of its heterogeneity has altered. On the one hand, in some institutions, areas once deemed an integral part of English have broken away. Speech, communications, and speech communications are prime examples. The overall impact of such moves requires closer study. Frequently, the formal study of the language itself (grammar, philology-linguistics) has been abandoned or ceded to another unit, so that many English departments have come to view themselves exclusively as departments of literature, whether English or English and American. (Schramm, 71)

Prior to the Core’s requirements, states and districts did not necessarily pay any attention to specifically which courses core content educators experienced, including secondary. That students had a number of courses in the content area, had completed their student teaching and requisite education hours, thereby achieving licensure and certification, was the accepted norm. Under the Core, however, more attention is now being given to content areas and teacher preparation.2 With the Core, college and university English and Education departments are thinking about who their English majors are and what career paths will they follow? The same ADE report acknowledges an increase in English majors is occurring among students pursuing a creative writing or education path: Creative writing courses and programs have become increasingly popular and in some cases even compete with traditional English programs for students. At times, the competition can become a source of tension. . . . [By 2000] . . .participation in higher education had increased markedly over this period, which saw a 139% increase in the number of baccalaureate degree awards overall. . . . in many public and private institutions, elementary or secondary education majors represent an increasing proportion of all English majors. This shift has been gradually, if sometimes reluctantly, reflected in the curricular of schools most affected . . .. The curricular changes can be seen as direct and on the whole healthy, responses to the challenge of improving the academic preparation of

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secondary school teachers and, thereby, the quality of secondary schools. Improving academic preparation of high school graduates ranks high on the agenda of many governors and state governments . . .. What if the new majors opt for the English education track or for creative writing, when the expertise and central interests of most faculty members lie in literary theory and criticism, the history of rhetoric, or historical studies of literature and cultural production? (Schramm, 72; 74-75)

A keen example of this dearth and subsequent consequences of instructional information emerges when pre-service educators and even some veteran teachers see the Core’s research skills and presentation requirements. Veteran educators are indeed rethinking how many of us were taught and subsequently are engaged in conversation with colleagues about rethinking and reconfiguring this portion of our discipline and approaches in order to address more effectively our students’ needs. By rethinking pedagogy, we therefore must rethink our approaches to research skills and present knowledge.

Understanding and Practicing Critical Thinking and Research Skills To facilitate our understanding and our meeting the needs of our students with this Core requirement, we should ask ourselves a seemingly simple question: “So what is research for and why do we do it?” From talking with teachers around the country, except for those whose undergraduate and graduate experiences included a blending of the “disparate” parts of English mentioned above, many English teachers approach writing and research skills as they were taught by their professors. Presenting knowledge also remains, for the most part, mired in the traditions of staid, static papers. Students in many cases go through the rote motions, ticking off the number of resources, the requisite number of pages, the requisite number of direct quotes and paraphrased ones, and turn in their papers. An increasing number of teachers are citing students who simply purchase the papers online. Within this context, we return to my two questions: “So what is research for and why do we do it?” I would recommend that in order to justify why we should continue to teach and expose students to research skills and present knowledge lies not only with the efficacy of the process inside and outside the classroom but also with the relevance and potential amazing engagement students can experience. To begin thinking in this direction of addressing the Core’s research skills and presenting knowledge, I recommend we consider the following as we construct curricula and instructional pathways:

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x Re-writing curriculum: Asking students to engage in research and presentation of knowledge should not only be for a purpose but also should evidence their cumulative learning—cumulative learning they, too, can see, experience, and share. This concept and approach requires for many states and districts a rewriting of curriculum. The adverb “Why?” is not a bad one; indeed, it can be a critical one as we begin to reconstruct curriculum, using the standards. Why are we creating this assignment, activity, and research? What do we want our students to “get”? And, to me, just as critical: “What will students be able to use from research skills and presenting knowledge as they transition from my classroom?” x Re-envisioning engagement: Just as literature is a common anchor among ELA teachers, so are the seeming Sisyphean efforts of grading papers and research papers. How many professional developments have we all attended to address this task? From our students’ perspectives, their goal is to give us what we have required in less than ample time, with least exertion, hopefully on time with the requisite number of pages and citations. We need to re-think the research projects—short and sustained. We need to include media and the technologies at our disposal—with which all of which our students are so completely familiar. x Facilitating: We must assume a more active role in our classrooms with our students during the processing times. We must join our students in asking questions, and we must be both learners with our students as well as instructional guides. In essence, if we are going to capture our students’ imaginations and energies, we have to bring more to them than the naked assignment, and then, we have to take a risk in trusting them, giving them permission to explore and discover, rather than parrot. x Modeling: This recommendation is perhaps the most troubling for classroom educators because even as the ADE report stated, English majors resonate with creative writing in increasing numbers, but I have found many classroom teachers would rather not write in front of their students or in front of their peers. We evaluate our students’ writing, of course, but we, too, must rethink our relational positions with our students when any kind of writing occurs, especially, research skills and presenting knowledge.

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Pace, Engagement, and Immersion What have we generally expected from our students when we asked them to conduct a piece of research, write a research paper, create or present a project that included research findings? What is the goal of research in our classrooms, particularly in English language arts, science, and social studies? Are we more keenly focused on students’ developing research skills in isolation, developing research skills in light of future application outside of the classroom, or simply the process itself for the sake of the process and tradition of “a research project”? In addition to the research process itself, critical thinking functions as the fulcrum of the research process—defining research parameters, gathering information and resources, analyzing and evaluating the merit and relevance of each resource—both primary and secondary, artifact and textual—organizing resources, creating content, determining the appropriate delivery of the research findings. And, perhaps, the most important as well as elusive components of the research process, namely, the recognition of gaps, erroneous assertions, and the merit of the unexpected discovery, all require critical thinking in order to achieve success. Many teachers across the country readily embrace critical thinking as an ongoing important skill to hone in all of the core content areas. Many texts have been written, explaining and modeling for teachers the process and effect of their utilizing the Socratic method for their students. In comparison and contrast, the Core actually delineates and drills even further and includes the early grades, as well, as evidenced in the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing:

Research to Build and Present Knowledge CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.7 Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.8 Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.9 Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. (Common Core State Standards)

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The Core Anchor standards K-12 employ active, evaluative, and analytical verbs to explain their long-term objective of “demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation” [italics, mine]: gather, assess, integrate, draw, and support. Even the title of the section alludes to the concept of scaffolding a research and presentation trajectory on which students are to build and refine not only the skills and process of research but also the purpose and import of them. We should note our using the ELA Standards reference here is appropriate, for both Science and Social Studies cite their reliance on the ELA Core standards as their point of reference in forming their “Core” standards. The following exemplar is drawn from a pilot instructional unit developed for Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts using strategies from Common Core. Dr. Kimberly A. Parker used the pilot in her 10th grade honors ELA class. This exemplar relies on research skills and presenting knowledge, as well as other Core standards. Freedom to Choose: Free Will in the Context of Race and Gender Grade Level: 11-12 Focus: Thematic Content Areas: ELA, SS Time Frame: 2-4 Weeks Unit Overview: Friends, activities, clothes, community, education, career--who decides? Who chooses? What is freedom to choose? Does every person possess it from birth? Or does freedom to choose occur only at a certain age? Does race, gender, or even one's age, effect the freedom to choose? This thematic unit explores the idea, the concept of choice--an individual's ability and right to choose and the consequences. Using literary characters, historical and cultural events, and supporting resources, students will examine, analyze, and research how the concept of freedom to choose has developed over time in America—personally, politically, socially, and culturally. Learning Objectives: During this unit, students will: Research and trace how freedom to choose has evolved in time in America Use literary, historical, and cultural resources to analyze, discuss, and evaluate freedom to choose

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Analyze whether freedom to choose impacts race and gender differently from other factors Examine how freedom to choose exists in their daily living CCSS: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.2 Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.3 Analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.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. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.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. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.6 Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.7 Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.1 CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.W.7 Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.W.8 Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.W.9 Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.W.6 Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.9 Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.7 Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem.

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CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.1 Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, connecting insights gained from specific details to an understanding of the text as a whole. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including analyzing how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term over the course of a text (e.g., how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10). CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.9 Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources. Assigned Texts: "Trifles” Susan Glaspell "Sweat" Zora Neale Hurston "The Search Engine" and "Flight Patterns” Sherman Alexie Bless Me, Ultima Rudolfo Anaya (Excerpts) "Ego-Tripping” Nikki Giovanni Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain (Excerpts) "The Declaration of Sentiments” Seneca Falls Conference1848 Black Power Richard Wright (Excerpts from this travelogue) Guiding Questions: How do we exert the freedom to choose in everyday life: at home, in school, with friends, with family, with our future? Do we ever feel our freedom to choose compromised or nonexistent? Has the freedom to choose shaped America's definition and image of itself? What is free will to you? To you within your community, your culture, your country, the world? Additional Texts and Resources: The Awakening Kate Chopin (Excerpts) Sophie's Choice William Styron “Barbie-Q” Sandra Cisneros "Vindication on the Rights of Women” Mary Wollstonecraft (Excerpts) To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee (excerpts) (Add selections from television, graphic novels, online magazines, films)

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Student Multimedia Projects: In Other Words: How Have Others Shown Freedom to Choose? Along with the assigned texts that everyone is reading, you may find that using other texts (literary, informational, multimedia) may help you better understand and explore the freedom to choose theme. Moving through the unit, explore and expand on the theme in selected passages from literature, non-fiction works, poetry, music, and/or film. Use your examples as you move through other activities. Be sure to note the following for each example: 1. Quote, image, paraphrase, lyric 2. Author 3. Title of text, image, song, or lyric 4. What made this example of choice and free will to exercise that choice interesting to you? Fiction: Sophie’s Choice, Billy Budd, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bless Me, Ultima, “Sweat,” To Kill a Mockingbird Informational: “Letter to Howells from Twain about John T. Lewis and his choice”, Profiles in Courage, Diary of Anne Frank, The Rights of Man Poetry: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade” Plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet Film: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Star Trek, Terminator 2, Stand by Me Music: What If (Coldplay), This is Country Music (Brad Paisley), What Do You Got? (Bon Jovi), I Was Here (Beyoncé) Oral History: John F. Kennedy Inaugural Speech (...Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.), 9/11 Memorial Museum Oral Histories (Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, Newtown shooting survivors, Boston Marathon Bombing- Were you there, what decisions did you make, how did this experience change you? Informational Text: “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) In Our World: Freedom to Make the Uneasy Choice While America does have a distinctive history championing freedom of choice, not all citizens have had, or have, this privilege. Individuals of color and women and young people have long fought to maintain this privilege and right. In your research, select three characters and create a

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Freedom to Make the Uneasy Choice Newsletter. Your objective, as with any newsletter, is to inform your readers about freedom to choose with specific Illustrations. With this newsletter, you are using literary characters and real people/events as primary illustrations of the sometimes-hard consequences that come with the freedom to choose. Share your Freedom to Make the Uneasy Choice Newsletter with the class for further discussion. Everyday Choices You make choices everyday, many times each day. Some of your choices affect only you, while others may affect those around you. Some choices may be as simple as whether to have water or juice with lunch or more complex such as deciding to do extra study for a test or what your future will look like or speaking out against a wrong, such as bullying. Keep a diary for the unit and observe, gather, and record examples of how you make choices everyday. My Turn to Make a Difference Sometimes the freedom to choose and one’s free will involve action. What are some causes that require direct action, such as cancer walks, toy drives, and food drives, for example? Have you, a family member, or friend ever made a choice requiring action? Select an example from your experience and describe it in an essay addressing the following questions: Is the decision to choose and act sometimes complicated by race and/or gender? What can we learn from choices that require action? What are possible or probable costs involved with making the right choice with regard to friends or social standing in choosing to address this issue? Class Objective The objective for the class is to collaborate, research, gather, and organize responses to the Guiding Questions, using research from Freedom to Make the Uneasy Choice Newsletter, the class discussions, the variety of texts, interviews, images, videos, music, blogs, tweets, and other resources the teacher and class deems appropriate. Following completion of the unit, Dr. Parker and some of her students offered comments on the learning experience. Dr. Parker: “I wanted them to be able to synthesize multiple perspectives and evaluate arguments before ultimately coming to their own conclusions. Something I am certain they never would have been able to do without the

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supplemental texts I used to extend their understanding of the unit’s objectives.” Students: “Being presented with new ideas and themes about a text helps me to further my own thinking and go deeper into topics that I hadn’t thought much about. I can not only back up my own thoughts, but also think about what the ideas are and what they mean.”

We are finding with students and teachers with regard to critical thinking, reading, writing, speaking and listening that students and teachers find new and immersive learning pathways to engagement when we allow ourselves and our students to move outside of the box of tradition. We are also finding and learning that we, too, become complementary discoverers and learners with our students when we disavow our fears and take a risk. We will explore more deeply this relationship in upcoming chapters.

Notes 1

Margaret Schramm, J. Lawrence Mitchell, Delores Stephens, and David Laurence, “Report of the 2001-02 ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major: The Undergraduate English Major,” 68; hereafter cited by last name and page. 2 See the following articles on teacher preparation: Stephen Sawchuk’s “Standards Pose Teacher-Prep Challenge,” edweek.org; Kate Walsh’s “21st Century Teacher Education,” educationnext.org; Teacher Preparation Research: Current Knowledge, Gaps, and Recommendations: A Research Report Prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, depts..washington.edu.

SECTION TWO: CREATING A PROTEAN LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Where we live, where we eat, where we convene with friends, where we vacation, where we play, and where we attend different events— among many factors, one, in particular, plays a central role: the environment. What does this word even mean within the context used here? x Setting x Situation x Atmosphere x Milieu x Location x Surroundings These words further describe and define the term, environment, and they also drill into what we expect to see, experience, and feel when we enter into a space. The classroom is another environment that is even more important for students and teachers. A protean learning environment is a cortical component for all students and for teachers. This kind of environment must include all of the descriptors above and must continuously create and recreate an engaging, safe, and collaborative learning environment, which foments contemporary learning. When I taught high school and now when I go into classrooms, my first and foremost concern is always how will I, a stranger, create a safe environment, a discovery-conducive environment, an environment that enables engagement and curiosity? This section explores and identifies key areas teachers must address to create protean, adaptive, learning environments that support and encourage discovery, exploration, and collaboration.

CHAPTER FIVE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING COMMUNITIES

Blind and capricious impulses hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another. So far as this happens, everything is writ in water. There is none of that cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of that term.” [italics mine] (Democracy and the Philosophy of Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, John Dewey, 353)

Well before each school year begins, teachers prepare their classrooms for optimum student experiences. We have come a long way from the old, dated classrooms of the past. Today, classrooms can reflect the personalities and learning aims of individual teachers. In the seventies, for example, many elementary schools included in classrooms individual reading pods, to facilitate individual reading. These areas were bright, comfortable, and some even resembled indoor tree houses, allowing students to “climb” into a private, quiet spot. As we have moved forward and technology has allowed far more “reaching outside” of the actual classroom walls, as well as expanding inside them, educators are addressing students’ varied and individualized and collaborative learning patterns and, yes, preferences. Educators, such as Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, Ralph Tyler, Julie Young, Jonathan C. Erwin, Robert Marzano and, especially, everyday teachers in the classroom agree that students whose learning environment makes them feel safe, free to express, encouraged to explore will stretch and grow academically—regardless of urban vs. suburban, poor vs. wealthy, privileged vs. disadvantaged. Just as we begin to “design” our curricula for each year, we also must begin, as Wiggins and McTighe assert in Understanding by Design, constructing our design for our students and what I describe as their “takeaway”: We are moving from thinking about what we want to accomplish as the designer to thinking about who the learners—the end users—are and what they will need, individually and collectively, to achieve the desired results of Stage 1 and to perform well the tasks proposed in Stage 2. Like a software designer, we have to do more than ensure that all the codes and functions are going to work. We must be mindful of who the users are and

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design so that they are all maximally engaged and productive. Our design must be truly user-friendly, in other words, not just intellectually defensible. (191)

Because the CCSS require cross-curricular instruction with a focus on critical thinking, critical writing and research, speaking and listening, working collaboratively and individually looms large within its paradigm. Illustrating this instructional aim evinces itself with the Comprehension and Collaboration section. Although speaking and listening has had a specific presence in many state standards, consistency and depth of instructional aim have not always existed. For example, Texas’ 2005 speaking and listening standards reflect the general approach to this standard at the time: x The student listens actively and purposely in a variety of settings. x The student listens critically to analyze and evaluate a speaker’s message(s). x The student listens to enjoy and appreciate spoken language. x The student speaks clearly and appropriately to different audiences for different purposes and occasions. Mississippi’s 2006 Curriculum Frameworks for English language arts, however, contains no mention of the instructional significance of speaking and listening. With the Core and Mississippi’s development of its Collegeand Career-Readiness for English Language Arts, however, speaking and listening threads throughout the framework. What the 2005 TEKS and 2006 Mississippi standards reveal emerges with the wide and varied differences not only in which standards a state deems important but also with the dearth or plethora of coverage for standards. Whereas Texas does address speaking and listening but in such general terms in 2005, California, Massachusetts, and New York during the same time period approach the same standard from a totally different instructional perspective: Massachusetts, for example, includes speaking and listening, associating these skills with “receptive and productive skills.” But like so many other states, the specificity and depth and clarity of how speaking and listening work within and toward instructional objectives, how speaking and listening complement the larger aims of developing critical thinking, writing, and research, and how speaking and listening transcend the classroom into students’ lives and careers are missing. The Core’s inclusion of this standard transitions and builds on its previous Anchor Standards, Reading, and Writing. In addition, the

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Speaking and Listening standards engender collaborative learning—a skill students, in a sense, perfect on their own through social networking, and a skill on which they often rely in college and career. From K-12, the emphasis on collaboration and its relationship with comprehension is interwoven into the Core’s framework. What follows is a crosswalk of the same Speaking and Listening standards for grades K, 5, 8, and 11-12. The purpose of the crosswalk is to illustrate how the Core scaffolds the instructional aim of this standard and how the standard itself relies on collaborative learning as an effective learning and comprehension approach: Grade K: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.1.A Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions (e.g., listening to others and taking turns speaking about the topics and texts under discussion). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.1.B Continue a conversation through multiple exchanges. Grade 5: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.5.1 Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 5 topics and texts, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.5.1.A Come to discussions prepared, having read or studied required material; explicitly draw on that preparation and other information known about the topic to explore ideas under discussion. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.5.1.B Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions and carry out assigned roles. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.5.1.C Pose and respond to specific questions by making comments that contribute to the discussion and elaborate on the remarks of others. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.5.1.D Review the key ideas expressed and draw conclusions in light of information and knowledge gained from the discussions. Grade 8: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.8.1 Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 8 topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.8.1.A Come to discussions prepared, having read or researched material under study; explicitly draw on that preparation by referring to evidence on the topic, text, or issue to probe and reflect on ideas under discussion. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.8.1.B Follow rules for collegial discussions and decision-making, track progress toward specific goals and deadlines, and define individual roles as needed. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.8.1.C Pose questions that connect the ideas of several speakers and respond to others' questions and comments with relevant evidence, observations, and ideas. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.8.1.D Acknowledge new information expressed by others, and, when warranted, qualify or justify their own views in light of the evidence presented. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.8.2 Analyze the purpose of information presented in diverse media and formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) and evaluate the motives (e.g., social, commercial, political) behind its presentation. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.8.3 Delineate a speaker's argument and specific claims, evaluating the soundness of the reasoning and relevance and sufficiency of the evidence and identifying when irrelevant evidence is introduced. Grade 11-12: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1 Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 11-12 topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.A Come to discussions prepared, having read and researched material under study; explicitly draw on that preparation by referring to evidence from texts and other research on the topic or issue to stimulate a thoughtful, well-reasoned exchange of ideas.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.B Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decisionmaking, set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as needed. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.C Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe reasoning and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range of positions on a topic or issue; clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions; and promote divergent and creative perspectives. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.D Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims, and evidence made on all sides of an issue; resolve contradictions when possible; and determine what additional information or research is required to deepen the investigation or complete the task. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.2 Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) in order to make informed decisions and solve problems, evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source and noting any discrepancies among the data. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.3 Evaluate a speaker's point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, assessing the stance, premises, links among ideas, word choice, points of emphasis, and tone used. The concept of collaborative learning is not new. Grouping, peer groups, peer review groups, reading circles, Socratic circles, small-group readings/collaborations—teachers have long relied on putting students together, K-12, to work together. Of course, consistency within each classroom is a concern, much less consistency nationwide. And yet, as we observe and experience the rapid growth of social networking and social media our students see as de rigueur, we still try to harness inside our classrooms this seeming predilection our students have. I can personally say that I had to teach for almost 20 years before I began to understand and question the more traditional way we tended to group students, and it was through my asking high school and college students what they expected from groups, what they liked about groups, what they hated about groups, what they would recommend to make effective groups.

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From my experience with my students, I was able to understand what factors I always need to consider in forming the groups; my role as facilitator and monitor, and learner with them; the necessity for me to be a keen listener and observer; the necessity for me to follow-up and ask questions to which I did not allow myself to frame the pre-response. And finally, and most importantly, I learned to trust my students. While the Core does embrace collaborative learning and does specify how students mature through the process, making this instructional aim completely clear and providing a model remains to be understood, created, and realized by some teachers and students. In 2013, my collaborators, John E. Grassie, Patricia Taggart Munro, and Judith A. Purvis, presented a working model of the “group activities.” We designed our model, Collaborative Learning Communities, to foment sustained cumulative learning and exploration through discovery, collaboration, reading, research, and critical thinking. The CLCs, as we called them, would be formed within the first six weeks of school and continue throughout the academic year. In this fashion, students are encouraged and “allowed” to own their learning and are encouraged to be curious and explore. The teacher serves as resource, facilitator, and guide. In an interesting development the teacher also engages with students as a learner. We created learning exemplars in which the CLSs would work. What follows are the exemplars we presented and shared with participants in our session, “Demystifying the Core: Get it, Got it, Go With It” during the National Council of Teachers of English 2013 annual convention in Boston:

Honorable Heroes Unit and completion date Honorable Heroes: Timeline: 2-3 Weeks: Grade 3 Cross Curricular Areas: ELA and Social Studies Major themes and concepts to be explored One hears today that young people lack heroes for models. Is that true? Do your students have heroes? Who are they? What qualities of a hero do they represent? Which historical figures would students recognize to be heroes? Are there contemporary or even local figures with similar qualities? This thematic unit explores not only the heroes of literature but those whose heroic actions are a part of everyday life. Using both literary

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characters and actual people who perform extraordinary actions in everyday life, students will learn about specific heroes, the characteristics of a hero, and the effect a hero has on our everyday life. How do we define the term “hero,” and what characteristics or traits does a hero have? From classical Greek literature, primary traits of a hero are physical strength, bravery, courage, and loyalty, and self-sacrifice. In today’s world, we speak of sports heroes, movie heroes, war heroes, and everyday heroes. Do these heroes, both real and fictional, share common attributes that make then heroes in our minds? Learning Objectives - During this unit, students will: List the qualities they consider necessary in a hero. Describe the lives and deeds of national, state and/or local heroes. Identify historic figures who have exemplified good citizenship; started new businesses; made contributions in the areas of civil rights, women's rights, military actions or politics; or who took risks to secure freedom. Guiding Questions What are the qualities of a hero? What historical figures do students consider to be heroes? What contemporary or local figures do students consider to be heroes? Assigned Texts (excerpts or entire text at teacher’s discretion) Mary Pope Osborn, The One-Eyed Giant (Book One of Tales from the Odyssey) Russell Freedman, Lincoln: A Photobiography Brian Floca, Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 Frances E Ruffin, Martin Luther King and the March on Washington Additional Texts and Resources: Fiction: Cynthia Rylant, The Lighthouse Family: The Storm Thurber, James. The Thirteen Clocks. Illustrated by Marc Simont. New York: New York Review Children’s Collection,2008. (1950) Poetry: Jarrell, Randall. “A Bat Is Born.” The Bat Poet. New York: HarperCollins, 1964. (1964) Browning, Robert. The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Illustrated by Kate Greenaway. New York: Knopf, 1993. (1888) Informational:

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Coles, Robert. The Story of Ruby Bridges. Illustrated by George Ford. New York: Scholastic, 1995. (1995)

Activities (Teacher Guided and Facilitated) Journey of Life - Past and Present As students discuss the story of The One-Eyed Giant and other assigned texts suggested by the teacher, have them define the term “hero” by making a list of words that describe a hero. Be sure to include character traits as well as physical traits if they think that physical traits are a part of a hero’s description. Have them share their ideas with other students in the classroom. Then the teacher will need to create a master list of hero descriptions to place on a poster or in a section of the classroom. In addition, read aloud several fables, folktales, and other appropriate stories, particularly informational texts. Then ask the students to name the literary hero in each story, using the class definition from the activity above. This step should help them determine whether or not these characters are really heroes. Next have students trace an outline of a heart on construction paper, cut out the outlines, and label each with a favorite literary hero and his/her heroic accomplishment. As students read more stories, encourage them to create additional hearts for display.

In Our World: Who’s Your Hero? Personal Heroes: Who do students admire? Have them consider family members, friends, neighbors, and teachers. What do they admire about any of these people? Why? Do they have certain characteristics? What are those special qualities? Have them choose one person to describe and list his/her special abilities. Then, have the students write a Friendly Letter to someone else in their class telling them why this person is special. Tell them something about the person, why they admire them, and why they consider them special or a “hero”. What qualities does this person have? How did that person influence them? Be sure to use good letter writing form, using a date, greeting, body, and closing, including correct punctuation. Have students exchange their letter with someone in the class. Students could display their letters as part of the thematic unit on heroes.

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Media/Everyday Heroes: Have students generate a list of recent heroes seen in the media. Are these figures that are in the sports world? Are they war heroes? Are they heroes that include firefighters, police officers, community workers for food banks and community shelters for the homeless, coaches, or teachers? Why did students choose these people for their heroes list? What have the heroes done or what are they doing now? How does the action of the heroes affect us? Hero Booklet: From the hero that students choose, have them create a cover page for their booklet from construction paper and decorate it however they choose. Then on the first page, have them draw a picture of their hero, or they may be able to cut out pictures from a newspaper or magazine, use actual pictures or an object that is representative. For the second page, they could choose words from the master list that fit their hero and write them on the page underneath the heading. Finally, on the last page, with the title of “I Will be a Hero”, ask them to list the qualities that they have that would make them a “hero” to someone else (such as kindness, bravery, loyalty, helpfulness, patience, etc.) Students can share their booklets with classmates or use them for a display of the thematic unit.

Common Core State Standards CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.1 Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.2 Recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.3 Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.3.1 Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.3.2 Determine the main idea of a text; recount the key details and explain how they support the main idea.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.3.3 Describe the relationship between a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures in a text, using language that pertains to time, sequence, and cause/effect. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.3.3 Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.3.3.A Establish a situation and introduce a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.3.3.B Use dialogue and descriptions of actions, thoughts, and feelings to develop experiences and events or show the response of characters to situations. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.3.3.C Use temporal words and phrases to signal event order. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.3.3.D Provide a sense of closure. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.3.1 Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 3 topics and texts, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.3.3 Ask and answer questions about information from a speaker, offering appropriate elaboration and detail. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.3.4 Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience with appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details, speaking clearly at an understandable pace. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.3.5 Create engaging audio recordings of stories or poems that demonstrate fluid reading at an understandable pace; add visual displays when appropriate to emphasize or enhance certain facts or details. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.3.6 Speak in complete sentences when appropriate to task and situation in order to provide requested detail or clarification. (See grade 3 Language standards 1 and 3 here for specific expectations.) Resources: Cited http://www.ipl.org/ Common Core State Standards: Appendix B

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Hero Exemplar Gr. 6-8 Unit and completion date Heroes All Around Us Timeline: 2-4 weeks; Grades: 6-8 Cross Curricular Areas: ELA and Social Studies Major themes and concepts to be explored As young people engage in the study of literature, history, science, and other cross-curricular disciplines, they discover the lives and actions of historical people whose deeds qualify them as extraordinary heroes of their time and place. Such actions generally involve daring, courage, unselfish behavior, and a desire to serve the common good of all people. What students today may not realize is that the same heroic qualities of Paul Revere, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Norma Rae, to name a few, still exist in every age and in our daily life. Perhaps the definition of a hero should be one who rises to the occasion when help is needed, one who has the strength of character to put others before him/herself, and certainly not one who seeks personal glory. Whether in real life or in historical and literary accounting, heroes share these same attributes – qualities and actions that set an example for us to follow. If we define a hero as one who performs brave and daring deeds to save the lives of others, one who is willing to risk his/her own life for the welfare of others, we need to know what traits characterize such a person, especially the motivation of his or her actions, and the physical and mental attributes ascribed. Do all heroic actions stem from the same personal strength of character and desire to right wrongs, to overcome problems that plague humanity, and the goal of making the daily life of every person safer and sounder? As students immerse themselves in the reading and lives of heroic persons of the past, they will recognize the same qualities of character that they also see in the heroes who are a part of their everyday life – in school, in the community, in church, in civic organizations, and in their own state and national government. This thematic unit explores not only the heroes of past ages, whose names have become synonymous with the age in which they lived, but heroes of our contemporary world and daily life – the heroes of rescue on 9/11, the military heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the medical heroes in Africa, the political leaders who daily work for the common good of mankind, and the community heroes who work for the same common goals closer to home. What qualities of character and self-resolve do these men and women share that make them role models for young people

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today? Students will learn the price of heroism and the effect such actions have on the lives of common people. The study of literature, history, and science provides us with a wide array of heroes and their making. Learning objectives - During this unit, students will: Identify the character attributes or traits that are common to heroes from both the past and present. Understand the situation or event that prompted such heroic behavior and actions. Describe the heroic actions undertaken by each individual and the circumstances surrounding his/her behavior. Consider the effect of each hero’s actions on his/her contemporary time period and the difference made within society at the time. Determine the price paid by each individual hero. List heroic traits in past heroes that are still apparent in heroes of our present society. Guiding Questions Explore the causes or events that precipitate the need for heroic action on the part of each hero. What is the strongest character trait that allows this person to act in a heroic manner? Identify the role played by government, society, religion, culture, family, and environment on the decision of each hero to take action. In what specific ways does the hero’s action benefit both himself and his society? What is the outcome of each hero’s decision to act as he/she does? Good or bad? What local or community heroes do you know whose actions compare to the characters studied in this unit? How are these heroes and the noble character they represent relevant to each of us now? Assigned Texts (excerpts or entire text at teacher’s discretion) Fiction: Mildred D. Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry Poetry: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride” Langston Hughes, “I, Too Sing America” Nikki Giovanni, “A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs. Long” Walt Whitman, “O Captain, My Captain!”

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Drama: Frances Gordon and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank: A Play Informational Texts: Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Written by Himself Winston Churchill, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Address to Parliament on May 13th, 1940 Ann Petry, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad Russell Freedman, Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott Additional Texts and Resources: Fiction: Little Women (Louisa May Alcott), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain), A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle), Dragonwings (Laurence Yep), “Eleven” (Sandra Cisneros) Film: The Flight that Fought Back (Discovery Channel), Norma Rae, Abraham Lincoln (Steven Spielberg), Harry Potter, Glory, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954-1985 (American Experience on PBS) Poetry: “Jabberwocky” (Lewis Carroll), “Chicago” (Carl Sandburg) Music: “The Rising” (Bruce Springsteen)

Activities: (Teacher Guided and Facilitated) The Journey of Life: Past and Present As you discuss in your CLCs the actions of past heroes such as Paul Revere, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass, consider the journey taken by these fearless men to bring us to the present society in which we live today. Trace the journey of Frederick Douglass in his effort to escape slavery in Maryland, a journey that eventually led him to England, and

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back to America to become a renowned speaker and writer, as well as a tireless worker for the Underground Railroad. Draw a map of Douglass’s escape route and the route taken by slaves in the South along the Underground Railroad to freedom in the North. In a separate geographic map, outline the route taken by Harriet Tubman in her many trips to the South to guide her own family and other slaves to freedom. Beginning with characters selected from the assigned texts, expand your list to include characters from additional texts or history and the contemporary world. As your CLCs discover different heroic traits shown by each character, compare and contrast traits from the “assigned heroes” with traits of the expanded list of characters. For example, what qualities of courage and resiliency found in these 19th century heroes are also apparent in 21st century heroes such as first responders to the disaster of 9/11 and in the daily work of firefighters, police, and military men and women? Create a Digital Case Study of several characters/heroes from your selected readings in which you outline the character traits exhibited by these persons along their journey of life. For example, how does Cassie Logan’s family in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry exhibit the heroic attributes of courage and resolution to reach their goals in a divided society? How does Langston Hughes voice this same perseverance and resolve in his “I, Too, Hear America Singing”? What public humiliation does the librarian in Nikki Giovanni’s “A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs Long” suffer in order to achieve her goal of providing reading material for her black readers? To what heroic qualities in Abraham Lincoln’s life and work does Walt Whitman call attention in his “O Captain! My Captain?” Use quotations, historical facts, and images to give evidence of your Case Study of each hero. In your Digital Case Study of each hero, list the heroic traits you find most compelling in the character’s reaching the end of his/her journey, and include quotations from the text to support those traits. Use MLA format in both the internal citations of your document and in your Works Cited. Who’s Your Hero? Write a Digital Biography for at least two of your heroes studied in this unit, one from the past and one contemporary hero. Your biography should include a description of this person or character’s (if literary) position in society, his or her efforts and accomplishments for the common good of society, and how his or her work has contributed to the wellbeing of society today. Be sure to include a list of heroic traits garnered from

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your study of this person’s life, as well as the price paid by this hero for the deeds he or she accomplished. For example, you might consider the life story of Anne Frank, a girl about your same age at the time, and research to find facts about her family’s situation during the years leading up to and during the Holocaust that are not revealed in the Diary. How did writing her diary help Anne cope with the physical, mental, and emotional pain that she endured during that time? In your writing, give evidence of her heroic qualities in specific situations through quotations and images, if possible. Explain in your Biography how Anne’s Diary came to light and how it has impacted the lives of young readers since. Another choice for an historical Biography might be the life and heroic work of Winston Churchill, the leader whose efforts saved the British Empire from demise at the hands of the German Nazis during WWII. Based on your reading of Churchill’s address to Parliament in 1940, “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat,” recount the attributes of resolve, determination, and perseverance that gave strength to Churchill’s leadership of Britain during this trying time. This topic may be even more relevant today, given the recent decision by Scotland to seek independence from the 300-year-old British Empire. You will be able to recall the 15th century clan chieftain, Braveheart, leading the Scots against British rulers. Your contemporary hero may be a school or community leader whose work has benefited your own town, or you may choose a more nationally recognized hero, whose work helped to better the lives of people everywhere. For example, consider the first responders to the 9/11 tragedy, memorialized in Bruce Springsteen’s song, The Rising, as well as Discovery Channel’s, The Flight that Fought Back, a documentary on the passengers aboard United flight 93 who confronted the September 11 hijackers. Still another source for a contemporary hero is Norma Rae, a film about the woman who worked to unionize textile workers in the South. All of these selections are within the purview of our modern world, and each offers evidence of the heroic qualities identified in the Lesson Objectives listed above.

Common Core State Standards Grades 6—8 Key Ideas and Details: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.6.1 Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

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CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.6.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.6.3 Analyze in detail how a key individual, event, or idea is introduced, illustrated, and elaborated in a text (e.g., through examples or anecdotes). Craft and Structure: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.6.6 Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text and explain how it is conveyed in the text. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.6.8 Trace and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, distinguishing claims that are supported by reasons and evidence from claims that are not. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.6.9 Compare and contrast one author's presentation of events with that of another (e.g., a memoir written by and a biography on the same person). Craft and Structure: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.7.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of rhymes and other repetitions of sounds (e.g., alliteration) on a specific verse or stanza of a poem or section of a story or drama. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.7.6 Analyze how an author develops and contrasts the points of view of different characters or narrators in a text. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.7.9 Compare and contrast a fictional portrayal of a time, place, or character and a historical account of the same period as a means of understanding how authors of fiction use or alter history.

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Text Types and Purposes: Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas, concepts, and information through the selection, organization, and analysis of relevant content. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.7.2.a Introduce a topic clearly, previewing what is to follow; organize ideas, concepts, and information, using strategies such as definition, classification, comparison/contrast, and cause/effect; include formatting (e.g., headings), graphics (e.g., charts, tables), and multimedia when useful to aiding comprehension. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.7.2.b Develop the topic with relevant facts, definitions, concrete details, quotations, or other information and examples. Comprehension and Collaboration: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.7.2 Analyze the main ideas and supporting details presented in diverse media and formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) and explain how the ideas clarify a topic, text, or issue under study. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.8.9 Analyze how a modern work of fiction draws on themes, patterns of events, or character types from myths, traditional stories, or religious works such as the Bible, including describing how the material is rendered new. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.8.7 Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using different mediums (e.g., print or digital text, video, multimedia) to present a particular topic or idea. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.8.8 Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; recognize when irrelevant evidence is introduced. Text Types and Purposes: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.8.1 Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence

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CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.8.1.a Introduce claim(s), acknowledge and distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and organize the reasons and evidence logically. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.8.1.b Support claim(s) with logical reasoning and relevant evidence, using accurate, credible sources and demonstrating an understanding of the topic or text. Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.8.4 Present claims and findings, emphasizing salient points in a focused, coherent manner with relevant evidence, sound valid reasoning, and wellchosen details; use appropriate eye contact, adequate volume, and clear pronunciation. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.8.5 Integrate multimedia and visual displays into presentations to clarify information, strengthen claims and evidence, and add interest. Resources—Cited: http://www.ipl.org/ Common Core State Standards: Appendix B

Hero Exemplar Gr. 9-12 Unit and completion date Hero and the Journey: Relevance Timeline: 2-4 weeks; Grades: 9-12 Cross Curricular Areas: ELA and Social Studies Major themes and concepts to be explored This thematic unit explores not only the heroes that we have met through literature over the ages, but those whose heroic actions and deeds have been well documented in the history of every nation as well as in our own everyday life. Using both literary characters and actual people performing extraordinary feats for the good of mankind, students will immerse themselves in the study of specific heroes, the characteristics of heroism, and the effect these heroes have had on our everyday life. What is it about heroes that we most admire and want to emulate in our own lives, and, most importantly, how does the study of heroic literature, both

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fiction and non-fiction, enrich our lives and create a noble standard that our present society can follow? Learning objectives - During this unit, students will Identify the character attributes or traits that are common to heroes throughout the ages Examine the time period and background that produced each hero from the past and the present Understand the heroic actions undertaken by each hero and the event that prompted his/her action Consider the effect of each hero’s actions on his/her contemporary time period. Note the difference made by the hero’s actions within the circumstances of his/her own society at the time Observe heroic traits in past heroes that are still apparent in heroes of our present society. Major Themes How do we define the term “hero,” and what characteristics does a hero possess? From classical Greek epic literature, we have come to consider physical strength, bravery, courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice for the good of others as primary traits of a hero, but are other characteristics important as well? In our modern society, we speak of sports heroes, movie heroes, war heroes, heroes of medicine, and everyday heroes. Do these heroes, both real life and fictional or literary, share some common attributes of character that cause them to rise to a larger than life image in our minds? Guiding Questions Explore the causes or events that precipitate the need for heroic action on the part of each hero. What is the strongest character trait that allows this person to act in a heroic manner? Identify the role played by government, society, religion, culture, family, and environment on the decision of each hero to take action. In what specific ways does the hero’s action benefit both himself and his society? What is the outcome of each hero’s decision to act as he/she does? Good or bad? What local or community heroes do you know whose actions compare to the characters studied in this unit?

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How are these heroes and the noble character they represent relevant to each of us now? Assigned Texts (excerpts or entire text at teacher’s discretion) See attached reading list from CCSS Appendix B Odyssey (Homer) Beowulf Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years (Carl Sandburg) To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (Taylor Branch) We’re Not Leaving: 9/11 Responders Tell Their Stories of Courage, Sacrifice, and Renewal (Benjamin J. Loft, MD) Poetry: Paradise Lost (John Milton) (excerpts), “Ulysses” (Alfred Lord Tennyson), Le Morte D'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table (Sir Thomas Malory) (excerpts), Film: Abraham Lincoln (Steven Spielberg), Harry Potter, Glory, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954-1985 (American Experience on PBS), Apollo 13 (Ron Howard) Additional Texts and Resources: Fiction: The Book Thief (Zusak), Fahrenheit 451(Bradbury), The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Alexie), The Absolutely True Diary of a PartTime Indian (Alexie), How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez), In the Name of Salomé (Alvarez) Informational: Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (Lewis) NASA Apollo 13 Mission Site http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_305.html Poetry: “Women” (Alice Walker), “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (James Weldon Johnson) Plays: A.Lincoln: A Pioneer Tale (Lincoln City, Indiana Amphitheater) Film: Film Study Guide for To Kill A Mockingbird: Seeing the Film through the Lens of Media Literacy, Schindler’s List, 300

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Music: “Heroes,” “Under Pressure,” (David Bowie) “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (Billy Joel) Oral History: Gettysburg Address, State of the Union Address (FDR), Letter from the Birmingham Jail, I Have A Dream (Martin Luther King, Jr.) Photography: Photos of The Great War: World War I Gallery, World War I Photo Archive, Pictures of World War II, Pictures of Soldiers: Heroes of World War II

Activities: (Teacher Guided and Facilitated) The Journey of Life: Past and Present As you discuss in your CLC’s the actions and importance of the selected heroes such as Dr. Martin Luther King, the first responders on September 11, 2001 to the World Trade Center site in New York City, and the crew of the Apollo 13 space mission, consider the journeys taken by those involved in these events and the continued impact of their efforts on our society today. How have the actions by those involved in these events impacted you? Choose from one of the three examples below for your CLC’s project. Journey Toward the Common Good Create multimedia reports based on the activities of Dr. King during the period of the three Selma to Montgomery Marches, which lead to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights act. Create a map of the routes taken by the three marches, use excerpts from Rep. John Lewis’ book, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, include portions of television news reports from “Bloody Sunday” on March 7,1965 and comments from Dr. King following the attack on the marchers by state police. Compare the characteristics you think make Dr. King, Rep. Lewis, and the other marchers heroes to characteristics you explored in the required texts. Construct a timeline for the events of September 11, 2001 in New York City following the attack on the World Trade Center. As you do so, incorporate images from news reports, and create a map of the area around the site and the routes taken by police and fire fighters to reach the Trade Center. Drawing from Dr. Luft’s book, “We’re Not Leaving..,” use first person accounts of the events, the efforts to rescue survivors from the Twin Towers, and create brief multimedia biographies of some of those

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who were lost during the attack. What qualities did the first responders to the 9/11-attack demonstrate that qualified them as heroes? Drawing from both NASA’s report of the actual events of the Apollo 13 space mission and excerpts from Ron Howard’s film, Apollo 13, create a multimedia report, including a timeline, of the events during the space flight and what was done to avert disaster and save the lives of the crew. What went wrong on the spacecraft, what could the crew do about it, and how did the mission control team in Houston figure out how to repair the damage and rescue the crew? While we know about the three astronauts, create digital biographies of key members of the mission control team whose insights and actions help avoid disaster so far away from Earth. How did the actions of the astronauts and the ground crew at NASA headquarters in Houston make them heroes? Compare them to characters from the assigned texts. Who’s Your Hero? Create digital biographies for three of the characters studied in this unit, drawing from those in the past and at least one contemporary hero. Your biographies should include descriptions of the characters’ role in society, who were they, what did they do, why were they willing to take great risks, and why were their actions important? In Our World Select a contemporary hero in your community whose work has benefitted you and those around you. Consider as your selection someone whose efforts are not widely known, someone who is unlikely to attain celebrity status, but whose concerns for those who need help in your community makes a genuine difference in the lives of others. For the project, create a multimedia biography of your hero drawing on interviews you conduct with this person, images of him or her at work in the community, and comments from those whose lives have been improved by this hero. Do as much of this reporting as possible on your own. Get to know the hero and the true nature of the impact his or her work has on the lives of others.

Common Core State Standards Grades 9-12 Key Ideas and Details: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.1 Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail 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.RL.9-10.3 Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme. Craft and Structure: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language evokes a sense of time and place; how it sets a formal or informal tone). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.5 Analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.6 Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.7 Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" and Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.8 (RL.9-10.8 not applicable to literature) CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.9 Analyze how an author draws on and transforms source material in a specific work (e.g., how Shakespeare treats a theme or topic from Ovid or the Bible or how a later author draws on a play by Shakespeare). Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.10 By the end of grade 9, read and comprehend literature, including stories,

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dramas, and poems, in the grades 9-10 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, at the high end of the grades 9-10 text complexity band independently and proficiently. Key Ideas and Details: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.1 Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.2 Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.3 Analyze the impact of the author's choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed). Craft and Structure: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including words with multiple meanings or language that is particularly fresh, engaging, or beautiful. (Include Shakespeare as well as other authors.) CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.5 Analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.6 Analyze a case in which grasping a point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g., satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement). Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.7 Analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem (e.g., recorded or live production of a play or recorded novel or poetry), evaluating how

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each version interprets the source text. (Include at least one play by Shakespeare and one play by an American dramatist.) CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.8 (RL.11-12.8 not applicable to literature) CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.9 Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics. Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.10 By the end of grade 11, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 11-CCR text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. By the end of grade 12, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, at the high end of the grades 11-CCR text complexity band independently and proficiently. Resources—Cited: http://www.ipl.org/ Common Core State Standards: Appendix B As demonstrated in these exemplars, in each CLC model, students participate in critical reading, writing, research, presentation, speaking and listening- all contextualized within and driven by critical thinking and collaboration. What we have observed when teachers utilize the CLC model is an active, immersive, cross-curricular, protean learning experience for students and teachers. Group work, using this paradigm, encourages curiosity and voice, as students expressed to us. In addition, teachers and students can create activities that not only allow them to see and discover the relevance between and among what their courses teach them, but also that demonstrate how what they already know and experience relate and have relevance. As stated earlier, teachers have always relied on grouping students for specific projects or a specific task. One key issue with traditional grouping formation, however, lies with instructional aims, creating the group itself, and projected outcomes. In addition, groups such as these do not foment the blending of comprehension, inquiry, analysis, synthesis, discovery through collaboration and individual work. The standards of the Core do lend themselves to this kind instructional blending. It should be noted that some of the blending listed here relies on the work of Hilda Taba, who developed the inductive model of teaching (The Skillful Teacher, 272).

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When one reads through the ELA Core Standards, what emerges is a keen emphasis and engendering for students’ critical thinking, students’ creative thinking—their unrestrained ability to think outside the box—students’ natural inclination for collaboration, students’ interest and deftness with technology. This “thinking process” Marzano and others illustrate quite visually: Knowledge Acquisition Knowledge Production or Application

As this illustration depicts, Marzano and others in Dimensions of Thinking: A Framework for Curriculum and Instruction ultimately aim at student application not only of the content knowledge but also of the extended knowledge “based” on that content (32-39). In light of the aims of the Core, not only for ELA but also for other content areas, as well, a new approach to instructional grouping could better address the needs and learning styles of students. In 2012, our collaborative group comprised of English language arts educators, an investigative journalist/executive producer, and students from several junior English classes, embarked on creating a different way of literacy learning and engagement attuned to the Core’s Standards. In addition to creating a new kind of instructional paradigm and instructional strategies, we also wanted to address collaborative learning. As we worked on these ideas, several questions we asked ourselves allowed us to rethink and resee the traditional instructional grouping:

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x Is group instruction still a viable learning environment and experience for 21st century students? x How can we re-envision instructional groups in such a way students will feel engaged and will want to drill further into their own learning? x Should we stick to the traditional model of instructional grouping, the model of the Socratic reading groups, or totally rethink the entire formation and purpose of the instructional group? x Do we take the risk to up-end the whole thing? We decided to take the risk. Because the Core Standards focus on critical thinking, writing, reading, exploring, discovering, and creating across the content areas and disciplines, we knew if offered the opportunity, students could expand and build on their course knowledge into career and college readiness: Note on range and content of student reading To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts. Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. Students also acquire the habits of reading independently and closely, which are essential to their future success. Note on range and content of student speaking and listening To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must have ample opportunities to take part in a variety of rich, structured conversations—as part of a whole class, in small groups, and with a partner. Being productive members of these conversations requires that students contribute accurate, relevant information; respond to and develop what others have said; make comparisons and contrasts; and analyze and synthesize a multitude of ideas in various domains. New technologies have broadened and expanded the role that speaking and listening play in acquiring and sharing knowledge and have tightened their link to other forms of communication. Digital texts confront students with the potential for continually updated content and dynamically changing

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combinations of words, graphics, images, hyperlinks, and embedded video and audio. Note on range and content in student writing To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students need to learn to use writing as a way of offering and supporting opinions, demonstrating understanding of the subjects they are studying, and conveying real and imagined experiences and events. They learn to appreciate that a key purpose of writing is to communicate clearly to an external, sometimes unfamiliar audience, and they begin to adapt the form and content of their writing to accomplish a particular task and purpose. They develop the capacity to build knowledge on a subject through research projects and to respond analytically to literary and informational sources. To meet these goals, students must devote significant time and effort to writing, producing numerous pieces over short and extended time frames throughout the year. (Common Core State Standards, English Language Arts Anchor Standards, College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards. http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/CCRA/W/)

We called our riff on traditional instructional grouping Collaborative Learning Communities (CLCs). What makes our idea of this instructional group unique lies with its fundamental formation. In other words, the CLCs are formed at the beginning of the academic year and are continued throughout. In this fashion, not only does the physical formation create a cohesive unit, but also its constancy and cohesion allow group members to own their individual learning and exploration encourage them to take a risk within a familiar and safe context, allow them to express their individual voice and assertions as well as to listen to and learn from others. Collaborative Learning Communities allow students to form microlearning groups from the beginning of the academic year. Working, thinking, sharing, exploring, discovering, and creating define the distinctive difference and purpose of the Collaborative Learning Communities. Unlike the traditional groups intermittently formed in a classroom, the CLCs promote cumulative learning.

CHAPTER SIX RE-VISIONING DELIVERY: HOW WE TEACH; EXPECTATIONS—TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

This chapter begins with a then and now, focusing on the past image of teacher delivery to students vs. the present. Specifically, the chapter describes the old approaches of lecture, drill, seek and identify mode, and rote memorization, presented in some schools of education. Next, the chapter explores how these static approaches to learning, particularly cumulative literacy learning; preclude 21st century student engagement while potentially thwarting cumulative learning. The chapter explores the attributes of instructional approaches that support student engagement: teacher as facilitator and guide, collaboration, critical thinking, discovery, and student ownership of work. Finally the chapter discusses the importance of a holistic approach to the “parts” of English language arts in lieu of the disconnected approach so often embraced at present. In other words, composition, literature, grammar are all components of critical thinking, critical reading (fiction and information texts and media), communication, and global awareness.

Then: The “Narrative Character” “Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.” (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 123)1

In his examination of the traditional methods of teaching, Paulo Freire described the relationship between teacher and student to be one of teacher as depositor and student as receptacle, conducted within a “narrative,” or passive, paradigm: “This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (students)” (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 122. I agree with this description, for as a student K-12, undergraduate, and even during some portions of graduate school, save a few quite memorable exceptions, I recall this same paradigm. First day in junior

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English, as we all gathered in Ms. E.’s classroom, what struck each of us immediately was decidedly not her stern demeanor, no, but her writing the “rules” on every board in the room—there were full boards on three of the four walls. After she had introduced herself, we were to sit quietly and write in our notebooks all of the rules she had written on the board. We did. I must confess, while I had known since I was a child that not only did I want to be a teacher, like my parents and their friends, but also I knew I wanted to be an English teacher. As the year progressed, the interaction between her and us remained essentially as Freire described—Subject (she) and we the patient, listening objects. As I have reflected on this class over the years and the literature we read and “experienced,” I know that it was the literature itself that enthralled me, the writing that challenged and excited me—but most assuredly not Ms. E’s delivery of either. Many of us experienced the same moments in other grades, such as the 10th grade, listening and reading along to Dickens’ Great Expectations: listen to the recording, read along, take notes from the teacher, multiple choice test, maybe an essay, then, move on. As Freire further describes: The contents, . . . tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness. The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration—contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance . . . . The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 12223)

This kind of delivery in teaching does not foment creativity, curiosity, much less, dialectical conversation among students or between teacher and students, unless, of course, students themselves have these conversations outside of class—as some of us did. Even the conferences to “discuss” essays are sometimes one-way rather than an exploration and guided mentoring leading to a “learning for understanding moment.” Let me be clear, however, not all of my K-12 teachers were as Freire describes or as Ms. E. was. And, the idea of engagement, curiosity, discovery, and creativity can occur well before the secondary level. Elementary teachers are some of the most energetic, immersive, imaginative educators I have encountered. Their passion and excitement often literally exude from them. As with some of my secondary school memories, I can remember exemplary elementary teachers and humanities

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teachers. My music appreciation teacher in 4th grade was amazing, and we all excitedly looked forward to her coming to us twice weekly. Although I cannot remember her name, what I do remember and what yet affects my life today was her love and passion for classical music and her ability to translate it for us to foment our own appreciation and, for some, a love, for it. As a teacher myself now, I can look back and see that her delivery was protean: each visit had clear, targeted objectives for the 4th grade audience; each session included a focus on an instrument—we could see it, touch it, hear it; each session included a piece of classical music featuring the instrument; each session included her talking about the “story, or narrative,” of the piece and the composer; each session always included her asking us what we thought, what we heard, what we felt about what we heard. Complementing the selections, she included opera—quite conducive, actually, because of the attending characters, plots, conflicts, for example. To make all she did in class have immediate relevance, she took us on field trips to Jones Hall in Houston to see, listen, and experience opera in real time. My first was Madame Butterfly. As an ongoing added follow-up, she required us to watch Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic on Saturdays or Sundays. Like her, Bernstein targeted his performance by talking to the audience for younger listeners. This example illustrates a dynamic relationship between students and teacher—not static, not passive. We were not mere receptacles nor she and Bernstein the ultimate deliverers. These learning moments, which had their origin in a 4th grade classroom, extended through grade 6 and into our lives outside of the school itself, and I dare say, for some of us, beyond our communities, our states, and country. Relying on this kind of instruction, our teacher, and Bernstein, too, allowed us to transcend time and space and culture into many learning moments. Dewey describes this kind of learning as learning that occurs in and out of class: And careful inspection of methods which are permanently successful in formal education, [regardless of content area], will reveal that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that they go back to the type of the situation which causes reflection out of school in ordinary life. They give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results. (Dewey, 358)2

The music teacher and other educators like her engaged us, immersed us, and allowed us to explore and discover as they guided, mentored,

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instructed. Essentially, they were engendering an early learning pathway and process for critical thinking, reflection, and analysis across the disciplines. As William James asserts, we were allowed to make our learning our own: “Lend the child his books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give them to him, make them his own, and notice the new light with which they instantly shine in his eyes. (James, 57).” Why Ms. E, the junior English teacher, yet to this day remains so clearly and distinctly embedded in my memory used to baffle me. Her kind of teaching Freire describes as a “‘banking’ concept of education” (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 248). Within this paradigm, the teacher assumes the role of depositor and the students are what I describe as receptacles, or as Freire describes, “depositories:” Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits, which students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat . . .. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education . . . . They [Students] do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. . . . In the banking concept of education, knowledge is bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing . . . [This pedagogical approach] negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 249-50)

Freire goes so far as to describe this approach as oppressive to students. What Freire, Dewey, James and others espoused was a wholly different pedagogical approach, one in which students would play a central role in their own learning, one in which teachers themselves would collaborate and would also engage in the learning process with students. In so many ways, the Core Standards present us with the potential to accomplish this process of learning not in just one progressive state or two or three but across the United States and across the disciplines. Teachers often talk about seeking “the light that comes on” in a student’s eyes as a clear indication the student has comprehended the idea, and perhaps, even, become excited and interested in the process. ELA teachers, myself included, seek “the light” in our engagements with students. It is this kind of lights which earlier philosophers and educators describe and know is there. I wanted to be not the Ms. E. kind of ELA

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teacher; rather, I wanted to emulate the elementary teachers, my music appreciation teacher, and my parents, too.

Now: The Present As one reads through the Core Standards, what emerges is the necessity for educators at all levels to rethink our past paradigm of instruction, take the good from the past, and embark on creating new learning and engagement pathways conducive for our 21st century students. A learning pathway that does transcend our specific content areas into our students’ college and career and daily lives—all anchored by, according to the Core, students’ ability to think critically in diverse situations. So, let us begin by looking at what I, and many others, regard as an exceptional, concretized definition of critical thinking itself. We all “talk” about this idea and bandy the phrase, but what if we had to succinctly put the phrase into a few sentences, could we? Ralph Tyler, in Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction asks teachers themselves to define this term. Who better? The secondary school teachers working in the Eight-Year Study defined ‘critical thinking’ as they were using the term to include three sorts of mental behavior. The first involved inductive thinking; that is, the interpretation of data, the drawing of generalizations from a collection of specific facts or items of data. The second involved deductive thinking: the ability to begin with certain general principles already taught and to apply them to concrete cases which, although new to students, are appropriate illustrations of the operation of the principles. The third aspect of thinking identified by these teachers was the logical aspect by which they meant the ability of the student to make material purporting to be a logical argument and analyze this argument so as to identify the critical definitions, the basic assumptions, the chains of syllogisms involved in it and detect any logical fallacies or inadequacies in the logical development of it.3 (Tyler, 60)

The three essential components of critical thinking, as defined by these teachers—inductive thinking, deductive thinking, and logical aspect— cited in Tyler’s 1949 text, are embedded throughout the Core’s Standards—the past informing the present. If what we, as educators, yet envision as our ultimate instructional objectives for our students across the disciplines to be their ability to think, read, write, converse, and function critically, then we must re-envision our methods for accomplishing this goal. As stated in earlier chapters, critical thinking on all levels permeates the Core’s Anchor Standards. To accomplish this goal, we must also break down the siloed barriers among the content areas, for this insular, isolated,

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and rather clinical separation never allows students to investigate, explore, and analyze the obvious and not-so-obvious connections among the areas in order to foment a coherent, cohesive learning experience. The Core’s insistence on the cross-curricular approach to accomplishing critical thinking elucidates one of the key concerns that has emanated from the CCSS and will continue to do so for a time, I suspect; that is the necessity for educators to rethink how we do what we do and also to reimagine our relationship with our students, as well as our relationship to what we teach in order to accomplish the Core’s aims. Freire presages this requirement of the Core in that he asserts the following: “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 249). In contrast, then, to the more traditional talking at students, then meeting their expectations of the requisite multiple-choice test, short-answer essay, five-paragraph essay, or research paper, the Core places both students and teachers in multiple learning and teaching roles: exploration, discovery, connections, analysis, evaluations—all striving for cumulative learning which necessarily affects how teachers must rethink what approaches, relationships, and content they plan to embrace. In so many ways the Core is not throwing out all that we have done in the past but is allowing for expansion of the old ideas, or as Wiggins and McTighe assert, to accomplish the “complex interactive achievement” of true student learning, we must remain in a perpetual state of “uncoverage,” thereby facilitating “the way to make any idea accessible and real, regardless of the teaching methods used” (Wiggins and McTighe, 228-29). We reimagine, therefore, small groups, whole class, and individualized, facilitated, collaborative instruction. What the Core is essentially compelling us to do is to let go just a bit of our control over our students and their learning styles. Freire describes this kind of instructional relationship as the “teacher-student with students-teachers:” The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 279-80)

From this instructional position of delivery, then, teachers can with a real sense of exploration and discovery for their students and for themselves embark on rethinking, re-discovering their specific content area as synecdoche, or a part of the larger whole of content areas. For students, this approach and re-visioning of content area to content areas provides a

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more coherent, cohesive learning whole. Success of such an approach does require, as Freire describes, a rethinking of our role as teacher in our classrooms. In addition to instructor, we add guide, facilitator, model, collaborator, and resource. Keith Gilyard, in his “John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois and a Rhetoric of Education,” provides a 21st century rhetoric of Du Bois and Dewey’s educational philosophies, supporting the necessity for such revisioning how we do what we do and how we delivery it: An updated, recombined, Dewey-DuBois, co-crafted rhetoric of education may thus be expressed: 5) Position teachers as guides to expose students to and help them respond to influences such as national and world economic arrangements as students attempt to reconcile individualistic and institutional ideals. 6) Include study of language, science, and art at every grade level, accentuating the students’ power of imagery and blending in at appropriate points the teaching of foreign languages and specific training of rhetoric. 7) Provide adequate funding for education at all levels.4

Embracing these perspectives—the teachers who participated in Tyler’s study, and education thinkers and philosophers—Freire, James, Dewey, DuBois, Wiggins, McTighe, Gilyard, for example, contextualized within the frame of the Core Standards- does indeed present a new frontier of how we understand, comprehend, aim, and elect to deliver our content. Take, for example, the ancillary materials we have traditionally gathered to teach a particular piece of literature or a theme: Edgar Allan’s Poe’s short story “Masque of the Red Death” (1842) typically a ninth/tenth grade literary text. As one begins to contemplate teaching this short story, what ancillary texts, media, images, etc would one bring to the students? What content areas would be at one’s disposal to enrich the experience and explicate the text and its historical and thematic messages? These are now the concerns we have with the Core, and yes, it must be acknowledged here that such approaches are decidedly neither new nor unique. What makes these inclusions unique now is the Core’s requirement of them for all students whose states adopted the Core, seeking to create in one phrase, educational equity. With such a text as Poe’s and the Core’s requirements, ELA teachers would be able to combine not only the story itself, but also references to Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, the film version of the short story, recent news articles, videos, interviews of the recent Ebola outbreak, micro-explorations into how viruses migrate, for example. With these resources, teachers and students could then move to the thematic threads of the text: self-preservation, fear, class, and point of view—all within the

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context of the anchor text and the ancillaries. Using technology, teachers could even allow students to explore and discuss Defoe’s actual text—the primary source:5

Looking at this example above, we can see how the blending of multimedia, traditional texts—both fiction and nonfiction/informational— social studies, science, and current events blend to create not only the literary experience but also a historical and social context that speaks to the power of literature to capture a moment in time, an event, social encounters, and reveal social/cultural ills, for example. Consequently, the student and teacher experience is not siloed nor isolated from the other content areas which do richly enhance the overall learning path. Continuous usage of this kind of delivery foments for students and teachers cumulative learning and discovery, provides students with an awareness of how their other courses relate and inform each other and are interrelated. Fundamentally, this kind of approach and delivery expands the scope of student and teacher knowledge. In a way, this approach provides students a sustained insight and a time-lined learning path, a learning path that addresses one of Dewey’s rhetorical queries for us: “How shall the young become acquainted with the past in such a way that the acquaintance is a potent agent in appreciation of the living present?” 6 (Dewey, “Experience,” 25). It should be noted here that this learning path is one that permeates and provides a significant cohesive portion of the

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Core’s schema. In this light, the teacher, utilizing the multiple instructional pathways, accomplishes what Freire describes as assuming the overall role of “problem-posing educator,” a role conducive to the fomenting and honing of critical thinking, reading, writing, listening, creating: . . .[T]he problem-posing educator constantly reforms his reflections in the reflections of the students. The students . . . are now critical coinvestigators in dialogue with the teacher . . . . The role of the problemposing educator is to create; together with students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of logos. Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; while the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. Students as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 283-84)

Looking back to the example with Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” one can see how this re-visioning of how we deliver the content and how we, ourselves, rethink, re-see, and re-experience our specific areas in light of the Core’s expansion provides for students a totally different and engaging learning pathway—a learning pathway in which they, too, own a stake and have a voice and a perspective. This learning pathway will have its surprises, will engender curiosity, and hopefully, will even create a bit of learning/creative confusion—all of which add up to engagement. And, of course, an added discovery for teachers is the wonderful realization that regardless of how many times we have taught a concept or a text or a skill, space and place change for us, too, as they do for our audience. On a recent visit to the Ontario Art Gallery (AGO) to experience the neverbefore-seen exhibit, Michelangelo: Quest for Genius, one feature that threaded through the exhibit from start to finish was the artist’s own words. The very last quote one sees, leaving this overwhelming exhibit is the one below; to me, it represents the past speaking to teachers, our students, and us right now:7

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Notes 1

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 123; hereafter cited by Freire, “Pedagogy,” page. iBook 2 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, 358; hereafter cited by Dewey, “Democracy,” page. iBook. 3 Ralph Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction; hereafter cited by last name and page. This book, though published in 1949, yet resonates with prescient insight with regard to curriculum purpose, function, and creation—all anchored by collaboration and cross-curricular import. 4 Keith Gilyard, “John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois and a Rhetoric of Education,” John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice: Trained Capacities, Kindle, LOC 3207; hereafter cited by last name and Kindle LOC. 5 Daniel Defoe, The Dreadful Vifitation in A Short Account of the Progrefs and Effects of Plague, 1. https://archive.org/stream/dreadfulvisitati00deforich (must be copied and pasted into browser). 6 John Dewey, Experience and Education, 25; hereafter cited by Dewey, “Experience,” page. 7 Michelangelo, “I am still learning,” Michelangelo: Quest for Genius, Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

CHAPTER SEVEN STUDENT-TEACHER ENGAGEMENT— CLCS

“We shall operate blindly and in confusion until we recognize this fact; until we thoroughly appreciate that departure from the old solves no problems.” (John Dewey Experience and Education, 28)

This chapter follows up the previous chapter in exploring just how important the student is in the learning process. Teachers who include their students in knowing the instructional plan, the learning objectives, and their role find more success than leaving students in a fuzzy haze. Further, this chapter drills into the teacher as facilitator with students not only in the classroom but also outside—Collaborative Learning Communities using Google Docs, Skype, iChat, and social media, for example, to continue their working conversations with the teacher as facilitator and ever-present resource and, yes, monitor. As noted in Chapter 5, the Core Standards as they are written incite and therefore spur sustained individual and collaborative work as integral to instruction, leading to cumulative learning. In light of this instructional focus, how teachers individualize and group students does have an impact on the success of the Core's instructional aims. Described as “cooperative learning” by Marzano, this kind of learning path has had “. . . a great deal of research on the positive effects . . .” (The Art and Science of Teaching: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Teaching, 578). Marzano goes on to describe further the impact of “cooperative learning,” and what we, in this book, have termed as Collaborative Learning Groups. Although cooperative learning as defined by Johnson and Johnson (1999) has many benefits, one that is most germane to this discussion is that it allows students to experience content as viewed from multiple perspectives [as required in the Core Standards]. McVee, Dunsmore, and Gavelek (2005) review the research on the sociolinguistic aspects of knowledge (i.e., schema) development and note that group interaction not only

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facilitates knowledge development but also creates awareness that is difficult if not impossible to achieve without such interaction. O’Donnell and colleagues (1990) report that cooperative interactions facilitate the learning of complex procedures. The research by Lou and colleagues (1996) illustrates that groups size might moderate the effects of learning groups.1 (Marzano, “Art and Science,” LOC 575-82.

Marzano’s Figure 2.6 “Research Results for Cooperative Learning” illustrates the impact this learning path can afford students and, as Dewey and Kames would assert, teachers, as well (LOC 577): Synthesis Study

Focus

Johnson, Maruyama, Johnson, Nelson & Skon, 1981

Cooperative learning (general) Cooperative vs. intergroup competition Cooperative vs. individual competition Cooperative vs. individual student tasks Cooperative learning (general) Cooperative learning (general) Cooperative learning (general) Cooperative learning (general), high school & college chemistry Cooperative learning (general)

Hall, 1989 Lipsey & Wilson, 1993 Walberg, 1999 Bowen, 2000

Haas, 2005

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Average Effect Size 0.73

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Moving forward, the Collaborative Learning Communities recommended and described in Chapter 5 allow for and encourage a “push and pull” learning from students and teachers, thereby creating a dynamic and creative learning milieu in lieu of a static and passive one. Consequently, students become more engaged and curious in their own learning process—both individually and collaboratively. Dewey asserts

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that notions of the importance of experience as elements of the past and traditional education can, in fact, impact and inform the present (Dewey, “Experience,” 28). However, the danger arises, Dewey asserts, if we limit or dismiss resolutely students’ experiences, subsequently, precluding any further expansion of learning: The proper line of attack is that the experiences, which were had, by pupils and teachers alike, were largely of a wrong kind. How many students, for example, were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them? How many acquired special skills by means of automatic drill so that their power of judgment and capacity to act intellectually in new situations was limited? How many came to associate the learning process with ennui and boredom? How many found that they did learn so foreign to the situations of life outside the school as to give them no power of control over the latter? How many came to associate books with dull drudgery, so that they were ‘conditioned’ to all but flashy reading matter? If I ask these questions, it is not for the sake of wholesale condemnation of the old education. It is for quite another purpose. It is to emphasize the fact, first, that young people in traditional schools do have experiences; and, secondly, that the trouble is not the absence of experience, but their defective and wrong character—wrong and defective from the standpoint of connection with further experience . . .. Everything depends upon the quality of the experience, which is had. (Dewey, “Experience,” 28-29)

From the perspectives and research explored here, the challenge confronting us lies with providing the idea/aim/objective not as a singular piece of information but rather from the Core’s multi-faceted lens—textual content for the core areas of English language arts, social studies, science, and mathematics. And I would add humanities as a core, as well. Multimedia content that often redacts, reconstructs, re-envisions, reconceptualizes our content area pieces into other forms, providing a myriad of contexts and perspectives for our students to reflect and ponder. Social media literally speaks to and immediately engages our 21st century students, allowing them to network, communicate, collaborate, and think at speeds we never imagined—even five years ago—adding information and perspectives to their learning engagement. These three areas when contextualized within the Core’s ultimate aims of engendering critical thinking, reading, writing, speaking and listening paradigmatically shift not just our delivery of content but also students’ expectations. This shift necessitates new learning pathways of engagement—hence, Collaborative Learning Communities (CLCs), for example.

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The CLC from the perspectives expressed here begins and imbues the learning pathway dynamically, thereby, facilitating students’ assumption of an active role in their own learning. Essentially, students will come to expect and experience a greater and a heretofore unexpected “pay-off” in this process in contrast to what they had traditionally expected: taking the weekly vocabulary test; identifying the correct point of view, characters, plot sequence, or figures of speech in a piece of fiction; categorizing the genre in a nonfiction/informational text; or underlining all the present participles, circling all predicate adjectives, or underlining verbs or verb phrases. This preceding list also applies to the drills and rote activities in the other content areas, as well. As an interesting example of how the CLCs operate in contrast to more traditional, less dynamic approaches, I cite my own experience—past and present—teaching Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The Past: When I began teaching, I was a 21-year-old English and Drama major freshly out of college and eager to share all the literature, grammar/linguistics, and rhetoric I had learned with, of course, equally eager juniors in my American literature survey. As we approached The Scarlet Letter the first year and, I must admit, years after, I always wanted students to fall in love with Hawthorne’s complexity of theme, language, character, and his unique extended-condensed metaphor that insinuated itself not only in the novel’s overall structure but also within the characters, as well. As we encountered Hester Prynne’s punishment of having to create the brand, herself, that would remain integrally attached to her to the grave, invariably, my students would ask, or actually, shout at me, politely, of course, “What is this guy doing?” What is the point of this stupid letter?” And, “For goodness sake, why is she just sitting there in jail sewing a letter?” I was dejected, deflated, frustrated, dazed—all of these words described me at that time, and to be honest, still do when I reflect upon those times and reread my journal notes. How could they not “get it?” How could my students not relate to these people and their plights, the punishment that the very language of the novel brought to life—brought to life for me, anyway? So, I assigned passages to be read, we would discuss; I would create short essay assignments. I even created small groups with micro-themes for them to discuss and report out to the class. As I look back now, though, I remember that even at the time I wondered and worried about what I more could do to engage and energize the students and make the novel more relevant to their present.

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The Present: Now, many years later, when I share this novel with both high school and university graduate students—my aims, my delivery, my scope of content, and my focus on student engagement and their expectations have all changed. And, I remain in a constant state of discovery and learning; so, no matter how many times I have read this novel, it is never the same text with each audience, each place, and time period. I remain open to new ways of sharing this text within Collaborative Learning Communities. Even when I am in classrooms for a limited amount of time, my first action is to form CLCs and then begin. Content, multimedia, and social networking—all work in tandem now. One inspiring individual for me has been artist Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival). Located in the Bronx of New York, Tim Rollins is an artist who also is a teacher—not in a traditional classroom but a huge building where magic—learning and engagement magic take place for students whose teachers in former schools deemed them troubled, disengaged, truant, tuned out—but to a one, each possesses a keen interest in drawing—and not always on paper. Beginning in the late 1980s, Rollins created his own curriculum, collaborated with the teachers and the state but more importantly, listened to, collaborated, facilitated, guided, and mentored several of these children, who would become known as K.O.S. Little did I realize I would “meet” these artists and their work on a visit to a favorite museum. As I walked into the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, I “met” the creative work of Rollins and K.O.S.—an amazing installation of Mark Twain’s Jim—I was stuck to the floor and mesmerized. I had never seen anything like it. I walked closer to the work to determine who had created such a riveting image: Tim Rollins and K.O.S. Of course, I had to know more about these artists. And what I found was that they had redacted Jim based on their reading of the novel; their interpretation and sense of relevance and relationship with the work; the character created was what I had seen. The Scarlet Letter is another work these imaginative, creative, curious young teens and Rollins created. I must confess, when I saw their interpretation and heard their voices, I realized they had captured not only how I had envisioned Hester Prynne’s letter A to look, but also their rendering transcended my own expectations, thereby, “taking me places” I had never imagined. I was seeing and thinking about this 19th century novel in a keenly interesting and thought-provoking 21st century way because of this art and these young artists. After reading the novel, Rollins and K.O.S. created a series of renderings visually illustrating Hester Prynne’s A—all contextualized within the Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century metaphoric, thematic thread and K.O.S.’s 21st century perspective and

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interpretation. What resulted was a series of works, such as “The Scarlet Letter: Procession,” “The Scarlet Letter I,” “The Scarlet Letter—The Prison Door,” “The Scarlet Letter—The Interior of a Heart I,” “Hester At Her Needle,” for example.2 Textual content had met and complemented multimedia content which had met and complemented social media—all melding to create a coherent, cohesive, comprehensive 21st century learning pathway. What came to mind was Dewey’s description of what I had experienced and what I needed to do to readjust my own teaching: Hence, the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is to be aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible . . .. And careful inspection of methods which are permanently successful in formal education, whether in arithmetic or learning to read, or studying geography, or learning physics or a foreign language, will reveal that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that they go back to the type of situation which causes reflection out of school in ordinary life. They give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results. (Dewey, “Democracy,” 540-41)

Without any further reflection, I began to incorporate and synthesize textual content, multimedia content, and social media into not only how I think about what I teach, but also how I deliver it, and how I must proceed in order to engage students. Textual content, multimedia content, and social media platforms—all emphasized in the Core—can indeed affect and effect students’ learning. From this instructional stance, the Core is indeed creating a new-old paradigm—a model/exemplar—from which 21st century education can further create its own paradigmatic shift in that the kind of learning discussed and explored here is progressive, cumulative, and most importantly, protean in nature for students and teachers inside and outside the classroom. The CLCs not only collaborate and experience learning inside the content classroom, but also they cross-pollinate to their other content areas, and then they extend their conversations and exploration outside the classroom into the connectedness of social media: texting, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Skype, iChat, Google, WebEx, even “plain, old email.”

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Notes 1

Robert J. Marzano, The Art and Science of Teaching: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Instruction, 575-82; hereafter cited by Marzano, “Art and Science,” and page. 2 Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Tim Rollins AND K.O.S.: A History, 76-81. In addition to the book, teachers and students may explore the images at the following link and selecting, Images: Tim Rollins and K.O.S. Scarlet Letter.

CHAPTER EIGHT MODELS— TWELVE TEACHERS’ NARRATIVES FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY, SHARING THEIR EXPERTISE

Real time and actual experiences related by teachers and their students using a curricular strategy I have developed and created along with a team of veteran classroom teachers, using the approaches and strategies discussed throughout this book.

Common Core: Paradigmatic Shifts Experts’ Survey The thoughts, ideas, approaches, collaborations, and concerns from classroom teachers are invaluable in evaluating various aspects of Core implementation. In addition, the questions and recommendations from teachers are equally important. The selected teachers were asked to use this survey as an ongoing journal/diary as they replied to all queries. Because this survey is an extended one, teachers were asked to view it as a protean document to which you continually add and modify information. This survey contains 4 sections: x x x x

Implementation Strategies Resources Reflections

The following teachers were selected for this survey based on their experience and concerns regarding the introduction and impact of the Core standards in their classrooms:

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Terri Knight English Teacher, Gr. 9 and 11, Maine South High School, Park Ridge, IL .

Shekema Silveri K-12 Executive Director, Silveri Learning Academy, Atlanta, GA Lance Damaska Elementary School Teacher, 4th Grade Math, Reading, Math, Science, Social Studies, Writing, Gaithersburg, MD Kimberly A. Parker, PhD AP English teacher, Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, Cambridge, MA Katie Greene English Teacher, West Forsyth High School, Cumming, GA Jonelle Wornock ELA Department Head, Building Instructional Lead, West Junior High School, Boise, ID Jason Torres Rangel English Lead Teacher, UCLA Community School, Los Angeles, CA Janice Schwarze Assistant Principal of Curriculum and Instruction, Downers Grove North High School, Downers Grove, IL Dan Bruno English Teacher, AP Literature and Composition, Commonwealth Governor’s School, Stafford, VA

Implementation What were your initial thoughts about the Core and ensuing curriculum development/design? Terri Knight Initially, my thoughts were born of an innate naiveté and optimism. I believed the Core would prove useful for teachers and students; administrators and parents would rally and support teachers.

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That there would be raging national debates and doubt; that ambiguity and uncertainty would lead to pervasive and divisive fears; that students could potentially be left behind blinking and swiping into unnaturally lit screens and possessing jagged bits of cavernous online information-- none of these things entered my mind 3 years ago. Previously, our collaboration time had been primarily used for us to work within smaller departmental course teams on teacher-selected goals that were relevant to daily classroom instruction, so the first challenge was to let go of the old model. The second challenge was to manage the dynamics of the larger group with new goals that were relevant to broader district and school goals, and, essentially, the new language of PLTs and the Core. Shekema Silveri Initially, I was extremely excited about the proposed shift to Common Core because it was never a true shift for me. I, and millions of other teachers like me, have always taught this way. Our classrooms have always featured an emphasis on how students know what they know and on their ability to adequately synthesize multiple streams/layers of information. Informational texts and technology tools have always been partnered with traditional text sets and instructional materials to create an academically challenging learning environment that surpasses the surface level learning that has often been the product of teaching to the traditional state standards. Lance Damaska My initial thoughts about the core were that it was going to be completely overwhelming. With the limited exposure to the objectives that I had, it was clear that these objectives were much more dense and complicated than what we had dealt with in the past. I didn’t understand how when we were already struggling to teach everything that we had to teach across the curriculum, we were supposed to integrate a new common core curriculum that was even more demanding than the already demanding curriculum we were teaching in Montgomery County. The curriculum design portion of the standards was taken out of our hands by our county as they developed the new curriculum and provided “seed” lessons for each week of the year in all of the subjects. We then were expected to use these seeds and then add to them in order to fill out the weeks of the school year.

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Kimberly Parker I thought the CCSS was yet another set of guidelines that were intended to “help” teachers teach. Katie Greene The need for establishing common expectations for students and teachers is understandable, but the implementation seems difficult at best. Jonelle Wornock I feel as if I come to this question with a unique background different from many other teachers across the country. Though Idaho is usually not at the forefront of major changes, especially when it comes to education, this was not the case with the initial Core roll-out. For me, I was excited. Our current Idaho state standards had always seemed vague to me, and the ISATs (Idaho Standard Achievement Test) created for No Child Left Behind were low level multiple choice exams that didn’t truly reflect what was being taught in most language arts classrooms. Our measurement we had used in the past for writing (Direct Writing Assessment) was in the process of being removed, and writing was what I felt needed to be included in any kind of testing, since that would be a direct reflection of our classrooms. So, my initial thoughts were that of hesitant optimism. Jason Torres Rangel For ELA, the CC standards don’t feel too new – they feel like much of what we’ve been working on as English teachers, and they match much of what my own school has been doing for the past 5 years…focusing on critical thinking, teaching non-fiction alongside fiction texts, helping students with metacognition, etc. Janice Schwarze When I first started working with the Common Core State Standards, I was the English Department chair. I did not see the standards as a threat of any kind because basically I agreed that these are the things students need to know and be able to do. However, I was a little worried about how I would roll this out to my department, where I would find the time to work on needed curriculum revisions, and how I would find the resource for professional development. I was excited about the literacy standards for Science/Social Studies and other technical subjects because I saw this as an opportunity to start cross-disciplinary conversations.

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Dan Bruno I have not taught in a Common Core state as yet, but I do consulting work for companies adapting their products to the Core. This position has given me perspective on the ways that the VA Standards of Learning and the Common Core correlate (which is entirely). My initial thoughts when we shifted to the new VA SOLs in 2010 revolved around a profound sense of relief that the standards were beginning to mirror the skills and outcomes of good teaching rather than being a vague, amorphous set of not-quite targets.

What are your professional concerns about Core implementation? Terri Knight It has become increasingly apparent that we are being asked to change… instruction and assessment, in major and minor ways. Many of my colleagues believe the art of teaching is disappearing, in favor of a “scientific” approach, which includes incredible amounts of data to be managed and used to inform our classroom practices. We all embrace “Best Practices,” but I have trouble imagining our classrooms with robotic clones at the helm as students’ test scores crest. This ambiguous, slowmoving change can be unsettling; it is the bad guy dressed as the Core with tentacles. Shekema Silveri I was saddened to learn just how many teachers were unprepared to teach on this “new” level. Many colleagues, both new and veteran, even expressed some concern over the students’ ability to learn on the level of Common Core. It was heartbreaking. The digital divide remains in full effect. Technology is integral when considering how to close the achievement gap is in certain schools/districts; yet, those same underperforming schools are precisely the ones who still lack access to the technology. CCSS should not have been a means of systematically inserting entirely new systems of nationwide, high stakes testing. This new emphasis on testing, at least in the eyes of some educators, outranked the true beauty (the heightened emphasis in critical thinking and global literacy) of what CCSS could have been for millions in the profession.

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Lance Damaska My professional concerns included figuring out just how to implement not only a new curriculum, but an entire new way of thinking and trying to get it across to children who had not experienced this new type of curriculum. The thinking in the math is completely different than anything we had taught before. It concentrated much more on the thinking in the math and not just memorizing the math concepts. It was the new algorithms to be taught rather than concentrating on the traditional algorithms that intimidated me. It was just a completely different way of thinking that I was intimidated by because I didn’t fully grasp it myself, and how are we supposed to teach it if we are supposed to be the experts and are confused ourselves? Kimberly Parker My professional concerns are that I don’t have enough time to actually think critically about implementation or about how to use them to their fullest potential. Katie Greene In order to help each of my students succeed, I need to meet each student where the student is academically. If all students are expected to succeed the same amount each year, but not necessarily at the same pace, it makes planning and assessing more difficult. Jonelle Wornock I don’t know if I had any initial concerns about Core implementation, though as we’ve progressed through the pilot and now the full implementation, I am concerned about the testing and where that will end up. Our district started with a few pilot schools the year before full implementation, and my school was part of this. Looking back, I wish all schools in our District had been able to “pilot” that first year and receive the training a whole year before implementation. With that pilot year and my entire Writing project training, I really felt that I was ahead of the game by a few inches for whatever it was worth. I think the real backlash is about the testing, and I believe this has some merit. Idaho is an SBAC state. I have been working with sample performance tasks since the SBAC site started sharing a few and from what I’ve seen, they are quality tests that require students to think

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critically, read and respond, and WRITE! But...the length of the test is too much for any student to handle. Jason Torres Rangel I work with a group of English teachers from throughout California, and many who come from smaller districts have found themselves inundated with district interpretations of the common core that feel antithetical to the scope and values of the CC. This panic has trickled down to teachers who have been given horrible trainings that have done nothing to clarify what the CC standards and assessments might ask of students. In fact, most teachers from these small districts in California have chosen to work around their district mandates, and continue to give their students instruction that they know is high quality and fits with the spirit and intent of the CC. Janice Schwarze I was concerned about the fact that the public – and indeed many educators – seemed to think that the CCSS were eliminating or devaluing fiction in its focus of nonfiction. That was not the case, so I was concerned about how to send the right message. At the same time, I had to figure out a way to help both the English department and the other departments increase their use of nonfiction in the classroom. As I looked to an inter-disciplinary approach to the standards, my biggest concerns were buy-in from the other departments and resources for bringing our ideas to fruition. Dan Bruno The most immediate and most alarming point in Core implementation is the administrative level, both on-site and at the district level. Administrators tend to be overly concerned with external appearances and public opinion rather than focused on the needs of students. This clashes directly with many teachers’ viewpoints leading to an inherently shaky and somewhat adversarial relationship. As a result of this systemic weakness, external stakeholders, such as ETS, design assessments that lack rigor and alignment; however, because the administrators and teachers have difficulty being on the same page, these tests manage to reach our students with often alarming results.

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Did your existing curriculum complement the Core, or was curriculum revision required? If so, describe to what extent? Terri Knight For the most part, our existing curriculum complements the Core. In some courses, revision is required. For example, in freshman English courses, we are being asked to incorporate more non-fiction texts to address the Core skills for informational reading. After 3 years, we are still discussing how to make this adjustment and to reach consensus on how to best make this adjustment. Shekema Silveri This is probably not a good question for me to answer. While I also helped design the Senior English (British Lit) curriculum for Clayton County Public Schools, I never struggled with any aspects because of my own personal/professional mindset going in. Lance Damaska Our curriculum needed to be completely redone. It was created to originally to fit the MSPAP, which was the Maryland State Test. Our curriculum did not align with the core curriculum at all. Many of the objectives in the core curriculum were in upper grades in the county. They needed to be pushed down into lower grades. They started several years ago with kindergarten and then they changed one grade a year until this past year when they implemented the fourth and fifth grades together. Kim Parker Complements; many of our texts are in Appendix B and the MA standards are complementary Katie Greene Yes, my existing curriculum complemented the Core. Jonelle Wornock Our existing curriculum needed to be revised so that the Standards would become the focus instead of relying on texts, as we do so often in language arts. Much of our curriculum in the past has centered around the textbook that had been adopted by our district, and though the 9th grade curriculum was rich in many ways, the reliance on the text didn’t seem to fit with the standards implementation.

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Once these were established, we created inquiry units using essential questions to guide the year. We chose texts to complement these and then worked on 4 common performance tasks that would replace the End of Course tests we had previously used. This past August, we met again to revise our revisions. This time, we started with the standards again, but really made them the forefront of our planning. Jason Torres Rangel Not much revision was required. Our school’s curriculum centers around helping students to discover their inner voice, and uses that to enter into dialogues already taking place in fiction, non-fiction, politics, psychology, and any discipline where reading, writing, and thinking are paramount. Janice Schwarze Overall, we were in pretty good shape in the English department, but we needed to make some revisions. Our biggest deficiency was in the area of speaking and listening. We hardly taught any of the listening standards, and while we “did” the speaking standards for the most part, many teachers weren’t spending time “teaching” students to meet the standards. In writing, we needed to shift some of the skills that we taught in 11th grade to 9th and 10th grade. We had recently revised our curriculum to make it more reading based, so we were in good shape with that except we needed to find additional places for nonfiction in our curriculum. Dan Bruno Not applicable.

What areas of the standards, if any, did you determine required further information before you felt confident to use them in class (content, cross-curricular content, approaches, for example)? Terri Knight Content specified in the Core regarding the use of seminal texts already existed in our curriculum; it seemed-- at the time—that focusing on instruction and skill development would be an appropriate course of action. These seemed to be perfectly appropriate comments for a confessional with colleagues. However, it would take more administrative directives, workshops, and professional development to re-direct our conversations. It is 3 years and countless Google Docs into the process of the Core implementation, and I think—if I listen to the national discourse—that I

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am supposed to be worried that my current students will be woefully unprepared for a skill-based future. But, I’m not really worried. Shekema Silveri Not applicable. Lance Damaska The cross-curricular contents were the most challenging to look at because I really enjoy the teaching of science. I really do not want to see science in the elementary schools become reading about subjects just because it fits into the reading objectives and we can say that we have touched the science subjects. Students, even at the elementary level need to be “doing” science. Social studies is much easier to fit into the areas of reading and writing without losing any of the true history or processes of history. The math content was the area in which needed the most information. The objectives are so dense, and you must make sure that you truly understand what is being asked of the students before you begin to teach the objectives. So much of it had to do with the vocabulary that is being used as well. Kim Parker More informational text to allow for students to read a range of gradelevel texts Katie Greene Not applicable Jonelle Wornock I teach 9th grade, so we share our standards with grade 10. Though we have written a curriculum that uses informational texts throughout, my curriculum group feels as if we use them more as supplemental texts than really analyzing them as their own pieces of text. For example, before teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, many of us spend time frontloading information on the time period, racial issues, Southern Alabama, etc., but we don’t take the time to analyze these pieces as textual pieces on their own. And though many of the RI standards are met by close reading, we don’t always take the next steps to “analyze its development over the course of the text” or “analyze in detail how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences.” We felt, as a

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curriculum group, that many of the RI standards could and should be met in other curricular areas such as history and science. Jason Torres Rangel I haven’t seen a demonstration of a standard used in a way that made me think that I was in need of further information. Sure I can always use new materials and ideas for lesson design, but did the standards themselves make me arrive at such a conclusion? No. Janice Schwarze Mainly we needed to unpack the standards so that they made sense to teachers and would ultimately make sense to students. Dan Bruno Much of what the Core calls for in terms of cross-curricular connections and other “new” teaching requirements are techniques and assets that good teachers are already mobilizing. I know that I taught a combined AP English and AP US History course in one school where I worked without a set of standards guiding the design. Teachers who love teaching often find ways to reach out to and connect with complimentary content.

How much prep time before the academic year began did you need for implementing the CCSS into your curriculum? Describe. Terri Knight About 3 years ago, I was part of a literacy team that met over the summer to unwrap the standards and select 2 standards for our PLTs to use as the focus of our work for the following school year. Our PLT work requires consensus. So the bulk of our prep time regarding implementation occurs during our collaboration time, during the school year. Individual teachers might explore implementation strategies on their own. Because reaching a consensus on the PLT in terms of the implementation is the primary goal, less and less prep time is utilized over the summer. Over the past two years, during our collaboration time, we’ve created common assessments, graded common assessments, and written learning targets for each unit of study. Shekema Silveri Not applicable.

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Lance Damaska We were given one day with all the fourth grade teachers of our county in training for the reading and one day for the math curriculum. They took us through some typical objectives and explaining just how the math was changing from what we previously accomplished. The same happened with the reading. It was difficult with only the two days to really get a grasp on what was coming our way in teaching this new curriculum. Kim Parker Minimal; some minor revisions. Katie Greene The county I worked in previously dedicated a lot of time to the “unpacking” of the common core. In addition, we had to redesign the delivery of the unit plans to align with CCSS (while the lessons did not necessarily change, the standards had to be reassigned). Jonelle Wornock Though I have been using the standards for three years now, I find myself constantly revising and refining as I go. Before school began this year, I worked with my curriculum group, as I mentioned above, and we really tried to focus even more on being more standards-driven with our units. Both my mirror teacher at my school and I really try to backwards plan from the standards, but it always feels like once a unit gets rolling that I somehow forget my focus. The problem with prep time before the academic year is that it is done in a vacuum with no live students to create the ebb and flow that comes with implementation. My 9th grade curriculum group talks about this phenomenon all the time; we create these incredible units (or so we think), but once the students get hold of them, things change. The same goes for a strong standards-based unit. It’s that monitor and adjust that comes with good teaching. Professional development must be ongoing and throughout the school year for true implementation to occur and to remain. Jason Torres Rangel The CC standards are not like the previous iteration of standards where you could say that you were only working on a single discreet standard on a given day – which DID affect the time it took to plan and implement lessons. Whereas before, a teacher might design an entire lesson around a standard, the CC standards are meant to work in tandem with each other,

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so that you are actually addressing many standards in a given unit. I think this lends itself much more to how teachers actually create strong lessons – now we are not creating lessons in an artificial bubble around each standard, but we are creating entire units with big questions of inquiry, where we can draw on many standards to help focus and guide our instruction. In this way the CC standards haven’t added significant amounts of time at all to lesson planning; in fact, they’ve help to focus how teachers prep. Janice Schwarze We decided to implement the CCSS in stages. In the 2012-13 school year, we spent the entire year unpacking the standards, writing studentfriendly learning targets, determining who would teach each standard and when it would be taught, and creating rubrics for presentation, discussion, and listening. We rolled this out to the staff in August of 2013 and expected all departments to experiment with them. Then we spent the 2013-14 school year tackling writing; while we did unpack the standards and write learning targets, we only wrote one rubric – focusing on argumentative writing – and created an argument framework that can be used for speaking or writing. This year the English department is focusing on the writing standards, and by the end of the year, will sequence learning targets that were written last year. Dan Bruno Not applicable.

How much ongoing prep time is required? Describe. Terri Knight Every Wednesday morning, students follow a late arrival schedule to accommodate our collaboration time. We meet in large course teams (9-11 teachers, content area and Special Education) for 70 minutes to discuss the Core, Learning Targets, instructional strategies and assessments. Within a large course team, there are smaller groups of teachers who have similar teaching styles and teach the same courses. In addition to the weekly collaboration time, these smaller teams of teachers meet during planning periods (45 minutes) to discuss specific instructional activities and resources with 1 or 2 other teachers who teach the same course. Most collaboration is good collaboration. My colleagues bring a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and diverse perspectives to our collaboration

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meetings. Students benefit when teachers are given time during the school day to collaborate. Shekema Silveri Not applicable. Lance Damaska We have ongoing prep time during the week at our school. We have three times a week. We back our planning time up to lunch and recess, which we do not cover. This planning time is still not enough to thoroughly examine what is to be taught the next week in all the subjects. We would spend one of the days of 1 hour and 15 minutes on math, one of the days on reading and writing and then we would spend the other day on social studies and science. This was nowhere near enough time to be as detailed as we needed to be with each lesson, but it is much more planning time than other teachers get from what I have experienced. Kim Parker No more than the usual amount of prep time for preparing--this varies based on the unit. Katie Greene We meet every two weeks in PLCs to design and create lessons. Jonelle Wornock I really feel that ongoing professional development is a necessity for good teaching to occur, regardless of Standards. I know many teachers, including myself, who spend time outside school taking classes or participating in conferences that enrich their teaching experience. I have taken an argument and narrative class in order to teach the Core, and I recently applied to be an Idaho Core coach, which is a statewide program, designed to create coaches across the state who can help with on-going professional development. Jason Torres Rangel We’re always prepping – I could spend weeks during the summer, multiple weekends and afternoons with colleagues planning lessons, but nothing has changed too much in terms of time because of the CC standards. We’re still lesson planning until our brains are fried, and we continue to tinker with lessons as we implement them, but nothing has changed too dramatically because of the CC standards.

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Janice Schwarze In each of the years where we unpacked the standards, etc., we had five full days of workshop time for 20-25 teachers to do this work. Once the targets were shared with teachers, teachers were expected to include them as part of their regular lesson and unit planning. I would expect that since these were new for many people, teachers’ prep time increased. Dan Bruno Not applicable.

Do you have protected planning time? Describe. Terri Knight Every Wednesday morning, students follow a late arrival schedule to accommodate for our collaboration time. We meet for 70 minutes: first, with our department chair, who establishes the focus for the day’s collaboration; then we meet with our team for the remaining hour. We use Google Documents to share the work of our team with each other and our department chair: during the meeting—very important as there isn’t any time during the day to complete these notes--, a member of the team summarizes our discussions, lists our accomplishments, attaches any documents that we have created, and sets goals for our next meeting. In addition to checking in with our team during the hour, our department chair provides weekly feedback on our meeting notes. Shekema Silveri Not so much. We have protected planning time as a department; however, the focus of that time is rarely on CCSS. Everything from testing schedules to data teams to changes in the lunch duty roster takes up the vast majority of our planning time. Lance Damaska We do have protected planning time in that the principal we had believed in the planning time backed up to our lunch and recess so that we had a lot of time to plan. Nothing was allowed to interfere with this planning time so it was definitely a blessing, even though we did not very often feel fully prepared entering the classroom.

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Kim Parker I have one 80-minute block daily Katie Greene Yes, I have two 46 min planning periods each day. Jonelle Wornock Protected prep time is in the Master Contract for our district and the time changes depending on the grade level in which you teach. I have a 44 minute protected prep time each day. My junior high is also a teaming school, so core teachers have an additional team prep time each day where we take care of student issues, talk about cross-curricular ideas, and consult with the counselors, SLPs, and the SpEd teachers. Jason Torres Rangel My school is a unique place. We are an LAUSD pilot school, which means that our teachers are unionized under the United Teachers of Los Angeles contract, but we sign an additional document called an Elect to Work agreement, in which teachers agree to a slightly longer work week, a modified evaluation system. In exchange for this, we get lots of curricular control, as a school we design our own school calendar, we can create our own common assessments (we are not beholden to those the district develops), we have lots of budget flexibility, and we have hiring and firing powers over our staff, including the Principal. As a result, our school pays for teachers to be subbed out for 6 entire days during the school year to engage in lesson planning. Moreover, we choose to pay teachers to come in a week before school starts, and stay a week after school ends to do lesson study and planning with each other. It’s remarkable. Janice Schwarze All teachers have one 50-minute period that is devoted to Curriculum and Planning (lesson planning, parent contact, grading, etc.). In addition, we had the time described in question 6, and we also allocated curriculum workshop time to several different teams of teachers so that they could plan lessons/units/assessments that align with the targets we wrote. Dan Bruno Yes, as a member of the Commonwealth Governor’s School faculty, we have two protected planning periods. This wealth results from our school-within-a-school model. Because we are not really the same as the school that houses us, we have to do a lot of the clerical work completed in

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the front office. Since we double as faculty and administrative assistants, we get extra time.

Do you participate in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) within your school and/or district? Will you describe your PLC and experience? Recommendations to other teachers who might consider PLCs. Terri Knight Initially, the process can be rather time-consuming. The first time we met with our PLCs/PLTs, each task took far longer than we anticipated; however, it is necessary work as it allowed us to examine our individual expectations and practices and reach consensus. There were some difficult discussions regarding pedagogy, yet there are key ideas that need to be reiterated throughout the process: Everyone has something to contribute to the group; Collaboration anxiety and fatigue; PLC organization to benefit a teacher’s current teaching assignment. Shekema Silveri Not applicable Lance Damaska The PLC experience is a wonderful one. I would encourage all teachers to do them, and I would encourage the groups to be across grade level so that all those different perspectives are given and they can all learn from one another. You can learn from reading on your own, but the perspectives that come through when discussing content with others is invaluable in the growing experience of teachers. Kim Parker We meet as a grade-level team weekly to share curriculum, look at student work, grade and make any curricular decisions that impact the whole grade 10 Katie Greene We work in content teams at my school. The PLCs work under norms and expectations that allow us to focus on instruction and data analysis. Jonelle Wornock Our district has recently implemented (we are in our third year) paid Professional Learning Communities, which happen school wide once a

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week. During these weekly meetings, we concentrate on 4 questions to guide our time: What do we want our students to learn? How will we know when they learn it? How will we help them if they don’t? How will we enrich the learning if they do? Since this is only our second year, we are still trying to find our way with this time. I believe there needs to be ownership of what goes on in each PLC so that the individual teachers will value the experience. How this looks, exactly, I don’t know. We are continually refining PLCs as a leadership team. Some ideas that have worked include giving the staff a menu of items and letting them choose the one that would be most beneficial to their curriculum area. An issue that we have sometimes is that many of our teachers don’t have a mirror teacher in their same subject area, so they have nobody with whom to collaborate with about their specific subject. What we’re trying to do as a leadership team is focusing a lot of our time on best teaching practices and using strategies to discuss them because they cross over into all subject areas. The difficulty is getting some teachers to see this as valuable for their subject area. Jason Torres Rangel Our school gives teachers complete control over our professional development for the year. We have created a Professional Learning Plan, which each department follows as guided by a Lead Teacher, who is paid an additional $3,000 per year to facilitate the professional development of the department. The department comes up with an inquiry question at the beginning of the year, and decides how they will monitor that question, what data they will gather, what assessments will be given, what lessons will be implemented, and what ways that teachers will engage and reflect on these various moving parts. For the entire year we are engaged in a science experiment of sorts as we study our practice. Because the PLP is not tied to an evaluation system that is based on State Test scores or data that feels arbitrary, the trust level amongst teachers and admin is extremely high. As a result, colleagues feel extremely comfortable to open their classroom doors and curriculum for observation and analysis. Janice Schwarze Our school district implemented PLCs several years ago. In our first year, teachers met for two hours approximately every other year. In our second and third year, we had two PLCs, so each one met for one hour. This year we have created a hybrid PLC model where seven times during the year our teachers meet for two hours in their PLC; four times they meet for one hour and spend the other hour in a district-led professional

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development session; two times they participate in a two-hour PD session; two times they spend one hour with their PLC and one hour doing department work such as writing common assessments, meeting in level teams, selecting new texts. Dan Bruno Yes; we have a PLC in our regional department. The English PLC is a strong PLC that communicates often and well, developing goals and working toward the betterment of all of our students. Since our program is self-selected once the student has earned admission, we try to find ways to challenge students without driving them back into the main school. To accomplish this goal, we must get creative. We also have weekly broadcast lessons that require us all to be on target with our lesson plans so that we arrive at the broadcast prepared for the content coming from the lead teacher for the unit.

If you do not participate in a PLC, would you want to do so, if afforded the opportunity? Explain how the PLC would benefit you, your instruction, and your students? Terri Knight Not applicable Shekema Silveri My absolute favorite PLC/PLN takes place online via Twitter. Twitter chats are a thing of beauty. They’re free and totally unrestricted by the limitations of Central Office hours of operation, which are definite pluses in this profession. This is a must-try for any teacher looking to meet likeminded individuals across the content areas as well as from around the globe. Lance Damaska Not applicable. Kim Parker Not applicable. Katie Greene Not applicable.

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Jonelle Wornock Not applicable. Jason Torres Rangel Not applicable. Janice Schwarze Not applicable. Dan Bruno Not applicable.

Do you collaborate with colleagues from other content areas in curriculum design and/or unit planning? If you do, is this collaboration an ongoing one within your school and/or district? What are your observations and recommendations? Terri Knight At the beginning of this school year, I was invited to be a member of the Literacy Framework Committee. The committee is comprised of 6 English teachers and 6 social sciences teachers—all of whom teach 9th or 10th grade students. We’ve met twice to unwrap pre-selected Core literacy standards (Reading, Writing, and Speaking and Listening). Reading Literature, Reading for Information, and Reading History standards were combined, when similar wording of the standard deemed appropriate. We unwrapped the literacy standards and created skill statements. Our last task was to prioritize the skill statements. We have presented the process and documents to the English and Social Science teachers who were not on the committee. Shekema Silveri I register and attend a great deal of free PD webinars. Some of my favorites are offered by Tech & Learning, Simple K-12, and EdWeb.net. In addition, my go-to sites for CCSS resources are: Edutopia, Success at the Core, and America Achieves. I’ve written for Success at the Core, and my classroom practice was filmed by America Achieves, so I’m biased. Lance Damaska We did not create curriculum, but we took what was created and in many cases adapted it to our specific children and their needs or we changed lessons to texts that we found to be more engaging. Also there

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was a need for a wider variety of texts as many texts were used over and over again in different areas, so the students needed new things to keep them engaged. In our collaboration each one of us on the grade level team took a subject to specialize in and we would look in depth at the objectives for the week. We would bring all the materials to the meetings and take the other teachers through what the next week would bring in for instance reading. Then we would talk about it, adapt it in any way that we saw fit and then finalize it on a grade level planning sheets that were then posted on the grade folder at our school so other specialists and ESOL teachers were aware of exactly what we were teaching so that they could incorporate the lessons into their areas of expertise in any way possible. Kim Parker No. Katie Greene Yes, but more so on my own design. Since I am new to the county, I am continuing to network with individuals in the county. However, I do have strong working relationships with many colleagues from my previous district. Jonelle Wornock With the new standards in place, I really see this as an opportunity for more collaboration, especially with social studies and science teachers. Just since the standards were adopted, I have seen more interest from the other departments in using same vocabularies and writing techniques school wide. Our science and social studies teachers have recently gone through Critical Reading training, which I think is one way to make these connections across curriculum. This is so beneficial to students if they see that the same strategies can be used in many subject areas. I’m always at a loss when I read a student’s paper from a history class and it’s only subpar, but in my class his writing is phenomenal. There are still too many students who think writing is only for the English classroom. I think there needs to be more training to make collaboration across subjects more accessible to all teachers. Jason Torres Rangel This is something we’re working on and are being much more deliberate with in our 5th year of being open. Right now we have integrated our Special Education students into our general population, and so Special Education teachers are now co-teaching with general education

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teachers, and this is really pushing us to explore ways to make crosscurricular connections as the special education teachers are helping us to see cross-curricular connections amongst our school. Moreover, we have tailored our common assessments in English, Art, Spanish, Social Studies, Science, and Math to follow a rubric that measures 5 similar dimensions. As we have been refining these assessments over the past 5 years, we are not ready to start cross examining the data as they make implications for how students are performing across the disciplines in similar areas of the rubrics. Janice Schwarze Not applicable Dan Bruno One of the foundational aspects of the Commonwealth Governor’s School pedagogical philosophy is interdisciplinary learning. We often plan with colleagues from across the four core content areas in the development of meaningful field experiences and related assessments. This philosophy has led to many enriching novel studies and rhetorical analysis lessons that have been enhanced by real-world contexts: for example, the juniors learning the basics of written and visual rhetoric travel to Colonial Williamsburg, VA to learn about both the time period and the ways that the society argued for its core value (reason) in everything from topiary to palaces.

Did you have any external PD you deemed effective for implementation? If so, please describe the presentation and its use. Terri Knight Not applicable Shekema Silveri Not applicable Lance Damaska We had no external professional development to get prepared for what was coming. It definitely would have been nice to have a core specialist that really walked us through everything about the philosophy about it and the best ways in which to tackle the information that was so immense.

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Kim Parker I am a member of NCTE and the New England Association of Teachers of English; that is most of my professional development. Katie Greene Not applicable. Jonelle Wornock The external PD I found effective came from Boise State Writing Project courses, State Department opportunities, and national and state conferences. Some of the Writing Project PD came via our school district and our very forward-thinking language arts coordinator, Stephanie Youngerman. This was done during in-service days and mostly focused on understanding the standards better and ways to backwards plan using the standards. We also spent some time creating performance tasks. Most of the PD, though, I did on my own with my own money and my own time. The Idaho State Department has had summer trainings for the last three years on informational writing, argument writing, and narrative writing. These trainings were offered for free, with credit available, and the trainers were from the Boise State Writing Project. I’ve attended the last two trainings, and I found them invaluable for my classroom and my curriculum changes that have come with the standards. Jason Torres Rangel Not applicable. Janice Schwarze Most of our PD was in our own district. Of course, the planning team read professional articles and attended conference sessions about CCSS, but there was not one single article that we all studied or one conference that we all attended. Dan Bruno I will say that any effective PD must come from teachers and be delivered to teachers. This model creates mutual respect and understanding which leads to more open minds and hearts. This matters because teaching is a labor of love; to ignore the need for an open heart is to court failure before beginning.

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Strategies How have your instructional strategies shifted, changed, adapted to address the Core? Terri Knight More and more I think about the skills, rather than the content, that I should be teaching every day. At times, I feel like a new teacher. The act of teaching feels “slower” as I isolate the Core skills and discover what students already know, what they already can do, and what I want them to be able to do. Adapting instruction, oftentimes, occurs in the middle of things. With the Core, I spend more time attempting to isolate a skill and teach it, and less time teaching my students to understand, accept, and appreciate the nature of integrated language arts. Shekema Silveri Not applicable Lance Damaska We have moved almost completely away from the stand and deliver model of teaching. In contrast to what was 80% teacher talking and 20% students talking, it is moving to exactly the opposite - 20% teacher talking and 80% students talking and exploring through a variety of ways. We are now continuing to push toward an elimination of summative assessments and to use formative assessments as we go along to decide if students have mastered content or not. It leads to a lot of small group teaching that has constantly fluid groups depending on where students are with each particular objective. Kim Parker I’m more intentional in teaching transfer skills and of using informational text more. Katie Greene The incorporation of non-fiction/informational texts has encouraged my PLC to redesign some lessons and units. Jonelle Wornock I feel like I have constantly been shifting and changing since I became a teacher 22 years ago. I don’t know if the Core has made this more evident, but the Core certainly has made me more aware of which

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strategies work best for the Standards I am using. I use think alouds and think/pair/shares, gallery walks, mentor texts, and modeling a lot more deliberately. It’s amazing that there are strategies, which are tried and true, but sometimes we forget about them or use them less frequently until we remember how awesome they are. For example, I’ve always known how important modeling is to the classroom, but I tend to move away from it when I get rolling with a unit. I am also spending more time with informational texts instead of just glossing over them to introduce them. We are looking at author’s purpose and using more critical reading strategies. Since taking some classes at BSU and participating in the Writing Project, I have been teaching with inquiry and creating units around an essential question. I do believe this is constantly shifting the way I look at lessons and units. Jason Torres Rangel They really haven’t changed all that much. Janice Schwarze No responses to this section. Dan Bruno They have not changed much. If anything, I have doubled down on the close reading strategies and focus that I have used since I began teaching. I also enjoy the support the Core provides for interdisciplinary learning; it is good to have support for out-of-the-box lessons.

How do you evaluate effectiveness of your instructional strategies as they address the Core? Terri Knight Our PLTs, over the past two years, have been perfect opportunities to share instructional strategies related to Learning Targets and the Core. Of course, the evaluation occurs during informal, yet honest conversations as we develop the strategies. We feel comfortable offering constructive criticism in small teams. In addition, to a certain degree, we have begun to look at data from common assessments that we have created as well. Though, I must say, it is rather easy to attribute less desirable test scores to factors other than instructional strategies. Still, common assessments play a role in our informal evaluation of instructional strategies.

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Shekema Silveri My evaluation of instructional strategies’ effectiveness focuses on the intangibles. These hallmarks include habits of the mind, the level of critical thinking and discussion my students are able to engage in, etc. Lance Damaska The first year or two of going through this new core involves teachers getting a grasp on everything that is required. There are grades in our school that have been in it for four years and are still overwhelmed at times with all that needs to be taught and mastered at each grade level. As teachers approach their task more like scientists and experiment with the wide variety of learning strategies, they will soon discover those strategies that reach their particular populations the best, and then you will see the effectiveness of the strategies increase. It really must be approached scientifically and using the data to drive both the instructional strategies that are used and adjusting when the results are analyzed and next steps are determined. Kim Parker If students are learning and meeting objectives, then I know it’s effective; if they can take away the transfer skills, too. Katie Greene Student and administrator feedback. Jonelle Wornock With the professional development opportunities I’ve had in the last 5 years, I have been incorporating great strategies in my lessons, and these have just extended themselves with the Standards. The evaluation piece has come into play with the backwards planning we’ve done with our performance tasks. For the last two years, our students have completed performance tasks at the end of each semester matched to samples we’ve seen posted on the SBAC website. Our students have done well with close reading several texts (including video clips, poems, and informational texts) and then did writing making connections. I feel if we had more information from SBAC, we could have more to use to evaluate. Jason Torres Rangel I look at whether students are engaging with intellectual ideas on high levels on the Blooms scale and whether they are able to not only recapitulate the ideas of existing experts in a given field, but whether they

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can add their own, new significance to the conversation already happening. When I do this, and I look at the CC standards, I see that they are well aligned. Janice Schwarze Not applicable Dan Bruno Not applicable

Have you always included informational texts or literary texts in your teaching when appropriate? Why/why not? Describe some of the texts. Terri Knight Yes. Primarily literary texts: novels, various short stories, poems, plays, and non-fiction texts such as memoirs (excerpts). In English 1, we read traditional works such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet. Over the years, Greek mythology and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian have also entered into the freshman curriculum. In AP Language and Composition, we study the rhetoric of early American texts, including speeches and traditional American classics such as The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and assorted poems and essays by Romantic and Transcendental writers. Typically, our units of study are organized by genre as, I think, we have previously characterized our department by the study of literature. Shekema Silveri Short answers: ALWAYS. Literature does not take place in a vacuum. I share multiple literary theories/lenses with my students and teach them how effectively to apply each of them through the application of informational text analysis. Synthesis of resources is EVERYTHING. Lance Damaska Informational texts and literary texts are throughout our curriculum. We teach with what we call core books. In fourth grade these consist of books such as Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord, Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop among many other chapter books. We also have many informational texts as well. We use Images magazines, and many small

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texts that fit the science and social studies curriculum. We also use a variety of picture books in the fourth grade as well to teach mini lessons on subjects. Books such as Freedom Summer, Encounter, and books by Patricia Polacco like Thundercake. Kim Parker Yes, but now I aim to use even more informational texts; I view informational texts more now as focal texts rather than add-ons. Katie Greene No, we have started using more informational pieces. In the past, lack of resources has hindered the use of these texts. However, many pieces appear in the textbooks we currently use. Jonelle Wornock I have always used informational texts to inform the literature we were undertaking. Most of the informational texts are used as front loaders to give information about the setting of the novel/play/story. For example, when teaching “The Most Dangerous Game”, I have included pieces on big game hunting and the time period in which the story as set. Because of the endangered species act from the 1970s, big game hunting is really a thing from the past unless you are on a reserve specifically used for this. We also spend some time on the discussion of hunting in general. Idaho definitely has a tradition of hunting with families, but there are also students against it. These informational texts help with our reading of the short story. For frontloading with To Kill a Mockingbird we use a variety of texts on the 1930s, the Great Depression, the Jim Crow laws, and poetry and songs from the time. I feel I am more purposeful with the texts now with my understanding of the Standards. Jason Torres Rangel As a graduate of a liberal arts college in ’03, which emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary learning that made many crossed fiction / non-fiction connections, I knew that I would craft a similar curriculum for my students when I became a first year teacher. At the time, under the previous iteration of standards, and finding myself in an English department at another school that had been steeped in a tradition of teaching the traditional “literary canon”, I found myself often conflicting with some (not all) more veteran English teachers who simply wanted me to teach more Shakespeare. What I was doing instead was exposing students to fiction and also social construct theory, so that when reading

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Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, we were not only examining literary devices, we were looking at what the text had to say about the construction of race, class, gender in this country. Janice Schwarze Not applicable. Dan Bruno Yes, as much as the budget will allow. We just added The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks this year as a book-length interdisciplinary study. We have also woven nonfiction articles throughout the curriculum. Our literary curriculum is far more robust, as you might expect in this era of resurgent rhetorical studies. They include the usual suspects: Cry, the Beloved Country, Much Ado About Nothing, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, and the like. There is a decided lack of imagination and melanin in our curricular canon, much to my displeasure.

How have your instruction and approaches changed/adapted/ modified in light of the following: Close reading, Critical thinking, Rhetorical Writing, Speaking, Listening, and Reading? Terri Knight After prioritizing and unpacking the CCSS, last year, our PLC’s decided to take the CCSS and develop Learning Targets that are written in student-friendly language. We made great strides in this endeavor. Our Learning Targets reinforce the ideas of Knowledge, Reasoning, Skill, and Product. Shekema Silveri My assessments are more of a pure marriage of the academic and the pragmatic. No longer are we simply compiling work time and materials to display what we learned. We’re actually showcasing the new skill sets acquired and their applications for college and career. Lance Damaska The close reading is something that we will be continuing to move more and more towards in the coming year. This year was the last of the MSA, the state test for Maryland. This upcoming year begins the PARCC which is much more complicated and in depth. Students must much more

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critically analyze and evaluate pieces on this test, so it will be a vital part of the reading/teaching in the upcoming year. Critical thinking is vital, and I have placed it even in the morning work that the children do. We progress through levels of puzzles and deductive and inductive reasoning each day as well as many different types of word puzzles. Our school system also concentrates on the thinking and academic success skills that I have included a copy of them. The students are actually graded on them, and this is something new for us, and evaluating them was something new. We have concentrated much more on this type of analysis. Students study the author’s craft and the use of words and then apply them into their own writing. Speaking is the one area that is still weak in the teaching we are doing; the reason being for the most part is the amount of time it takes to have 26 students speak on whatever it is that needs spoken on. As a teacher, it worries me because I know the importance of the skill, but I also know the massive amount of stuff that we know have to get through in a year. We are trying to do everything in science and social studies through small trade books and primary source documents when they are available. In reading, the textbooks would be the core books (chapter and picture books) we use in our reading groups. Student projects have really changed as we have implemented the UDL strategies and students are given a task such as poetry with similes and metaphors, and then how they present it to the class or the project they turn in is totally up to them as long as it meets the content qualifications they are given. Kim Parker I try to give students more experience with speaking and listening and separate it as its own set of tasks. Katie Greene We use close reading more often. We use the Depth of Knowledge scale to design effective questions. We use persuasive writing topics and prompts very frequently. Jonelle Wornock I think what I’ve had my students look for in the texts has changed with the Standards, as now I use the language within my instructions and my comments.

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I really feel as if our whole school is taking more time to use strategies that allow our students to think, hypothesize, make claims, and find evidence. The Accelerated 9th grade curriculum has always used rhetoric in our teaching as we get our students ready for AP courses in high school. Since most of our students take speech and critical reading and writing as elective courses in the 9th grade, I feel like I’ve let these other classes take on the speaking and listening. Now with the Standards, I am trying to be more purposeful and include these in my lesson planning. We use a lot of think/pair/shares and Socratic Seminars, knowing that my students need to be comfortable with the Speaking and Listening standards. I believe that our 9th grade texts are challenging and fit with the text complexity demonstrated in Appendix A of the Standards. Projects haven’t really changed either, but I know I am much more aware of making sure my students are close reading, writing, speaking, and using technology throughout the year. Jason Torres Rangel I would say that our common assessments, which are based on the UC AWPE English placement tests, have revealed that students need to have a certain level of text comprehension if they are to achieve a certain level of writing proficiency on college-geared writing tasks. This has made our department focus on helping students improve their reading ability and level by finding and practicing their reading with books that are at their reading level. Given that our school has many English Language Learners, and are “behind” in their grade level reading ability, this is a major focus of our department, especially this year. Janice Schwarze Not applicable Dan Bruno Close reading: Not much changed here; I have always been an advocate for reading with a pen in order to pull evidence to support a claim. As stated above, the Core reinforces my practice in this area. Critical thinking: Again, my focus has always been on what these standards appear to endorse. Reading a novel is meaningless as an exercise unto itself. The special thing about literature is the mirror it holds up to life, the themes it asks us to consider. That is the focus of the literature and it requires critical thinking to get at them.

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Rhetorical Writing, Speaking, Listening, Reading: This set of standards makes rhetorical study more of a priority; given the resurgence of rhetoric in freshman comp courses, it would be irresponsible of us as ELA teachers not to prepare students for these classrooms.

Resources What resources are you finding most useful in implementing the Core in the following areas: Content, Cross-Curricular, and Technology? Terri Knight Content: When looking for new fiction and non-fiction literature, we consult various anthologies and textbooks. English department members attend state and national conferences, peruse interesting websites. Books by Jim Burke and Jim Knight, and many others, have been popular resources. Cross-Curricular: I have only recently begun working with teachers from the Social Science department. So far, we have only referenced Jim Burke’s The Common Core Companion. Shekema Silveri Conversations, both formal and informal, among colleagues. Lance Damaska Use of computers has been essential as well as the use of flipcharts on the Promethean boards have made presentations much more engaging, and the simple ability to hop onto Google and get pictures of things the children don’t understand or have never seen before has been essential to our success thus far in implementation. Kim Parker Twitter, English Companion Ning. Katie Greene Conversations with colleagues, and we have Professional Development every Tuesday that helps us learn how to implement technology.

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Jonelle Wornock Content: Books by Carol Jago, Kelly Gallagher, James Fredricksen, Jeff Wilhelm, Michael Smith, Barry Lane, BSWP resources created by teachers, Scholastic magazine’s Upfront edition. Cross-Curricular: AVID resources on Critical Reading Strategies and Writing. Technology: Newsela, some student presentation sites such as Photostory or WeVideo. Jason Torres Rangel Content: Teaching Analytical Writing, Gadda Walsh Peitzman The Literature Workshop, Blau They Say, I Say Time for Meaning, Bomer Rewriting, Harris The Bedford Reader Janice Schwarze Not applicable. Dan Bruno Content: The Common Core Companion by Jim Burke; The Common Core App. Cross Curricular: The National Center for Literacy Education Website and Communities. Technology: Nearpod; Folger Digital Texts; iMovie; Annotary; Scrible.

Are you or your PLCs creating any resources that aid in the implementation process? If so, describe how you use some of these resources. Terri Knight We have created a number of common assessments during our protected collaboration time. Initially, we worked as a large PLT/PLC to create our first common assessment. We determined the format of the test, wrote the questions, created a rubric for the writing sample, and scored the tests together. This process took a considerable amount of time as it was important to reach consensus for every step. Subsequent common assessments were created by individuals and then revised by the group, or created by smaller teams and revised by the group.

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In our PLT, we also created a packet of instructional resources for the research paper unit. We each brought copies of all of our worksheets and discussed instructional approaches at various stages of the research unit. We eliminated redundancies in worksheets or instructional activities and created a packet; however, we kept all instructional strategies or activities and did not evaluate the effectiveness of them. Shekema Silveri Not applicable. Lance Damaska The flipcharts are used as whole group lessons as well small group lessons. They are also very helpful with the critical thinking aspects of lessons when they are used in that manner. Kim Parker Not applicable. Katie Greene Not applicable. Jonelle Wornock I use Newsela and Upfront for some of my informational texts. For our AVID students and a project they did creating Public Service Announcements, my students used WeVideo and Photostory to create social justice issue infomercials. Jason Torres Rangel We use them to engage in yearlong inquiry studies of our practice. Janice Schwarze Not applicable.

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Reflections As you have progressed through the academic year, chronicle your reflections about Core implementation from the following perspectives: Students, Content, Instructional approaches, and Cross- Curricular approaches. Terri Knight Student knowledge of the Core seems varied. They either know very little about the Core, or they have formed an opinion based upon the opinions of the adults in their lives. Students appreciate practices that they perceive as having a benefit, such as “re-do’s” and “re-takes”—which they associate with the Core. Students seem “annoyed” with Learning Targets and Exit Slips, which they perceive as being overused. Students are sensitive to over-testing as well—and, in general, deem it detrimental to their learning. I think students know the CCSS by its controversy: “over-testing” and “unrealistic standards.” Shekema Silveri Not applicable. Lance Damaska The students are very excited and engaged during the process of completing projects as they have been given their choice in how to complete them to show mastery of the various objectives. But other than this, there has been a tremendous amount of frustration from the students. This new curriculum is more in depth than anything they have ever been exposed to. They don’t have textbooks to help them at home, and their parents very often can’t help them either because they were never taught math this way, so they are very frustrated as well. I do think the student frustration will abate as entire classes of students go through the core process from kindergarten all the way through. Those students who normally struggle, struggle even more with this new core curriculum, and I fear having them fall behind and just totally give up because of the rigor of the curriculum. Ways to help these students “catch-up” have to be developed, or we will lose many students simply to the frustration of “not getting it.”

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Kim Parker I don’t know how much the implementation has really impacted students because our curriculum was already closely aligned before we began; they are doing more speaking and listening tasks, though. Katie Greene Not applicable. Jonelle Wornock We’ve had so much negative press in our state about Common Core, that I feel our students need to keep hearing that these Standards really are just good ways of learning and that they will become better thinkers and writers because of them. In our District, we unfolded a new math program at the same time as the Standards were implemented, so there has been some confusion over which are actually Common Core changes and some which are simply our new math. Though I have used inquiry in the past, I really want to make sure to focus my units and lessons this way. I also want to incorporate more Socratic Seminars that include students’ writing level 3 questions from their reading. This is a skill that I need to work on more with my students. If I could pinpoint one thing that needs more work, it would be crosscurricular approaches. We have the opportunity to connect so many content areas with these Standards, but we need to do so in a meaningful and purposeful way. I don’t know if I quite understand what that looks like yet, but I’m hoping to explore this in the upcoming year. Jason Torres Rangel Not applicable. Janice Schwarze Some content has had to go as teachers spend more time teaching the skills instead of just expecting that students demonstrate mastery of the skills. We have struggled with finding time to have the important conversations of what should be let go as we do this important work. We do believe, however, that students have a better understanding of the content we do cover now that we are spending more time helping them master it. Our internal professional development has been extremely well received. Teachers are contacting presenters for guidance and electronic copies of materials. I personally saw several teachers who had relied on lecture in the past run very effective student-led discussions because of the

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PD they received on our institute days, during department meetings, and during PLC discussions. Dan Bruno Students do not want to know or be engaged in the shift to Common Core; they want to be addressed in the same ways, the same caring and human ways that have made learning possible in the past. The Core makes content more of a focus in the day-to-day learning and assessment of the classroom. Like Parker Palmer suggests in The Courage to Teach, the subject we teach becomes the focus of the classroom. When we are focused on the subject, we are focused on the meaning. The Core does not make specific recommendations about instructional approaches, but the specificity of the goals makes instructional approaches easier to align with the intended outcomes. The prioritization of interdisciplinary learning and literacy is long overdue. A lot of what we know about literacy points to the fact that when everyone is focused on literacy, students will thrive.

Have you posed any questions during this academic year, regarding Core implementation or the Core itself that you want to explore further with other teacher intellectuals and administrators and instructional specialists? If so, identify and describe, please. Terri Knight The “Us vs. Them” mentality—largely inescapable in any career field, I imagine-- is compounded by the looming Charlotte Danielson rubric that is commonly used for Teacher Evaluations. The fears: data will disembowel our classrooms and define us; that autonomy is disappearing, and is regarded as nonessential and can be deemed ineffective. How can teachers regain and/or maintain professional respect, confidence, expertise, and autonomy within a climate of intermingling processes (teacher evaluation/ Core) that-- at times-- are perceived to be hindering teachers’ best efforts in the classroom? Shekema Silveri Not applicable. Lance Damaska We really are questioning the math and whether or not the teaching of the math really does give the students the deeper in depth understanding of

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the math. We are also looking at ways of incorporating more critical thinking skills into all areas of the curriculum, but really need to know exactly what types of that thinking we should be concentrating on with these children. In the reading area we really want to look at the different ways in which you get a child to truly analyze a piece of text. As adults we already do it for the most part, but almost to a teacher we are not sure of what it was that actually got us to that point, other than most of us really like to read and have done a lot of it in the past. What was it that enables us to see things in books that we can really have some deep discussions about? So many times in class you bring something up out of a story, and the students look at you like what are you talking about? The critical thinking really does seem lost, and how is that developed beyond “worksheets”? Kim Parker None. The Core isn’t helping us to address how students who are struggling will struggle less, which is our biggest challenge. Katie Greene Not applicable. Jonelle Wornock I would really like to explore cross-curricular options in my school. I think it’s also time to share best practices during PLCs, experiment with these with our students, share and examine student samples, and reflect on the strategies and whether or not they worked the way we expected. I believe we will be doing this in PLCs throughout the first semester. Jason Torres Rangel Not applicable. Janice Schwarze Mainly I would love to know how people are finding the resources for proper implementation. We need both time and money to have the types of discussions, professional development, and planning time that teachers need in order to implement the CCSS effectively. I would love to see some examples of “out of the box” thinking.

CHAPTER NINE MAINTAINING QUALITY OF INSTRUCTION: THE CORE STANDARDS ARE DECIDEDLY NOT CURRICULUM

“Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality.” (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 200)

This chapter explores what maintaining quality of instruction means now. For example, district-to-district, and even state-to-state, consistency and constancy and coherence of instructional quality do not apply. Some states provide rigorous standards, varied course offerings, and a variety of college-bound and career-focused courses, while others do not. Some states require beginning teachers to have a Masters in their content area; others require a Masters in Education; still, others require only a BA to begin teaching. Professional development varies widely, as well, and teachers often have stated in national surveys that with Common Core, they feel their most daunting challenge is content information not only in the social studies, science, and humanities requirements for the Core but also English language arts itself.1 The chapter will offer recommendations for maintaining quality of instruction, as it relates to curriculum design and collaboration within the requirements of the Core: x Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) x Teacher preparation: content knowledge and trusted resources (identifying and knowing how to vet) x Curriculum Design Let’s begin by asking what does the Core require that is not expressly stated or described in the standards? And we must inquire why traditional concepts of professional development do not address the Core’s

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instructional aims? Because the Core’s Anchor Standards focus on honing students’ abilities to employ critical thinking, reading, writing, speaking and listening skills, utilizing a synthesis of content areas, including humanities, multimedia texts, and technology, teachers, principals, and other instructional professionals find they must review, rethink, and not just reorganize but also re-envision their curriculum. In fact, as educators, such as Freire, Dewey, Wiggins and McTighe, Marzano, Graff and Cathy Birkenstein assert, teachers must place themselves in a new relational role of instruction with their content areas and with their students: [T]eachers’ capacity to struggle involves their capacity to challenge their students, from an early to a more adult age, through games, stories, and reading so that students understand the need to create coherence between discourse and practice. . . . There is no teaching without learning, and by that I mean more than the act of teaching demands the existence of those who teach and those who learn. . . . [T]eaching and learning take place in such a way that those who teach learn, on the one hand, because they recognize previously learned knowledge and, on the other, because by observing how the novice student’s curiosity works to apprehend what is taught (without which one cannot learn), they help themselves to uncover uncertainties, rights, and wrongs. . . . [T]eachers find themselves continually ready to rethink what has been thought and to revise their positions. (Freire, “Teachers,” 88-89; 93-92)

Collaboration—across the content areas collaboration—sharing—learning from and with each other. Attempts, earnest attempts and conversations, at this kind of instruction have occurred in the 70s and the 80s with districtwide and statewide initiatives such as writing across the curriculum and writing across the disciplines. The resulting professional development sessions across the country really did not result in changing the mindset of teachers—not English language arts educators or others. David R. Russell succinctly penetrated and delineated the 70s and 80s issues with writing across the curriculum in “Writing Across the Curriculum in Historical Perspective: Towards a Social Interpretation” (1990): I hope that the future of WAC [writing across the curriculum] will bring more ways of sharing responsibility, not shifting it, that it will bring new ways of integrating students, instead of excluding them. But the history of cross-curricular programs suggests that reforms will require deep changes in language policy to overcome a century of institutional inertia. To effect such changes we must first see WAC in its historical and social context.2 (70)

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Unlike earlier attempts at this kind of cross-curricular collaboration, the Core in a way requires this level of collaboration, for no one content area owns critical thinking, reading, writing, speaking and listening. They all own these skills. Twenty-four years later from Russell’s article, not much has changed—until the advent of the Core. Much of traditional professional development still does not address, completely and across the disciplines, these protean, progressive, cumulative learning requirements of instruction. Who better and more apt to address this instructional issue than teachers themselves? Traditionally, some teachers within the same content area did share, explore, discuss, and even create content, but not everyone in a particular content area shared that interest. For example, when many districts decide to review and revise a content area, a group of teachers is selected, such as my own when I was teaching in Irving, Texas. Once the curriculum is created, again, some districts allow teachers in the content area to review and comment, but this process is not coherently done across the board. And, traditionally, teachers from other content areas—ELA, social studies, mathematics, science, humanities—and other instructional staff—have not had sufficient access and collaboration for curriculum and content development across the disciplines, as the Russell article reveals.3 Yes, in the 70s and 80s attempts such as “teaching across the disciplines” and “writing across the curriculum” did in fact emerge. Many books were written; many professional developments were conducted. Many teachers were obligated to attend. The majority of teachers around the country, however, did not wholly adopt the movements, as instructional and learning pathways.4 Many states and teachers returned to the more traditional methods—content siloes intact. Of course, some more innovative states during this period did in some fashion incorporate these new approaches into their curricula, such as California, New York, Texas, and Massachusetts, for example. Unfortunately, a greater number of teachers and students were unable to follow suit. With the Core’s requirements and in spite of the seemingly incessant politicized logomachies, teachers for themselves and for the sake of their students, innovated, created, and rose to the challenge. Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) have become the central microcosms, illustrating to teachers around the country that they themselves can take control and guide and create effective instructional learning that yields to critical thinking, reading, writing, speaking and listening inside and outside the classroom and even into college and career and daily living. Rather than composing the PLCs solely of one content area, teachers and administrators have found that combining a variety of content areas quite

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instructive and effective, as the NCLE Report Remodeling Literacy Learning Together: Paths to Standards Implementation illustrates: A five-year study of 1,500 schools undergoing ‘major reforms’ found schools in which active professional learning communities (PLCs) were part of the improvement strategy saw decreases in students’ absenteeism and the drop-out rate and increases in student achievement in all content areas. [The recognized benefits of the PLCs included] shared purpose and collective responsibility for student outcomes, [and these outcomes] were found to be particularly powerful in closing achievement gaps. (NCLE 2014 Report, 15)

This “new-old” approach echoes thoughts and recommendations of Dewey, Freire, and James in that within the PLCs, teachers from across the disciplines in effect form what we have identified for students as Collaborative Learning Communities, or CLCs. Like the CLCs, the PLCs provide sustained, protean, progressing professional learning milieus for teachers. Within these safe collaboratives, teachers can take risks, ask questions they may not have posed solely among their own content peers, share students’ work, share successes and failures, and never fear recrimination. During the 2014 NCTE Advocacy Day, a member of a panel of educators, “Implications for Change: Practicing Educators and Education and Community Leaders,” Ms. Teri Knight, a 20-year ELA educator, discussed how PLCs were working in her district—their positives, their successes, and their challenges. 5 Acknowledging this kind of collaboration for some colleagues was challenging, Ms. Knight also cited that from her and her colleagues’ perspectives, the benefits and student successes and their own growth made the efforts worthwhile, as is evidenced in the Report: A recent report from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future summarized a decade of National Science Foundation research on Teacher effectiveness as follows: ‘We now have compelling evidence that when good teachers team up with their colleagues, they are able to create a culture of success in schools, leading to teaching improvements and student learning gains. The clear policy and practice implication is that great teaching is a team sport.’ (NCLE 2014 Report 15)

Further supporting this report and its data are articles from both Core states, and, interestingly, non-Core states: “Leading the Way: District Improves Performance and Learning Using PLC Model” (2006), “Building Trust and Community” (2012), “Superintendent Peter Noonan helps launch PLCs in Virginia County” (2014), “Increasing teacher success with

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online, collaboration PD” (2014). One early book outlining and delineating PLCs by Jim Collins, Good to Great, was implemented in the Capistrano Unified School District (California) and presented in “Professional Learning Communities” (2007). This article keenly explicates the possibility and potential of the PLC as an effective instructional tool. Eamonn O’Donovan, at the time of the article, principal of Ladera Ranch Middle School in Ladera Ranch, CA, says of the PLC and its instructional efficacy: “There is no silver bullet to reach collaborative nirvana; rather, it is achieved in small steps that turn a flywheel-in this case a collaborative commitment to learning for all students-unerringly forward.”6 Not only do successful PLCs work as effective resources for teacher collaboration, fomenting instruction and professional development, but also the PLC provides an efficacious and professional context in which relevant and prescient curriculum design can evolve and flourish for teachers and students. One quite serious issue I have often heard and discussed with teachers, parents, academics, and others, who have heard about the Core, continues to haunt it—the Core asserts itself as definitive curriculum. Simply not true. If one reads the Core’s Myth vs. Fact page, this concern is initially addressed and is later addressed in the “Development Process” and within the “Overview” in FAQs. Of course, the Standards themselves provide the clearest indicator that they are not in and of themselves a curriculum. Specifically stated in the “Myth vs. Facts” section, the Core addresses curriculum design as follows:

Myths about Implementation Myth: The standards tell teachers what to teach. Fact: Teachers know best about what works in the classroom. That is why these standards establish what students need to learn but do not dictate how teachers should teach. Instead, schools and teachers will decide how best to help students reach the standards. Myth: These standards amount to a national curriculum for our schools. Fact: The Common Core is not a curriculum. It is a clear set of shared goals and expectations for what knowledge and skills will help our students succeed. Local teachers, principals, superintendents, and others will decide how the standards are to be met. Teachers will continue to devise lesson plans and tailor instruction to the individual needs of the students in their classrooms.

As one reads through the standards, that they, alone, do not represent a coherent, cohesive curriculum evidences itself. As Ralph W. Tyler recommends in “How a School or College Staff May Work on Curriculum

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Building” in Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, successful curricula depend upon teacher involvement, ownership, vision, and immersion in the process: If a school-wide program of curriculum reconstruction is undertaken, it is necessary that there be widespread faculty participation. The instructional program actually operates in the terms of the learning experiences, which the students have. Unless the objectives are clearly understood by each teacher, unless he is familiar with the kinds of learning experiences that can be used to attain these objectives, and unless he is able to guide the activities of students so that they will get these experiences, the educational program will not be an effective instrument for promoting the aims of the school. Hence, every teacher needs to participate in curriculum planning at least to the extent of gaining an adequate understanding of these ends and means. . . . Drafting committees may be used to formulate initial drafts of philosophy and psychology, but these drafts will need to be studied, discussed, and revised as a result of consideration by the whole staff. (Tyler, 126-27)

CCSS provide a K-2 series of learning objectives with specific end-ranges, all contextualized within the ultimate learning aims/objectives/goals of the Anchor Standards. Alone, CCSS are just that—standards/objectives/ goals—naked, lacking a roadmap of instructional learning pathways. Alone the CCSS are devoid of teacher vision, passion, and expertise. Teachers across the disciplines in PLCs and using the Core can create active, immersive, engaging curricula—curricula that reflect their districts and their students. Attending the successes of PLCs is the ever-present challenge of time: where to carve out the time for teachers. In the 2014 National Center for Literacy Education (NCLE) Report that examined the trending time allotted for collaboration, the survey found: The measure of collaboration time in our survey was used in the 2009 MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, which had a special focus that year on professional collaboration. This allows us to compare our 2012 data to their 2009 . . .. This comparison shows a disturbing trend, with the percentage of teachers having virtually no opportunity for collaboration (30 minutes or less per week) more that disturbing from 12% to 28% and the percentage with more than 2 hours shrinking from 41% to 24%. Both surveys were conducted with nationally representative samples. (NCLE 2014 Report, 13)

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The Report goes on to delineate and illustrate what different collaboratives look like, the kinds of collaboratives teachers would presently prefer, and how often the cross-curricular PLC is not utilized: The NCLE survey found that two-thirds of US teachers report participating at least monthly in key forms of professional collaboration, including coplanning with colleagues and participating in collaborative inquiry, defined as “data team, Professional Learning Community, Community of Practice, professional reading or book study.” Recall that these are the two forms of professional learning cited by more educators than any others as making the greatest impact on their practice. While it is encouraging that these collaborative structures are at least present, when we dig deeper we see that the amount of time teachers have to spend working in collaboration remains very small. (NCLE 2014 Report, 15)

Within this data, as the Report drilled more deeply, the fact that during these collaborative sessions, teachers remained primarily within their own content area and grade level emerged, as well:

What this data shows is that PLCs, even those that foment cross-curricular and “cross-school teams” are far less present or prevalent than, perhaps, they should be in order to achieve the Core’s ultimate instructional aims. And yet, teachers who do seek out cross-curricular collaboration do,

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ultimately, find venues to accomplish their and their students’ instructional needs, such as NCTE’s Connected Community. As Freire states, “The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity” (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 162). NCTE’s Connected Community, as one explores it, blends both the content and grade-level specific, while also fomenting the cross-collegial and cross curricular approach. NCLE, National Center for Literacy Education further solidifies NCTE’s vision in that it literally is a collaboration of all of the content area organizations—Science, Mathematics and Social Studies—as well as other multi-level/cross-curricular organizations focused on learning literacy and collaboration, such as ASCD, Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE), Consortium for School Networking, International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy (NCRLL), International Reading Association (IRA), American Association of Librarians (ALA), and Alliance for Excellent Education (AEE), to cite a few. Additionally, Freire, and even Plato, assert, within such collegialcollaborative dialogues, critical thinking emerges and evolves—critical thinking …which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people and admits of no dichotomy between them—thinking which perceives reality as a process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity—thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved. (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 179)

It is this kind of PLC of which Ms. Knight spoke in Washington, DC on NCTE’s Advocacy Day, referenced earlier in this chapter. Essentially, in today’s educational milieu in the time of the Core, as well as in the time of states creating their own versions of the Core-renamed, and in light of science and social studies creating their own content-versions of the Core, maintaining quality of instruction and relevance of curricula loom large— important—challenging. A wonderful quote, whose originator had no inkling of PLCs, CCSS, or curriculum design, found its way and association to a previously referenced article in this chapter, “Professional Learning Communities” (O’Donovan): “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success” (Edward Everett Hale and used/quoted in an address by General H. M. Lord, Director of the Bureau of the Budget.7 Although Gen. Hale, in his 1922 budget report, was not

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referring to remapping learning in the United States when he uttered these words and was in no way foreshadowing such a paradigmatic shift in the 21st century, his words resonate nonetheless. To meet and exceed 21st century expectations for our students, Mr. Hale’s statement should be a roadmap for all educators. Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. There are times when the past does indeed inform our present and our future. This quote succinctly does so through the vision and passion of every teacher.

Notes 1

For further information, see “National Center for Literacy Education’s 2014 Report, Remodeling Literacy Learning Together: Paths to Standards Implementation,” American Teachers on Teaching in an Era of Change, 3rd edition, “Are Teachers Happy With CCSS Implementation? Survey Offers Another Answer.” 2 David R. Russell, “Writing Across the Curriculum in Historical Perspective: Towards a Social Interpretation,” hereafter cited by last name and page. 3 For further information, see Tobey Fulwiler’s “How Well Does Writing Across the Curriculum Work?” and James Kinneavy’s “Writing Across the Curriculum.” 4 For further information see Janice Peritz’s “When Learning Is Not Enough: Writing Across the Curriculum and the (Re)Turn to Rhetoric,” Larry Beason’s “Feedback and Revision in Writing across the Curriculum Classes,” Janet Alsup’s “”Seeking Connection: An English Educator Speaks Across the Disciplinary ‘Contact Zone’.” 5 Teri Knight, Panelist: Implications for Change: presentations from practicing educators and education and community leaders. Proceedings—Announcing the National Center for Literacy Education Survey Report” Remodeling Literacy Learning Together: Paths to Standards Implementation,” Washington, DC. (February 27, 2014) 6 Eamonn O’Donovan, “Professional Learning Communities,” ‘Principal Opinion’ District Administration: The Magazine for K12 Education Leaders, 94-95; hereafter cited by last name and page. The other articles listed in the paragraph may be located in ASCD Archive. 7 H.M. Lord, “Address of Gen. H.M. Lord, Director of the Bureau of the Budget,” 308. It should be noted, here, I elected to reference the original statement and its speaker not only because of its historicity but also because of its applicability to this topic in conjunction with politics and budgets. Google Play Books.

SECTION FOUR: CHALLENGES: INSTRUCTION

While there are challenges to curriculum design, even with the best curriculum, the resulting work begins and concludes with effective and engaging instruction. This section provides recommendations on how teachers can re-think and re-envision their approaches to thinking about literature and informational texts, along with using humanities and media. Through engaging and innovative instruction that includes cross-curricular content and access, teachers and students explore, discover, question, reexamine, evaluate, analyze, and reconstruct: The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems of groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others. In dry prosaic minds, almost all the mental sequences flow along these lines of habitual routine repetition and suggestion. In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is broken through with ease at any moment; and one field of mental objects will suggest another with which perhaps in the whole history of human thinking, it had never once before been coupled. The link here is usually some analogy between the objects successively thought of,--an analogy often so subtle that, although we feel it, we can only with difficulty analyze its ground; as where, for example, we find something masculine in the color red and something feminine in the color pale blue, or where, of three human beings’ characters, one will remind us of a cat, another of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow. (James, 52)

CHAPTER TEN CROSS-CURRICULAR CONTENT— SOCIAL STUDIES, SCIENCE, AND HUMANITIES

“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.” (John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 10, 1962)

The chapter begins with the discussion of why a true and robust crosscurricular approach produces students who emerge as critical thinkers and global citizens; English/language arts is a perfect discipline for this endeavor, but it requires a different approach from the past. The Core’s requirements do provide the foundation for this instructional aim. The chapter will take actual curricular examples of texts and thematic strands addressed in secondary schools at present and illustrate how teachers can approach this new instructional direction in how they approach a text, how they can see thematic, character, events threads in literature and relate them to informational texts—both archival and informational texts—and use assets from museums, interviews, music, images, speeches, and journal/newspaper articles to provide immersive, inquiry-based strategies for students. What does a critical thinker and global citizen look like, sound like, act like? The Core seeks to foment “Students [who] will learn to use cogent reasoning and evidence collection skills that are essential for success in college, career, and life. The standards also lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person who is prepared for success in the 21st century” From Freire’s perspective, to achieve this new kind of 21st century global literacy, traditional methods of “banking and depositing” education must yield to “problem-solving” methods and approaches—both explored in earlier chapters. In Freire’s rationale and recommendations, teachers assume roles of co-investigators with their students; teachers and students transcend the insularity and solitary nature of the content area and single classroom to peer into and experience other content areas and

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teacher-experts, thereby expanding their immediate knowledge base. Within this paradigm, according to Freire, “The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity” (Freire, “Pedagogy,” 162). Dewey further elucidates on the importance of students’ exploration and discovery and wrestling with associative concepts in order to learn and form their own ideas in “The Significance of Geography and History,” and “Science in the Course of Study.”1 (Dewey, “Democracy,” 204-303; 274-86) In my working with teachers who are restrained in their efforts to encourage their students in this learning direction and experience, one experience in particular I noted in my journal. Because of my work and research with challenged and sensitive texts, I was asked to come and discuss Sophocles’ Oedipus Trilogy to classes of Regular and Honors seniors. As always, I rely on my own experiences teaching high school students, but more importantly, I have come to rely on what students themselves have taught me over the years and continue to teach me every time I am privileged to be among them. I always want to collaborate with students, and I always want to rely on a cross-curricular approach that will allow the students and me to relate a text or texts to their present. In this case, I must confess, the Greek classics as slotting into the category of challenged texts was a surprise. As we began our conversations and explorations of the plays, one student raised his hand and inquired, “Where do you come from?” As one can imagine, I could see the teachers sitting in the back of the seminar room take a large, collective “What do we do now?” breath. But, one of my “rules” when I work with students is that no adults who observe may engage or interrupt. I insist upon this condition so that students will feel totally safe with me and empowered to ask anything they wish—yes, anything. And with this “rule,” I must confess, I have heard and have been asked much. That said along with the students, I believe, we are the better for the sharing, regardless of the risk and the, sometimes, discomfort. So, in response to the student, I replied with a smile, “Houston, Texas. Now, let’s return to Sophocles.” He raised his hand again, and said, “If you are from Texas, how can you teach about a work that despises God?” Well, now the air in the whole room was literally sucked out with the one question. But, that said, I thought the question was a worthy one, and in the context of the class and this young man, the question deemed a reasoned and exploratory response. We discussed the history and “religion” of the Greeks compared to codified, organized religion in the present. I engaged more students in the conversation along with the young man to explore the now expanded query, “Even though we may be of

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different periods and beliefs and experiences, is it possible for us to see and think about the challenges Sophocles poses in the trilogy?” We proceeded over the next several days to explore the character of Oedipus as a child abandoned, a relative who betrays and is jealous of another—Creon to Laius, Jocasta, a mother and wife who unwittingly falls into an unimaginable disaster, for example. We also explored the notion of what if we had access to a seer or a prophet who could foretell the future and/or warn us of impending chaos, as Teiresias provides Oedipus, would we want such access? What would we do with such access? As has often been the outcome with such explorations, students’ curiosity and desire to know supersede fear, fear, for me, too, and we traversed curiously into the realm of discovery and learning, using the text (s) and cross-curricular content. Each time I enter a classroom, the students and I embark on the same kind of exploration and collaboration with an anchor, or target text(s), supported and expanded by cross-curricular content. With Mark Twain, for example, my going into a district to teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and “A True Story,” was, as Freire describes, an ongoing learning experience, regardless the state, regardless rural, urban, or suburban, regardless private or public school. Theme, character, events, cultural and social conditions—as students began to understand the work within its historical context, once we collaboratively explored the text with its components, the cross-curricular content, along with students’ own experiences, all of which allowed them to drill more deeply into the work(s). Huck, Jim, slavery, religion, friendship, Tom, Aunt Sally, the Widow, Miss Watson, the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, Aunt Polly, Col. Sherburn, Aunt Rachel, Hannibal, the South—all of these elements, along with Twain’s narrative style, begin to interest students, encouraging them to relate, or as James and Dewey would state, associate, concepts, ideas, experiences with which they are familiar in order to drill more deeply into the text(s). The cross-curricular content aids and enhances this analysis and evaluation. Keith Gilyard references the efficacy of such a learning approach in a seven-point rubric that examines and combines the educational philosophies of Dewey and DuBois in “John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois and a Rhetoric of Education:” “6) Include study of language, science, and art at every grade level, accentuating the students’ power of imagery and blending in at appropriate points the teaching of foreign languages and specific training of rhetoric” (Gilyard, Loc 3207 Kindle). Other educators also agree with Gilyard, Dewey, DuBois, in regard to the import of using cross-curricular content to provide students a coherent,

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cohesive, and thereby, cumulative learning experience, including Edward P.J. Corbett, Chris Anson, Tobey Fulwiler, Christine H. Leland and Stevie R. Bruzas, Beth Maloch and Randy Bomer, David R. Russell.Besides providing concrete contexts for students outside of the actual text—be it literature, nonfiction/informational, social studies, science, or mathematics—using cross-curricular content also paves the way for what I describe as “thinking outside the instructional box.” As teachers, we have all experienced those wonderful class periods where students become so energized and immersed in the work that they and we forego the lesson plan for the greater teachable moment, as we now describe it. What I have realized over the years, however, and before the CCSS cross-curricular requirement, is that the constancy of utilizing cross-curricular learning pathways foments students’ thinking processes. In other words, as students become accustomed to peering through and learning from a multifaceted perspective and lens, they incorporate this thinking process naturally into their own—affecting reading, writing, listening and speaking collaborations, everything. I have even had former students, teachers, and when I was teaching high school, parents, coming back to me saying they were surprised students continued to evidence the predilection of questioning, making diverse associations, all of which proves that using cross-curricular content in teaching ELA introduces students to a broader sense of literacy. I have used this same learning approach and philosophy with graduate students. In one class, with students who were student teaching in English and who were searching for ideas on engagement, we brainstormed together on what they could do to interest their students in reading what the students deemed a difficult text, Toni Morrison’s Jazz. One of the traits that makes this novel so unique lies in Morrison’s writing style—the language and rhythm and characterization of the novel echo and parallel the movement and rhythm of jazz music and the jazz timbre of New York’s Harlem of the 1930s. I suggested to my graduate students that they pose an offer to their middle schoolers: if we could ask Morrison to respond to letters from students about their reactions to this novel and she would respond, would they in turn read the entire text and work collaboratively to determine what they wanted to say to the author. One addition to our request of both the middle schoolers and Morrison was that for every point of interest, comment, even “recommendations” they made, they had to cite passages and rationales. The students readily accepted what they deemed to be a challenge to “speak” directly to an author, my graduate students were experiencing first-hand how to facilitate drilling into a text, utilizing cross-curricular content when appropriate, and

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students at the middle school level experienced, some for the first time, sustained collaboration, critical thinking, writing, analysis, evaluation, listening and speaking. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, secondary students never cease to amaze me. The middle schoolers not only rose to the occasion but also exceeded it. My graduate students, too, had learned several interesting lessons with regard to engagement, fomenting critical thinking, realizing that just saying to students “read the text and let’s discuss” does not work with today’s students. My students found that they had to provide crosscurricular content in the areas of geographical location, historical events for Harlem Renaissance, historical event for the Great Migration, jazz music, jazz rhythm, and African Americans’ relationship to jazz, to illustrate and enhance students’ reading experiences. More work—but amazingly satisfying and instructional. Although my perspectives on the efficacy of cross-curricular content are clear, a letter Flannery O’Connor wrote in 1961 as a reply to a professor and her students speaks forcefully. To describe succinctly, on 28 March 1961, students were reading O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and could not “ . . . find an acceptable interpretation.” The professor explained to O’Connor, “We have debated at length several possible interpretations . . . none of which fully satisfies us” After the professor summarizes the different interpretations he and his students discussed, he asks O’Connor to “ . . . give us further comments about your intention in writing ‘A Good man is Hard to Find.’ ” O’Connor responds: The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be. If it were a legitimate interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick and its interest would be simply for abnormal psychology. I am not interested in abnormal psychology . . . . The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer if believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it. My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock. 2 (O’Connor, Loc 2549-2564)

The Core’s cross-curricular requirement allows for all students across the country to experience instructional pathways such as these discussed above, rather than a select few. What follows are some limited examples

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from English language arts, social studies, and science that provide a cross-curricular crosswalk, illustrating how teachers and students can drill further and wider into a text(s) using not only other texts, but also, primary and secondary resources, letters, speeches, humanities, music, multimedia texts.

Crosswalk As we have discussed, one feature of the Core that is both new and old lies with its requirement of a cross-curricular approach. I describe this requirement as old because some English teachers have incorporated this instructional process into their teaching for some time, and, as we have seen from earlier notions of the purpose and content of public education, the concept of a content-crossing approach was anticipated. That said, not all English teachers-nor other content area teachers, and particularly at the secondary level incorporate a cross-curricular approach. In lieu of exemplar units or thematic lessons, the section below provides a conceptual idea of how one might approach blending a targeted, or anchor, text for instruction with other texts—nonfiction/informational, media, humanities, etc. Each target text is listed first with suggested ancillary texts listed after with a brief précis. Following the section are a few questions teachers can ask to guide the decisions on blending texts. Of course, we must always note, the ultimate instructional success of blending texts lies quite keenly with our students, for they are our target audience. x The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne—conceptual frame: confronting a life-altering challenge in public x The Myth of Medusa (tale) x “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” by Margaret Fuller (essay excerpt) x Woman’s Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (nonfiction/ informational text excerpt) x Speech by Mark Twain (nonfiction/informational speech) x The Scarlet Letter as interpreted by Tim Rollins and K.O.S—art3 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Fredrick Douglass—conceptual frame: the personal narrative (here, a slave narrative) focusing on adversity and personal experience

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x The Douglass’ Monthly and The North Star (nonfiction/ informational 19th century periodicals-excerpts) x Narrative of the Life of Henry “Box” Brown, Written by Himself (nonfiction/informational 19th century periodicals-excerpts) x Caroline Henderson’s letters from the Dustbowl in The Dust Bowl: A Film by Ken Burns- (nonfiction/informational 20th century periodicals-excerpts from The Atlantic Monthly)4 x The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (nonfiction/informational personal narrative-excerpts) x Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County by Alexandra Pelosi (nonfiction/informational-media-personal narratives by children)5 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare—conceptual frame: power and politics within the framework of friendship and social ethics x Queen Elizabeth’s promise to the Lord Mayor and the people of England on the eve of her Coronation (“I will be as good unto ye as ever a Queen was unto her people. No will in me can lack, neither do I trust shall there lack any power. And persuade yourselves that for the safety and quietness of you all I will not spare if need be to spend my blood.” Speech—personal-public statement) x Abraham Lincoln’s discussion with his Cabinet, regarding his decision to forego their counsel and introduce the Emancipation Proclamation and the law of the land prior to the conclusion of the Civil War (“Mr. Lincoln’s Office: Emancipation Proclamation” informational/nonfiction conversations, accompanied by scholarly commentary) x Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting statement, supported by Justice Ginsberg, on the issue of Schuette v. Coal. Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigration Rights 572 U.S. 2014) (informational/nonfiction text—argument) As the sample blendings reveal, one can take an historical text and illustrate its relevance to students’ own present realities, relying on texts, media, informed by other content areas. A few considerations as teachers contemplate which texts to blend would be the following: x First and foremost, as earlier stated, who are my students? x What text types should they find interesting, even though they might not be familiar with them, at all?

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x What texts from this day and time not only could speak to my students but could also reflect the author’s intent and message we are presently studying? x Before I present to my students, I must know why I selected each text.

Notes 1

This section explores and illustrates the efficacy of blending and intersecting the content areas. Like James and Benjamin Franklin, Dewy asserts that by acknowledging and exploring the similaritites and difference among the core content areeas, students would benefit tremendously, thereby increasing their knowledge-base. 2 Flannery O’Connor, “I am in a state of shock,” LOC 2549-64, Kindle. 3 Rollins and K.O.S., Tim Rollins AND K.O.S.: A History. 76-81. 4 Caroline Henderson, “Letters by Caroline Henderson,” The Dust Bowl: A Film by Ken Burns PBS, November 2012; also, “Letters from the Dust Bowl,” Atlantic Monthly: theatlantic.com 5 Alexandra Pelosi, Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County, HBO , July 2010

CHAPTER ELEVEN TECHNOLOGY, DATABASES, AND MEDIA

This annotated chapter provides teachers with an introductory list of resources—some free, some subscription—for use in the classroom, curriculum development and professional development. The annotations will provide teachers, Professional Learning communities, administrators, and curriculum directors with Digital, Media, APPs, Social Networks: Skype, Google, WebEx, they can utilize for engaging instructional learning.

General Information Library of Congress American Memory Collection http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html Extensive archival documents, film, audio, music, and graphics on a vast array of topics. Browse individual collections by topic: Advertising, African American History, Architecture and Landscape, Cities and Towns, Culture and folk life, Environment and Conservation, Government and Law, Immigration and the American Expansion, Literature, Maps, Native American History, Performing Arts and Music, Presidents, Religion, Sports and Recreation, Technology and Industry, War and the Military, Women’s History Smithsonian Resources for Educators http://www.si.edu/Educators Online access by students and teachers to video, images, graphics, and standards-based instructional activities. Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access http://smithsonianeducation.org K-12 grade specific instructional resources aligned with individual state standards. Site provides access to the collections from the various Smithsonian museums.

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National Archives Teachers’ Resources http://www.archives.gov/education/ Vast array of topics and multimedia instructional activities based on the Archives’ collection of historical documents, government records, and presidential collections. Also provides professional development site for teachers National Archives Documents Teach Project http://docsteach.org Activities for K-12 classroom use designed to promote student research skills featuring primary documents and resources. Site also includes recommended instructional approaches for teachers. National Archives Research Our Records Project http://www.archives.gov/research/ Provides a set of exemplars and specific tools to promote student research on selected American historical themes featuring images of original documents and government records.

Educational Technology Resource Eduhound Collections of topic-based online education resources, including valuable ed tech resources to incorporate into your curriculum. Educational topics, templates, technology tutorials, and practical tips are featured.

Research Online Google Scholar Search scholarly literature, including full-text books. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.

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Learning Strategies http://www.edutopia.org/ Search by keyword from over 2200 features on this site or browse a collection of over 100 downloadable videos to find the tools needed to help in promoting an interactive learning environment. Internet Public Library http://www.ipl.org/ Information You Can Trust features a searchable, subject-categorized directory of authoritative websites; links to online texts, newspapers, and magazines.

Academic Research and Documentation http://www.questia.com A Library Database with over 9 million books and articles (subscription required)

Bringing Your Classroom to Life PBS Teachers This is a great website that can help teachers grow professionally. It offers free teaching resources relevant to different grade categories.

Thematic Pathfinders for All Ages 42explore A web project that provides resources and teaching materials on a variety of subject areas and disciplines.

Complete Online Resource for Original Content across Disciplines Education World Another great website for teachers, providing teaching tips, lesson plans, activities, academic articles, web resources, and many more

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American Association of School Librarians http://www.ala.org/aasl/standards-guidelines/best-websites/2013 Among many other sites here, the Course Library offers this helpful section for teachers: Common Core: Moving from Complex to Calm, Cool, and Collected The Common Core is asking teachers to move from rote and recall to rigor and relevance, and the librarian can play a vital role in this paradigm shift.

Websites for 21st Century Teaching Strategies http://www.21stcenturyschoolteacher.com/cool-websites.html Offers an extensive list of online applications, including the top 100 learning tools voted by teachers who use them, graphics, videos, audio, and tutorials. RAFT - Resource Area For Teaching http://www.raft.net/who-we-are www.raftbayarea.org/workshops RAFT's workshop program is designed to enrich educational programs by facilitating the practice of hands-on teaching across the curriculum. Reading Intervention Program – Gr. 4-12 http://www.scholastic.com/read180/read-180-experience/reading-programdesign.htm?esp=R180/ib/20140909//img/PPCMultipShopLanding/Teacher s/READ180///// READ 180 supports educators with a comprehensive system of curriculum, instruction, and professional development, while providing students with personalized rigorous instruction for college, career, and beyond. Evaluating Digital Resources http://www.atpe.org/en/Resources/Educators/Teaching-Digital-Literacy While today’s students are adept at using technology to find information, they are not necessarily good at discerning the quality of the information they’re finding. Literacy educators have to help them understand how to decode and deconstruct these messages.

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Additional Digital Literacy Resources for Teachers http://www.atpe.org/en/Resources/Educators/Teaching-Digital-Literacy ProCon.org’s Teachers’ Corner offers lesson ideas for incorporating information presented on the independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit website, which offers pro-and-con examinations of controversial issues ranging from standardized testing to euthanasia.

English Language Arts Project Gutenberg- Free eBooks http://www.gutenberg.org Extensive collection of scanned novels and informational texts drawn from the literary canon available for download by students and teachers. Literature Circles- NCTE ReadWriteThink http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lessonplans/literature-circles-getting-started-19.html Instructional plans and extensive curriculum resources developed by the NCTE project designed to help teachers create literature circles in the classroom to promote reading and comprehension. Classroom Literature Circles- Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation http://www.edutopia.org/literature-circles-classroom-bookdiscussion-how-to Guide to the creation of classroom literature circles based on examples developed by K-12 teachers around the country. Booklist Online- American Library Association http://booklistonline.com/Default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1 Extensive list of reviews for teachers of texts used in classrooms across the K-12 grade levels and content areas. Recommended Reading Lists- American Library Association http://www.ala.org/tools/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet23 - yateens Recommended fictional and informational texts for K-12 students. Cross-referenced to state and national standards.

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Online Literary Criticism- ipl2 http://www.ipl.org/div/litcrit/ Extensive collection of critical reviews of fictional and informational texts according to literary periods in world literature divided by nation and region. Folger Shakespeare Library- Teach and Learn http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=2594&CFID=65046949&CFTO KEN=84984735 Broad collection of readings, classroom activities, and multimedia resources designed to help teachers introduce students to the works of Shakespeare. Folger Digital Texts http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org A complete, full-text library of the complete works of Shakespeare using the gold standard Folger Edition text. The notes are not included, but the site does include a robust search feature and access to the base code for each text so that tech savvy teachers can invent new ways to use the digital editions. Folger Digital Texts API http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/api/welcome.html The “behind-the-scenes” area of the Folger Digital Texts website. The API features quick commands that allow teachers to manipulate the text of Shakespeare’s canon to achieve specific instructional goals. For example, there is a command in the API that allows for the removal of all dialogue tags and stage directions; a teacher could use the stripped down text for any number of classroom activities. Read-to-go Booklists for Teachers- Scholastic http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/ready-go-book-lists-teachers Comprehensive listing of various recommended book lists organized by author, title, and genre.

Stories of Notable Writers and Their Work Today in Literature A good place to find literature trivia or interesting tidbits of information for the beginning of class (subscription required)

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Quotations from Notable Writers Quotiki hen you need writing prompts or something inspirational for your bulletin board, this is a great resource for finding and saving quotes.

Themes in Literature The Great Books Foundation Essential website for learning Shared Inquiry Discussion, the best way to get students talking about books.

Teacher Resources in Literature – Annenberg Learner Conversations in Literature An amazingly produced and developed free video workshop for 6-12 teachers from Annenberg, complete with hour-long video training sessions.

Oral Poetry The Poetry Archive Recordings of famous poets reading and discussing their works

Free Public Domain Audio Books Librivox Free audio book classics from a wide range of authors past and present

Anthology of English Literature The Luminarium A complete selection of British literature between 1350 and 1800, organized by period. In each section you’ll find information, quotes, works and biographies, as well as essays, articles and additional sources for notable writers of the period.

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The World and Works of Shakespeare Shakespeare Online This site, maintained by Shakespeare enthusiast Amanda Mabillard, offers play analysis, sonnets, plays, a biography, and a timeline.

High School English Literature: Resources for Students, Teachers and Parents Finding Dulcinea http://www.findingdulcinea.com/guides/Education/High-SchoolLiterature.pg_0.html#0 Shakespeare, classic American or European fiction, and contemporary poetry are only a few of the categories of high school English resources you can find on the Web. This High School English Literature Web Guide points you to the best sites on the Internet, whether you’re looking for an obscure sonnet, and essays about Renaissance literature or historical background and literature study guides.

Teacher Resources for ELA Read, Write, Think Created by teachers for teachers to offer the best materials for reading and language arts education. The site focuses on learning language, learning through language and learning about language. Great site for any Language Arts, ESL, or English teacher. Common Core Novel Guides for Teachers http://www.4secondarysolutions.com/Common_Core_High_School_Liter ature_Guides_s/3.htm An extensive list of CCSS novel guides for purchase - Each guide is priced separately. Poems of Identity http://www.poetryoflife.com/who-am-i/ This site focuses on poems of desolation, thoughts of suicide, and seeking reasons to live.

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http://www.popscreen.com/v/3w6k/Identity-by-Julio-Noboa-Polanco Poems that express the desire for freedom http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-silken-tent/Frost, Robert, “The Silken Tent” Poem expressing the feeling of being bound http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAByg4fgTaU&list=PLD12F2202897 16D49 Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” http://www.essentiallifeskills.net/be-true-to-yourself-quotes.html

Writers’ quotes on self-identity Biography and Works of Sandra Cisneros http://www.unc.edu/~dcderosa/STUDENTPAPERS/childrenbattles/Sandra Cisnerosaudra.html Reviews and criticism of Cisneros’ major works

Outline of American Literature http://www.america.gov/publications/books/outline-of-americanliterature.html This textbook, covering American literature, newly revised, traces the paths of American narrative, fiction, poetry, and drama as they move from pre-colonial times into the present, through such literary movements as romanticism, realism and experimentation.

English Language Arts Methods: Grades 9-12 Model Lessons Learn NC Preservice teacher education resources LEARN NC, a program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education, provides lesson plans, professional development, and innovative web resources to support teachers, build community, and improve K-12 education in North Carolina. All of our resources, except for online courses, are free and open to the public.

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Peer Review in Action: The ELA EQuIP Rubric https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/peer-review-for-better-elalessons-equip A great peer review activity for teachers working on Common Core lessons, including Socratic Seminars, measuring text complexity, and engaging students in close reading.

Strengthening Lessons for the Common Core https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/better-common-core-lessonsequip Collaborating and evaluating lessons using the EQuIP rubric, as well as reviewing student work and adapting to the Common Core Voyant Tools http://voyant-tools.org/ A website that features a robust suite of textual analysis tools.

Social Studies and Humanities EDSITEment- National Endowment for the Humanities http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plans Collection of lesson plans and learning activities for teachers and students K-12 spanning the humanities. National History Education Clearinghouse http://teachinghistory.org Collection of classroom teaching materials K-12 designed to engage students in the importance of history in understanding America and the rest of the world. C-SPAN Classroom http://www.c-spanclassroom.org Collection of programs and excerpts from C-Span’s daily coverage of the Congress. Site also directs teachers to lesson plans, classroom activities and additional resources.

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History Explorer- Smithsonian Institution http://historyexplorer.si.edu/home/ General resource featuring instructional materials, lesson plans, teacher guides, multimedia, and resources from the Smithsonian Museum’s collections. Materials divided by grade level and historical period, along with cross-curricular links. New York Public Library Primary Sources http://www.nypl.org/weblinks/2591 Extensive collection of books, documents, multimedia, and eBooks on topics ranging from literature, history, and the humanities to the sciences. American Historical Documents http://www.ushistory.org/documents/ Site allows students to view images of original documents drawn from critical periods in American history. Images are also available for download for use in classroom projects. University of Pennsylvania Libraries- Humanities and Social Sciences http://guides.library.upenn.edu/index.php?gid=1673 Extensive collection of documents, references, literary and informational texts, graphics and multimedia elements on the humanities and social sciences in the United States and many nations around the world. National Archives America’s Historical Documents http://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/index.html Downloadable images of America’s most important documents, along with analysis of their historical significance. National Gallery of Art Educational Resources http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/education/teachers.html Instructional materials, images, video links, and interactive activities K-12 designed to promote student interest in painting, sculpture, and photography.

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Museum of Modern Art Resources for Teachers and Students http://www.moma.org/learn/teachers/online Variety of resources available to teachers for classroom use including images, instructional plans, class activities, and professional development. Focus is on the museum’s collection of painting, sculpture, graphic arts, and photography. Harvard Art Museums Resources for Teachers http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/art Images taken from the collections in the university’s museums along with background of the works, their importance, and recommended resources for the artist and period of the work. Guggenheim Museum Learning Through Art for Educators http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/school-educatorprograms/learning-through-art/for-educators Instructional strategies, videos, curriculum plans, and recommended resources for teachers K-12. Metropolitan Museum of Art K-12 Educator Resources http://www.metmuseum.org/learn/for-educators/timeline Images and resources from the museum’s collection divided by historical period, theme, and grade level for classroom use. Museum of Tolerance Teacher Resources http://www.museumoftolerance.com/site/c.tmL6KfNVLtH/b.5052463/k.A E91/Teacher_Resources.htm Collection of documents, multimedia resources, and teachers’ guides on a variety of subjects dealing with the Holocaust and other periods of racial and ethnic intolerance around the world. Philadelphia Museum of Art Teacher Lesson Plans http://www.philamuseum.org/education/resources.html Extensive array of teacher resources, images, lesson plans, and recommended student activities for use in K-12 cross-curricular instruction.

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Teacher Resources and Professional Development across the Curriculum Annenberg Media Learner.Org Videos, interactives, workshops, and distance learning are all available on this site, including materials for your lessons. Arts, Foreign Language, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts are all represented. Digital and Video Stories of Women http://www.makers.com A comprehensive video collection of women's stories. Resource for Women Artists of Color http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/ Univ. of Minnesota Voices From the Gap, targets secondary and college education: featuring women artists of color and collaborations with scholars, educators, and students Internet Archive: Video, Texts, Audio http://archive.org A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, the sites provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public.

Online Cultural Artwork and Digital Stories http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project Exhibits and collections of art from around the world--immersive, interactive, and adaptive American History Artifacts and Information http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/ This site includes Wisconsin Historical Society’s extensive Archival Library of journals, microfilm, etc. from 19th century American history.

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San Francisco State University Library Television Archive http://www.library.sfsu.edu/about/collections/sfbatv/index.php Preserving California’s cultural heritage though the state’s unique primary source materials. Promoting, supporting and encouraging the transfer and sharing of intellectual and creative resources locally, regionally and internationally. Center for Multilingual, Multicultural Research: Native American Resources http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~cmmr/Native_American.html Offers Native American resources, including art, education, history, government, cultural, commercial, personal and employment sites Education Resources from the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/index.html Includes Teacher Resources, Lesson Plans, Professional Development and Primary Source sets in the form of historical prints, photographs, film, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers. Teachings and Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. http://www.morehouse.edu/kingcollection/index.php The life and work of MLK spanning from 1944 to 1968, and encompassing approximately 10,000 items, the collection includes hundreds of handwritten notes, famous and lesser-known speeches, manuscripts, sermons, and other writings of unparalleled historical significance. Stanford History Education Group – Reading Like a Historian http://sheg.stanford.edu/rlh A full curriculum and method focused on developing historical thinking skills and strategies. Complete with introductory materials, curriculum focused on US and World History, and stories of success, this website is a one-stop shop for developing a robust history-focused method for critical reading and writing in the Social Studies classroom.

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Mathematics Resources for Math Teachers- National Council of Teachers of Mathematics http://www.nctm.org/resources/content.aspx?id=538 Collection of resources for teachers drawn from all areas of mathematics. Includes classroom ready instructional plans. Illuminations- Resources for Teaching Math http://illuminations.nctm.org Lesson plans, interactive classroom activities and teaching resources adhering to both the CCSS and NCTM standards. National Science Foundation- Mathematics Classroom Resources http://www.nsf.gov/news/classroom/mathematics.jsp Index of classroom resources and instructional materials for K-12 teachers.

Science NASA Websites for Educators http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/Alpha_index.html Comprehensive catalog of resources, multimedia materials, lesson plans, and student activities available to teachers. NASA Educational Publications http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/topnav/materials/AZ_Pubs.html - .Ufu-o43VDGI Catalog of all NASA publications regarding space missions, scientific research, graphics, and multimedia libraries. NASA Educational TV http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html - .VCHQpr5Crew Classroom access to video and audio from current and past NASA manned and unmanned missions around the Earth, our solar system, and in deep space.

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NASA Educational Resource Center Network http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/national/ercn/home/index .html - .VCHREb5Crex Site designed to help teachers explore instructional and educational resources available from the agency. Smithsonian Science Education Center http://www.ssec.si.edu Online e-books, instructional activities and experiments for teachers and students in life science, physics, chemistry, earth and space science. National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine http://www.nlm.nih.gov Collection of online resources, classroom publications, teacher guides, multimedia resources, and podcasts for students on all aspects of medicine, clinical research, and public health. MIT Resources for High School Teachers http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/ Collection of student produced multimedia instructional activities, teacher guides, lesson plans, and resources. Site provides access to MIT online lectures and presentations. Teaching Science with Technology- Edtechteacher.org http://edtechteacher.org/tools/science/ Resources for teachers in the physical and life sciences including lesson plans, classroom activities, and interactive tools. Ten Websites for Science Teachers- edutopia.org http://www.edutopia.org/blog/websites-for-science-teachers-eric-brunsell References for science teachers including project based instruction, technology integration, and research sites for teachers, online instruction and interactive conversations. National Science Teachers Association- Freebies for Science Teachers http://www.nsta.org/publications/freebies.aspx Collection of books, recommended classroom activities, lesson plans, and student experiments in grades K-12.

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Museum of Science, Boston- Online Collection http://www.mos.org/museum-online Teacher resources, access to the museum’s collections, special exhibits and professional development programs.

Online Teacher Apps Science 360, National Science Foundation http://science360.gov/files/;jsessionid=48C304F33F99800BB588068F19D B0CC5 A collection of science based online videos and activities for classroom use, K-12. Various elements are available for free and work on both classroom computers and portable devices. Mind/Shift: How We Will Learn http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/06/apps-that-rise-to-the-top-testedand-approved-by-teachers/ Reviews of classroom applications selected by teachers from around the country. The extensive listing, compiled by Michelle Luhtala, a librarian in New Canann High School in Connecticut, contains descriptions of the various applications and links to their online sites. The applications listed cover a variety of instructional areas for teacher presentation, as well as those designed for the creation of activities by students. 50 Fab Apps for Teachers, Scholastic http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/06/apps-that-rise-to-the-top-testedand-approved-by-teachers/ The collection of recommended applications is divided by content area and grade level for both teacher presentation and direct student use. The listing contains both paid and free applications. Selected classroom teachers review all of the applications. 15 Helpful Apps for Teachers and Educators, Digital Trends http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/best-apps-for-teachers-education An assortment of helpful organizational and productivity applications for classroom use. Many of the apps are free and provide for remote access by teachers and students.

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Best Apps for Teaching 2013, American Association of School Librarians http://www.ala.org/aasl/standards-guidelines/best-apps/2013 Recommended applications are divided into categories referencing specific books, STEM content areas, classroom organization and management, social sciences, and content creation. Socrative, MasteryConnect http://www.socrative.com Application that allows teachers to connect remotely with students on tablets, laptops, and smart phones. Teachers are able to create and monitor specific questions, collaborative activities, and individual student learning guides. Remind https://www.remind.com Online messaging application enabling teachers to contact students and parents directly with answers to specific class assignments, individual questions in class, and to discuss a student’s progress in class. App is free for teachers and students. Educational Literacy Apps, Reading Rockets http://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading101/literacyapps Recommended apps for teachers and K-5 students featuring interactive activities to help with reading comprehension, vocabulary building, phonics, spelling, and writing. Applications mirror content and characters from the critically acclaimed PBS series of the same name.

Documentary Websites, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2011/07/best-free-documentarywebsites.html Social studies resource listing a number of online sites featuring documentary programs, videos, critical reviews, and teaching resources. Helpful resource in helping students

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Free Technology for Teachers, Richard Byrne http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2013/01/13-good-resources-for-socialstudies.html - .VFKqx4ePwn8 Listing of thirteen online resources for social studies teachers covering museum virtual tours, focus on US history, Hip Hughes History series of online lectures on US and World history produced in a contemporary fashion, European Exploration, and History Engine, an online journal and posting site for students designed to share questions and opinions about US history. Nearpod http://www.nearpod.com/ Featuring a cross-platform content development system, Nearpod is the only presentation tool any teacher could need. Imagine combining your presentations with your formative assessments and digital media. Nearpod does just that. With the desktop editing platform, you can build your own; however, if you need inspiration, fully functional presentations are available through the Explore feature. Some of these presentations require a paid subscription.

Literature and Informational Texts Grades 4-6 Literature Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Mary Pope Osborn, The One-Eyed Giant (Book One of Tales from the Odyssey) Cynthia Rylant, The Lighthouse Family: The Storm Poetry Carl Sandburg, “Fog” Randall Jarell, “A Bat is Born” Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamlin” Informational Texts Bruce Koscielniak, A First Look at Time and Clocks Henrietta Buckmaster, Underground Railroad Frances E Ruffin, Martin Luther King and the March on Washington Brian Floca, Moonshot, The Flight of Apollo 11 Russell Freedman, Lincoln, A Photobiography Connie Miller, Marie Curie and Radioactivity Robert Coles, The Story of Ruby Bridges

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Grades 6-8 Literature Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Sandra Cisneros, Eleven Rosemary Sutcliff, Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad Mildred D. Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry Poetry Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride” Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” Carl Sandburg, “Chicago” Langston Hughes, “I, Too, Sing America” Nikki Giovanni, “A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs. Long” Walt Whitman, “O Captain, My Captain!” Drama Frances Gordon and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank: A Play Informational Texts- ELA Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Written by Himself John Steinbeck Travels with Charley: In Search of America Informational Texts- History/Social Studies Phillip Isaacson, A Short Walk through the Pyramids and through the World of Art Elizabeth Partridge, This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie Russell Freedman, Freedom Riders: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott Linda R. Monk, Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution Winston Churchill, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Address to Parliament on May 13th, 1940 Ann Petry, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad Informational Texts- Science, Mathematics, and Technical Subjects Donald Mackay, The Building of Manhattan Hans Magnus Enzenberger, The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure John Katz, How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho Grades 9-10 Literature Homer, The Odyssey John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

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Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird Julia Alvarez, In the Time of Butterflies Drama Sophocles, Oedipus Rex William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth Poetry Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” Emily Dickinson, “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” James Weldon Johnson, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Alice Walker, “Women” Informational Texts- ELA Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address Franklin Delano Roosevelt, State of the Union Address Learned Hand, I Am an American Day Address Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Elie Wiesel, Hope, Despair, and Memory Informational Texts- History/Social Studies Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West Charles C. Mann, Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491 Joan Dash, The Longitude Prize Informational Texts- Science, Mathematics, and Technical Subjects Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story Joy Hakim, The Story of Science: Newton at the Center Grades 11-12 Literature Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Christina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban Saul Bellow, Adventures of Augie March Drama William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet Thornton Wilder, Our Town

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Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun Poetry Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” Pablo Neruda, “Ode to My Suit” Emily Dickenson, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” Informational Texts- ELA Thomas Paine, Common Sense Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence Henry David Thoreau, Walden Richard Wright, Black Boy Amy Tan, Mother Tongue Rudolfo Anaya, Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry Informational Texts- History/Social Studies Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Seneca Falls Conference, Declaration of Sentiments James M. McPherson, What They Fought For 1861-1865 David McCullough, 1776 Informational Texts- Science, Mathematics, and Technical Subjects Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gravity in Reverse: The Tale of Albert Einstein’s Greatest Blunder Ray Kurzweil, The Coming Merger of Mind and Medicine

Graphic Books for Students- ALA Recommendations K-5 Airplane Adventure by Cari Meister. Illustrated by Marilyn Janovitz. Stone Arch, 2010. ISBN: 9781434216182. Anna and Juan are going to Mexico to visit their grandmother in this introduction to the graphic novel format. Instructions for how to read a graphic novel introduce this book and discussion questions and writing prompts are listed at its conclusion. One of the "My 1st Graphic Novel" series.

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A Day at the Fire Station by Lori Mortensen. Illustrated by Jeffrey Thompson. Capstone, 2011. ISBN: 9781429645089. Explains the everyday life of fire fighters in the station house as well as the quick actions they take when a call comes in. A glossary and a bibliography for additional reading and Internet sites are appended. One of the "First Graphics: My Community" series. Johnny Boo: The Best Little Ghost in the World! by James Kochalka. Top Shelf Productions, 2008. ISBN: 9781603090131. Boo Power makes Johnny Boo the best and together with his pet ghost Squiggle and his amazing Squiggle Power, they have the world’s greatest adventures. First of the "Johnny Boo" series. Knights of the Lunch Table: The Dodgeball Chronicles by Frank Cammuso. Scholastic/Graphix, 2008. ISBN: 9780439903226. In this Arthurian legend re-imagined for middle grade readers, Artie King finds that making enemies at Camelot Middle School is a lot easier than making friends when he challenges the Horde to a game of dodge ball. First of the "Knights of the Lunch Table" series. The Whole World's Crazy by Jimmy Gownley. Simon & Schuster/Atheneum, 2011. ISBN: 9781442445383. Life is tough for Amelia. Her mother is newly divorced and they are living with her cool aunt Tanner. Amelia survives with the help of her Gathering of Awesome Superpals and some attitude. First of the "Amelia Rules!" series. Middle School Page by Paige by Laura Lee Gulledge. Abrams/Amulet Books, 2011. ISBN: 9780810997226. When Paige's family relocates to New York City, she has to start over. As she fills up a sketchbook, she finds the courage to become exactly who she wants to be. Lewis & Clark by Nick Bertozzi. Roaring Brook/First Second, 2011. ISBN: 9781596434509. This historically accurate graphic novel begins with President Jefferson's call to explore the western region and continues beyond the conclusion of the famed Lewis & Clark expedition.

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The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan. Candlewick, 2009. ISBN: 9780763636180. It's Kansas in 1937 and life is bleak during the dust bowl. Jack is left to his imagination in this graphic novel that is part historical fiction, part tall tale. Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón. Farrar/Hill and Wang, 2010. ISBN: 9780809026845. Drawing on the unique historical sites, archives and expertise of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, this authorized biography is the complete account of the lives of Anne's parents, her first years in Frankfurt, the rise of Nazism, the family's immigration to Amsterdam, her life in the annex, and her arrest and tragic death in Bergen-Belsen. Grades 9-12 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Sanez Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2013 Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Madness, Chris Grimly Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2004 The Graveyard Book, Dave McKean HarperCollins eBooks, 2009 The Complete Persepolis, Marjane Satarpi Pantheon, 2007 March:Book 1, John Lewis and Andrew Aydin Top Shelf, 2013 Marble Season, Gilbert Hernandez Drawn & Quarterly 2013 The Canterbury Tales, Seymour Chwast Bloomsbury USA, 2011

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Online Instructional Games Neo K-12 http://www.neok12.com http://www.neok12.com/diagrams.htm An impressive online site of educational videos, lessons, and games for students K-12. The primary site provides links to a variety of games and videos covering science, math, social studies, history, and ELA. In addition, the diagrams home page provides links to interactive activities in science and social studies. (Subscription required) Managahigh https://www.mangahigh.com/en-us/ Online site for both teachers and students, which provides links to math games and an archive of 60,000 math questions. In addition, the site also includes links for classroom competition challenges involving one or more schools. Teachers can also take advantage of reporting applications to track individual student and class progress. Edutopia- Made with Play: Game-based Learning Resources http://www.edutopia.org/made-with-play-game-based-learning-resources Comprehensive listing of resources for game based learning, curriculum planning, and professional development. Site also includes a video library highlighting classroom use of the specific game-based learning programs and strategies.

Interactive Sites for Education http://interactivesites.weebly.com The site provides links to interactive, educational games and simulations for students and teachers in grades K-5. All activities work on either a stand-alone basis or in combination with SMARTboard or Whiteboard classroom systems. Topics included on the site include ELA, science, social studies, math, music, and art. Teachers can also link to a series of “brainteasers” for the class and student evaluation tools.

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Nobel Prize Learning Activities http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/ A listing of online educational games and instructional activities in the sciences and humanities for middle and high school students based on the work of Nobel laureates. Sheppard Software http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/web_games_menu.htm Site features hundreds of online educational games for students K-12. The activities cover ELA, science, social studies, and math and are grouped by grade level. The majority of online activities are free of charge for teachers and students. Bring on the Magic- Disney Originals http://games.disney.com Extensive listing of online educational games for students in grades K5 based on Disney characters and films. All of the games are interactive, providing students with immediate feedback and instruction as they play the games. Assessment Focus http://www.assessmentfocus.com/educational-games.php Library of online games covering all primary instructional areas for grades K-12. Focus of games is to provide student performance assessment tools for teachers. Learn 4 Good http://www.learn4good.com/games/for-high-school-students.htm Online site featuring interactive games for high school students. Games are played on the site and are free of charge. Students are challenged to analyze and solve problems in a variety of real world situations, such as business, medicine, agriculture, environmental issues, and chemistry. Game On: Increasing Learning Through Online Games https://sites.google.com/site/gameonlearning/science-ms-games-1 Comprehensive listing of online games, many of which are reviewed and recommended by the American Library Association. Games are designed for high school students and focus primarily on science and environmental concerns.

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EdHeads http://www.edheads.org/ Online educational resources providing free science and math games designed to promote critical thinking and independent analysis. The site includes games for students under the “Choose an Activity” tab and a separate additional teacher resources section. Ed Tech Ideas http://edtechideas.com/2009/12/21/60-educational-game-sites-that-you’veprobably-never-seen/ The site contains links to a series of free online games designed to help improve math and ELA skills. Each game listed challenges students to apply basic skills and varying degrees of critical analysis.

Online Social Networks for Teachers and Students Twitter https://twitter.com Widely used social networking application. Teachers can set up a class page allowing students to communicate with one another, pose questions, and offer comments on ongoing projects. EducatorsCONNECT http://www.educatorsconnect.com An online community designed for classroom teachers. The site provides venues for teachers to share classroom experiences, instructional strategies, curriculum design, and lesson plans. te@chthought- 15 Social Networks for Teachers http://www.teachthought.com/social-media/15-social-networks-forteachers-from-edshelf/ A collection compiled by K-12 technology specialist, David Kapuler, designed to help teachers expand their professional learning community networks.

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EducationDIVE http://www.educationdive.com/directories/social-networks-and-resourcesfor-educators/ A collection of targeted social networks, databases, and online resources for teachers. The site provides links to specific education topics, informational videos, and an extensive digital library and resources directory for teachers. Twiducate http://www.twiducate.com A resource and application designed to create direct contact and collaboration for teachers with colleagues and students. Teachers can create a secure class network for students providing an exchange of information on assignments, specific questions, and suggestions for new class activities. Edmodo https://www.edmodo.com Subscription based site providing for communication and exchange between teachers, students, and parents. Provides a resource for teachers to monitor student performance, address questions and provide individualized instruction. Edudemic http://www.edudemic.com/social-networks-for-students/ The site provides links to 5 social networks designed for students. The selected networks help students with research and study skills across the core content areas.

REFLECTIONS AND RESOURCES

What follows are my reflections on the journey of this book and finally a list of resources teachers can use in their classrooms, resources that facilitate learning literacy espoused in the Core. I began this book because I had an essential question about Common Core State Standards---their efficacy, their weakness, teachers’ acceptance, teachers’ skepticism or rejection, parents’ reactions, and most of all, students, students, students and across the board learning equity: can we ever achieve it? Ideally, the stated goals of the Core—whether one supports it or not—reiterates the same goals President George H.W. Bush articulated in his 1990 State of the Union address—with two directly echoed in the Core: Goal 3: By the year 2000, American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter, including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography, and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern economy. WHERE WE STAND NOW: Twenty-six percent of 12th grade students scored at or above the “proficient” level in mathematics on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. The same year, 37 percent of 12th graders scored at or above the “proficient” level in reading. Goal 5: By the year 2000, every adult American will be literate and will possess the skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. WHERE WE STAND NOW: Policymakers continue to express concern that Americans lack the skills necessary to compete in a global economy. Advocates of the Common Core State Standards often cite workforce readiness as a key justification for the initiative. According to a 2013 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 17.5 percent of American adults scored at the lowest levels in literacy based on an international survey (“1989 Summit,” 19).

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Fast-forward twenty-four years to CCSS: Why Are the Common Core State Standards Important? High standards that are consistent across states provide teachers, parents, and students with a set of clear expectations to ensure that all students have the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life upon graduation from high school, regardless of where they live. These standards are aligned to the expectations of colleges, workforce training programs, and employers. The standards promote equity by ensuring all students are well prepared to collaborate and compete with their peers in the United States and abroad. Unlike previous state standards, which varied widely from state to state, the Common Core enables collaboration among states on a range of tools and policies, including the: x Development of textbooks, digital media, and other teaching materials x Development and implementation of common comprehensive assessment systems that replace existing state testing systems in order to measure student performance annually and provide teachers with specific feedback to help ensure students are on the path to success x Development of tools and other supports to help educators and schools ensure all students are able to learn the new standards. NOTE One wonders: What could happen, what would happen if we as educators took the seeming risk so many think or believe the Core poses? What could happen if, like the Wright brothers or Mary McLeod Bethune or George H.W. Bush, or Paulo Freire, educators decided to take the Core, create our own paradigmatic shift towards making the 1990 Goals three and five a reality in spite of the obstacles, the challenges, the opposition, and the unknown. Imagine what could happen if every educator decides now is the time that WE can strive for and achieve equitable learning and readiness, regardless of region, ethnicity, class, public or private school. What would happen? Perhaps, Common Core State Standards have played a pivotal role not foreseen by either the opposition or the proponents—a deep peering into the reality of K12 education in the entirety of the United States in the 21st century and the ensuing earnest and substantive conversation of acknowledgment, change, and action. For our students’ sakes, let’s hope for this kind of paradigmatic shift, indeed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chapter One Baker, James. The National Council of Education: Report Of The Committee Of Ten. archive.org. 1892. https://archive.org/details/reportofcomtens00natirich “Commission On The Reorganization of Secondary Education,” Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. archive.org. 1917. https://archive.org/details/cardinalprincipl00natiuoft (accessed Jan-Dec 2012-14). Conant, James B. “Section II. A Unique Feature: The Comprehensive High School” and “Section III: Recommendations for Improving Public Secondary Education.” The American High School Today. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/13171-000. Department of Education, David P. Gardner and Members of the National Commission on Excellence. A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform: An Open Letter to the American People and the Secretary of Education. http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html. April 1983 (accessed Jan-Dec 2012-14). Hosic, James F. (Compiled). Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools. no. 2. Bulletin, Bureau of Education, Washington. DC: Department of the Interior, 1917. Klein, Alyson. “1989 Education Summit Casts a Long Shadow: Historic Sit-Down Propelled National Drive for Standards-Based Accountability,” Education Week. September 24, 2014: 1;18-20. Koerner, James D. “The Tragedy of the Conant Report: A ‘Personal Testament.’” The Phi Delta Kappan 42, no. 3 (1960): 121-24. Mirel, Jeffrey. “The Traditional High School: Historical Debates Over Its Nature and Function.” Education Next. (Winter) 2006: 14-21. National Center for Literacy Education. Remodeling Literacy Learning: Making Room for What Works. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English. 2013. National Council of Teachers of English and International Reading Association. Standards for the Teaching of English Language Arts. Urbana: NCTE and IRA. 1996.

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National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. Common Core State Standards Initiative: Preparing America’s Students For College and Career. 2012. http://corestandards.org. United States Department of Education. No Child Left Behind: Elementary and Secondary Education Act. 2001. Retrieved from http://ed.gov. Williams. L.A. Secondary Schools for American Youth. New York: American Book Company, 1944.

Chapter Two Binder, Alan. “Governor Plans to Cut Ties to Core in Louisiana.” The New York Times, June 18, 2014. Brady, Robert. 2014. Interview with author. Email. December 10-15. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” Select Essays and Addresses, Including The American Scholar. Edited by Eugene D. Holmes. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916. 185-207. Hernández, Rufina. “A Common Cause for the Common Core.” Education Week. January 21, 2014: 24-25. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/01/22/18hernandez.h33.html Klein, Alyson. “1989 Education Summit Casts a Long Shadow: Historic Sit-Down Propelled National Drive for Standards-Based Accountability.” Education Week. September 24, 2014: 1;18-20. Lu, Adrienne. “Q&A Common questions about the common core.” USA Today. December 3, 2013. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/03/pew-statelinecommon-core/3853531/ National Center for Literacy Education. “Making Room for What Works.” Remodeling Literacy Learning. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2013. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. Common Core State Standards Initiative: Preparing America’s Students for College and Career. http://corestandards.org. Oklahoma Academic Standards: Oklahoma State Department of Education. http://ok.gov/sde/oklahoma-academic-standards. Sewell, William. "Entrenched Pedagogy: A History of Stasis in the English Language Arts Curriculum in the United States Secondary Schools.” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 15, no. 1 (2008): 87-100.

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Sterne, Laurence. (1759) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. 6th edition. New York: Penguin, 1975.

Chapter Three “110.18. English Language Arts and Reading, Grade 6, Beginning with School Year 2009-2010,” Chapter 110. Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English Language Arts and Reading: Subchapter B. Middle School. ritter.tea.state.tx.us “Appendix M-Connections to the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects,” Next Generation Science Standards. nextgenscience.org. Berube, Maurice. American School Reform: Progressive, Equity, and Excellence Movements, 1883-1993. Santa Barbara CA: Praeger, 1994. https://www.questia.com/library/2995855/american-school-reformprogressive-equity-and-excellence Franklin, Benjamin. “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania,” 1749. U Penn Archives: http://www.archives.upenn.edu/primdocs/1749proposals.html Herbst, Jurgen. The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education. New York: Routledge, 1996. https://www.questia.com/read/107910938 James, William. Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1899. Kincheloe, Joe L. “See Your Standards and Raise You: Standards Complexity and the New Rigor in Education.” American Standards: Quality Education in a Complex World, the Texas Case. Ed. Raymond A. Horn, Jr. and Joe L. Kincheloe. New York: Peter Lang. 2001. https://www.questia.com/read/109289687. Leland, Christine H. and Stevie R. Bruzas. “Becoming Text Analysts: Unpacking Purpose and Perspective.” Language Arts. 92. No. 1 September 2014. 23-35. Literacy, n. OED Online. September 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109054?redirectedFrom=literacy (accessed December 09, 2014). Side-by-Side Comparison of the Texas Educational Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and Louisiana Grade Level Expectation (GLEs): English Language Arts: Grade 6. Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. November 2005. sedl.org.

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Chapter Four Schramm, Margaret, J. Lawrence Mitchell, Delores Stephens, and David Laurence, “Report of the 2001-02 ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major: The Undergraduate English Major,” ADE Bulletin. No. 134-35. Spring-Fall (2003): 68-91; hereafter cited by last name and page.

Chapter Five Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2005. Saphier, Jon, and Robert Gower, The Skillful Teacher: Building Your Teaching Skills. 5th ed. Massachusetts: Research for Better Teaching, 1997. Marzano, Robert, Ronald S. Brandt, Carolyn Sue Hughes, Beau Fly Jones, Barbara Z. Presseisen, Stuart C. Rankin, Charles Suhor. Dimensions of Thinking: A Framework for Curriculum and Instruction. Virginia: ASCD, 1988.

Chapter Six Dewey, John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. 1916. (2008). The Project Gutenberg EBook http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/852 . iBooks. —. Experience and Education. New York: Kappa Delta Pi, 1937. Google Play Books. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970. 30th ed. Myra Bergman Ramos. Translated. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. iBooks. Freire, Paulo. Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach. With New Commentary by Peter McLaren, Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, Donaldo Macedo, Dale Koike, and Alexandre Oliveria. Translated. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2005. iBooks. Gilyard, Keith. “John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois and a Rhetoric of Education,” eds. Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication. Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2014. Michelangelo, “I am still learning,” Michelangelo: Quest for Genius, Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Photograph taken during the exhibit. Tyler, Ralph. Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.

208

Bibliography

Chapter Seven Dewey, John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. 1916. (2008). The Project Gutenberg EBook. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/852 iBooks. —. Experience and Education. New York: Kappa Delta Pi, 1937. Google Play Books. Marzano Robert J. The Art and Science of Teaching: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Instruction. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007. Rollins, Tim and K.O.S. Tim Rollins AND K.O.S.: A History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 76-81.

Chapter Eight No bibliography required.

Chapter Nine Freire, Paulo. Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach. With New Commentary by Peter McLaren, Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, Donaldo Macedo, Dale Koike, and Alexandre Oliveria. Translated. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2005. iBooks. Knight, Teri. Panelist: Implications for Change: presentations from practicing educators and education and community leaders. Proceedings—“Announcing the National Center for Literacy Education Survey Report” – “Remodeling Literacy Learning Together: Paths to Standards Implementation,” February 27, 2014, Washington, DC. http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/remodeling-together Lord, H.M., “Address of Gen. H.M. Lord, Director of the Bureau of the Budget.” Addresses of the President of the United States and the Director of the Bureau of the Budget at the Thirteenth Regular Meeting of the Business Organization of the Government at Memorial Continental Hall. June 10, 1922. https://archive.org/stream/.../cu31924014533594_djvu.t... National Center for Literacy Education. Remodeling Literacy Learning: Remodeling Literacy Learning Together: Paths to Standards Implementations. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English. 2014.

Common Core: Paradigmatic Shifts

209

O’Donovan, Eamonn. “Professional Learning Communities.” Principal Opinion. District Administration: The Magazine for K12 Education Leaders. March 2007. http://www.districtadministration.com/issue/district-administrationmar-2007 Russell, David R., “Writing Across the Curriculum in Historical Perspective: Towards a Social Interpretation.” College English. 52. No.1 Jan. 1990. 52-73. Tyler, Ralph. Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.

Chapter Ten Dewey, John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. 1916. (2008). The Project Gutenberg EBook. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/852 iBooks. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970. 30th ed. Myra Bergman Ramos. Translated. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. iBooks. Gilyard, Keith. “John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois and a Rhetoric of Education,” eds. Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication. Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2014. Henderson, Caroline. “Letters from the Dust Bowl.” The Atlantic Monthly. May, 1936. theatlantic.com James, William. Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. Google Play Books O’Connor, Flannery. “I am in a state of shock.” Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience. Compiled by Shaun Usher. San Francisco: Chronicles Books, 2013. Kindle. Pelosi, Alexandra. Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County, HBO Documentary www.hbo.com/.../homeless-the-motel-kids-of-orangecounty Queen Elizabeth. On the Eve of Her Coronation. January, 1559. www.elizabethi.org/contents/quotes/ Rollins, Tim and K.O.S. Tim Rollins AND K.O.S.: A History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 76-81.

Chapter Eleven No bibliography required.

INDEX

“110.18. English Language Arts and Reading, Grade 6, Beginning with School Year 2009-2010,” Chapter 110. Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English Language Arts and Reading: Subchapter B. Middle School, 54 “Building Trust and Community” (2012), 158 “Increasing teacher success with online, collaboration PD” (2014), 158 “Leading the Way: District Improves Performance and Learning Using PLC Model” (2006), 158 “Report of the 2001-02 ADE AD HOC Committee on the English Major: The Undergraduate English Major,” 57 “Superintendent Peter Noonan helps launch PLCs in Virginia County” (2014), 158 2005 TEKs-Grade 6-Reading Comprehension standards (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills), 45, 56 2009-2010 TEKs-Grade 6-Reading Comprehension standards (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills), 45, 56 2014 NCLE Report, (National Council for Literacy Education), 51-53

A Nation at Risk (1983) A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform: An Open Letter to the American People: A Report to the Nation and to the Secretary of Education, 4, 12 Alliance for Excellent Education (AEE), 162 American Association of Librarians (ALA), 162 Appendix A (Research and Key Elements of the Standards), 24 Appendix B (Text Exemplars and Sample Performance Tasks), 24 Appendix C (Samples of Student Writing), 24 Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE), 162 AWPE English placement tests, 147 Baker, James H., 5 Baldwin, James, “Sonny’s Blues,” 24 Berube, Maurice, American School Reform: Progressive, Equity, and Excellence Movements, 1883-1993, 34, 56 Brady, Robert (Director of Social Studies and World Languages for Indianapolis Public Schools), 23 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954, 9 Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (1918), 8 Churchill, Winston, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Address to Parliament on May 13th, 1940, 86

Common Core: Paradigmatic Shifts Cohen, Michael, “1989 Education Summit” (U.S. Department of Education – Clinton administration), 27-28 Collaborative Learning Communities (CLCs), 72, 77, 99 College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading, 38 College, Career & Civic Life C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards, 54 Collins, Jim, Good to Great, 159 Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, 8 Committee of Ten (1892) The Committee of Ten: Main Report, 4, 15 Common Core State Standards, (CCSS, the Core), standards, 1, 3, 7, 13-14, 18, 21, 23-25, 28, 35-39, 48-50, 54, 58-59, 63, 6566, 73-76, 80-81, 86-89, 93-96, 105 Conant, James B., The American High School Today (1959), 10, 16, Consortium for School Networking, 162 Corbett, Edward P. J., 36 Core Anchor standards K-12, 64 Darling-Hammond, Linda, 25 Defoe, Daniel, The Dreadful Vifitation in A Short Account of the Progrefs and Effects of Plague, 107 Department of Education; also DOE, 13, 20 Dewey, John, "My Pedagogic Creed,” 31, 33-34,

211

Dewey, John, Democracy and the Philosophy of Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, 72 Dewey, John, Experience and Education, 107 Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Written by Himself, 85 Du Bois, W.E.B., "On the Wings of Atalanta" from The Souls of Black Folks, 33 Eberly, Rosa A., 36 ELA (English language arts), 2-3, 57, 9-10, 12-14, 21, 24, 26-29, 35-40, 43, 45, 48-51, 54, 58-59, 62-66, 74-77, 80-82, 86-89, 9397, 103, 106, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “The American Scholar,” 28-29 ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) (1965), 10 ETS (Educational Testing Service), 123 Frank, Anne, The Diary of a Young Girl, 86 Franklin, Benjamin, “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania,” 31 Freier, Paulo, 36, 100, 156 Fuller, Margaret, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” 24 Gilyard, Keith, “John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois and a Rhetoric of Education,” 106, 110 Ginsberg, Rick, “Educational Reform: Overview, Reports of Historical Significance,” 4 Giovanni, Nikki, “A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs. Long”, 85 Graff, Gerald, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, 1

212 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter, 113 Herbst, Jurgen, The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education, 31, 55 Hernández, Rufina, 19, 31 Hosic, James, Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools, 9, 15, 204 Hughes, Langston, “I, Too, Hear America Singing,” 85 Indiana Academic Standards, 23 International Reading Association (IRA), 162 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), 162 IRA (International Reading Association), 14 James, William, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, 33 Jindal, Bobby (Governor of Louisiana), 23 Kincheloe, Joe L., “See Your Standards and Raise You: Standards Complexity and the New Rigor in Education,” 56 American Standards: Quality Education in a Complex World, the Texas Case, 43 King, Martin Luther Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, I Have A Dream, 92 Kliebard, H. M., The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 18931958 Koerner, James D., “The Tragedy of the Conant Report” (1960), 11, 121, 124 Leland, Christine H. and Stevie R. Bruzas, “Becoming Text Analysts: Unpacking Purpose and Perspective,” 56

Index Lewis, John, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, 92 Lincoln, Abraham, “Gettysburg Address,” 24 Loft, Benjamin J., We’re Not Leaving: 9/11 Responders Tell Their Stories of Courage, Sacrifice, and Renewal, 92 Marzano, Robert J., 36, 97, 110 McTighe, Jay, 36, 72, 207 Michelangelo, “I am still learning,” Michelangelo: Quest for Genius, Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), 108 Mirel, Jeffrey, “The Traditional High School: Historical Debates over Its Nature and Function,” 9, 204 Mississippi’s 2006 Curriculum Frameworks for English language arts, 73 Montessori, Marie, 33 Morrison, Toni, Jazz, 169 MSPAP (Maryland State Test), 124 NASA Apollo 13 Mission Site, 93 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 20 National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy (NCRLL), 162 National Council of Education, 5 National Council of Social Studies (NCSS), 37 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) , 13-14, 21, 59, National Defense Education Act, 10 National Education Association (NEA), (National Teachers Association), 16, 32 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers, 20 National Science Teachers of America (NSTA), 37

Common Core: Paradigmatic Shifts NCLE (National Center for Literacy Education), 162 NCLE 2014 Report, 158 NCLE Report Remodeling Literacy Learning Together: Paths to Standards Implementation, 158 NCLE Report, Remodeling Literacy Learning Together: Paths to Standards Implementation (2014), 2 NCTE’s 1996 Standards for the English language arts, 9 NGSS (Appendix M—Connections to the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects, 54 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) 2001, 14 Norma Rae (film), 86 O’Connor, Flannery, “I am in a state of shock,” 170 O’Donovan, Eamonn, “Professional Learning Communities,” ‘Principal Opinion’ District Administration: The Magazine for K12 Education Leaders, 162 Oklahoma Academic Standards, 22 Osborn, Mary Pope, The One-Eyed Giant (Book One of Tales from the Odyssey), 79 Oxford English Dictionary Online, 36 Parker, Dr. Kimberly A. (Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts), 64 Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, 23 Petry, Ann, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, 85

213

Poe, Edgar Allan, “Masque of the Red Death,” 106 Progressive Movement in United States education, 34 protean learning environment, 70 Remodeling Literacy Learning: Making Room for What Works, 27 Rollins,Tim and K.O.S., Tim Rollins AND K.O.S.: A History, 114 Russell, David R., “Writing across the Curriculum in Historical Perspective: Towards a Social Interpretation,” 156, 162 Sagan, Carl, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 31 SBAC state (Smarter Balance Consortium State), 122, 142 Schramm, Margaret, Mitchell, J. Lawrence, Stephens, Delores, and Laurence, David, “Report of the 2001-02 ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major: The Undergraduate English Major,” 60, 69 Sewell, William, “Entrenched Pedagogy: A History of Stasis in the English language arts Curriculum in United States Secondary Schools,” 26, 30 Side-by-Side Comparison of the Texas Educational Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and Louisiana Grade Level Expectation (GLEs): English Language Arts: Grade 6, 45 siloed vs. quilted methods of instruction (cross-curricular), 104 Sophocles, Oedipus Trilogy, 167 Springsteen, Bruce, The Rising, 86

214 Steinbeck, John, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 10, 1962, 166 Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 27 Taba, Hilda, The Skillful Teacher, 96 Taylor, Mildred D., Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, 85 The American High School Today: A First Report to Interested Citizens (1959), 11 The Flight that Fought Back (Discovery Channel), 86 Thoreau, Henry David, Civil Disobedience, 54 Tremmel, R., “Changing the way we think in English education: a conversation in the universal barbershop,” 5

Index Tucker, Marc S. (The National Center on Education and the Economy), 22 Twain, Mark, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 168 Tyler, Ralph, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, 104 Tyler, Ralph, Julie Young, Jonathan C. Erwin, 72 Whitman, Walt, “O Captain! My Captain?”, 85 Whitman, Walt, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” 24 Wiggins, Grant, 36 Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, 72 Williams, L.A., Secondary Schools for American Youth (1944), 10 Yagelski, R. P., “Stasis and Change: English education and the crisis of sustainability,” 5