Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Common Core Standards

Find the Standards
  •  here...(Note: ELA spirals, Math is organized into domains.) 
  • Next Generation Science Standards 
    • Overview Video:  http://www.nextgenscience.org/case-next-generation-science-standards
    • Middle school standards:  http://www.nextgenscience.org/search-standards-dci?tid_1%5B%5D=14
  • Unpacked Standards:  http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/acre/standards/common-core-tools/unpacking/ela/6.pdf
  • CAUTION:  http://mrsmomblog.com/2013/10/02/how-common-core-is-slowly-changing-my-child/
  • Technology and the standards:
    • http://www.k12.wa.us/EdTech/Standards/edtechcoresubjects/CCSS-Crosswalk.aspx
    • http://www.livebinders.com/play/play?id=127467
Ways to understand the CCSS:
  • They are not all we have to teach ...they are the foundation
  • How we think:  key cognitive strategies
  • What we know:  key content knowledge
  • How we go:  Key transition knowledge and skills (matriculation and progression and gap analysis)
  • How we act:  Key habits of mind, discipline specific behaviors
  • Way to categorize them: 
    • Reading:  What (1-3), How and Why (4-6), and Integration of Ideas (7-9), Complexity (10)
      • Shifts:  text complexity, close reading, knowledge of reading in disciplines, balancing text type, academic vocabulary, text-based answers, writing from sources
    • Writing:  Form (1Argument, 2Explanation, 3Narrative), How (4"ATP", 5Writing Process, 6 Technology), Research (7Short, 8Multiple sources, 9Evidence for Analysis), Write A lot.

Strategy to Unpack the Standards:

  1. Read to get the gist of the standard (underline all verbs, record and reflect)
  2. Determine the learning progressions: Read the related standards in the grade level(s) before and after.  How do students progress in their learning?  Where is the learning boundary?
  3. Develop an understanding: Rewrite the standard in student-friendly words.  What WEBB depth of knowledge (1-4) is expected? (1) recall and reproduction; 2) Skills and concepts; 3) Strategic thinking and reasoning (most); 4) extending thinking/doing)
  4. Consider MASTERY by completing this sentence frame:  Students who demonstrate mastery of this standard will be able to (Know, Think/Understand, Do)....
  5. Use data to consider differentiated instructional implications for students (L@SW: Can, Verge, Far From)
  6. Find links to other content standards.
  7. Find links to math and science&engineering practices, ELA student portraits, and history habits of mind.


How do we keep the "common" in the common core?
  • This is a transformational shift in teaching and learning in America
  • What is the PD required?
    • PD for teachers that is collaborative (across school, district, state, and nation)
    • Public Awareness - new assessment and testing means new scores (not so high!)
    • Curric and Instruction
    • Technology
    • Vocabulary instruction - Academic Vocabular is the language of power!

Rationale for the standards:
  • What Businesses Want...great blog post about 12 Common Core Employer Skills
  • Why adopt them as is?  Read this.  "Structure is the Standards"
  • Diana Ravitch - "Why I can't support the Common Core" blog
  • Gavin Payne (gavin@gpayneconsulting.com)
    • Quality and inevitability of the standards (consistency in America)
    • Equity and opportunity to upper education
    • Different places and paces
    • lots and lots of help (economies of scale = choice) creates clarity
  • What Texas is using instead: Common Instructional Framework
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT:
  • PD Protocols/Activities:
    • Cut up standard and have people put them in order.  (Create the progression.)
    • Think of high/low grid:
      • High difficulty and High potential impact:  PD (studio); Culture shift; Assessments
    • High difficulty and High potential impact:  PD (studio); Culture shift; Assessments
      • High difficulty and Low potential impact:  PD (whole staff...about conceptual change)
      • Low difficulty and High potential impact:  PD (studio); Knowledge-Implementation gap, culture shift to CI, Alignment, Public Awareness
      • Low difficulty and Low potential impact:  materials (concrete, easy, easy to misuse)
    • Venn Diagram:  CCSS and Curriculum (venn apart, venn together, CCSS inside, same circle)
  • PD Resources and Ideas:
  • Changes for teachers instruction/learning:
    • TIME for deep understanding - "spend your time doing anything but avoiding depth."
    • Proficiency for a wider range of students - "requires intense support and scaffolding"
    • Complexity of reading:
      •  "Reading is simply - you pay close attention and think."
      • Don't avoid hard text - bring students closer to it.  Chunk it, reading out loud and rereading silently, small portions of the text used with care, capitalize on the power of focus and then transfer.
      • Show the hard, deliberate thinking work.
    • How to begin?
      • If no PK - build it.  
        • Don't give trivial summary, do the work.  
        • Don't just tell them:  "We have an overwhelming love of having them parrot our words back to us!"
        • Develop effective pre-reading strategies
    • Motivation does not happen outside of the content - "you don't ned to go outside the text to motivate students!"  Teach them to work hard and accomplish things that are hard!

From Wyoming Training - Wyoming Vetted sites  - Taking advantages of "Economies of Scale":
For Math:
Math CCSSM Day - 12/21:
  • CCSSM and Math Practices
    1. Video Clips to watch.
      1. CCSS call for Focus, Coherence, and Depth 
        1. Focus creates time to use the skills and tools with remarkable flexibility
        2. Depth creates Fluency, Understanding, Application
      2. CCSS focus and our curriculum  (Teach less, do more)
        1. K-2: +/-, quantities they measure
        2. 3-5: x/ /, FRACTIONS (least well understood and most inhibits algebra)
        3. 6-8:  Proportional reasoning, geometric measurement, linear algebra
      3. Questions:
        1. What goes away? (70% intensive focus to command the skill, 20% rethink and link, 10% awareness)
        2. Assessment
        3. Difference
      4. Changes:
        1. "When it gets too hard, it's time to move on!"
        2. Not every strand it equal
        3. Able to apply and extend by commanding the simplest case.
        4. Find key moments in our curriculum to slow down and devote more time to allow for reasoning, thinking, and discussing as well as the necessary hard work and practice (practice in what's difficult).
        5. **Dare to focus NOW!  Do not wait for 2014!
        6. Learn the math as you go.  None of us have the deep mathematical knowledge needed to teach in this way.  Learn as you go.
  1. CCSS Math Practices  (Goal:  they are woven in.  They are the rigor.)
    1. Resources:  Bulleted Math Practices handout, Think Math, Powerpoint Slides copied
    2. Task:
      1. Unpack #3 and #5 together.  (Readings from Mathematical Understanding)
      2. Unpack others as grade level teams
  2. CCSS Domains:
    1. Resources:  Powerpoint Slides, DG's handout, Standards, Progressions,  Textbooks
    2. Task #1:  Teachers will study the progressions and share what they notice/wonder about. 
    3. Task #2:  Teachers make decisions about which of the 4 critical areas of the content standards will they focus on at each grade level?  Begin a plan.  Finalize the plan during Feb Studio with DG's support.
  3. Exploring Free Resources:
    1. Inside Mathematics - 6th, 7th, 8th grade lessons and resources including student work, classroom videos, etc...
    2. Illustrative Mathematics - many problems and tasks
    3. Think Math - 
    4. MAP - especially valuable for algebra
    5. Revisit Conceptua - (Jill for passwords)
    6. Revisit National Library of Virtual Manipulatives
    7. Phoenix Rising Article about Math CCSS
    8. Wyoming CCSS Standards
    9. Other...

ELA:



According to CCS - Range of Text Types for 6-12:  Students in grade 6-12 apply the Reading standard to the following range of text types, with texts selected from a broad range of cultures and periods.

  • Literature:  Stories (include the subgenres of adventure stories, historical fiction, mysteries, myths, science fiction, realistic fiction, allegories, parodies, satire, and graphic novels), Drama (include one-act and multiact plays, both in written form and on film), Poetry (include the subgenres of narrative poems, lyrical poems, free verse poems, sonnets, odes, ballads, and epics)
  • Informational Text:  Literary Nonfiction (includes the subgenres of exposition and argument in the form of personal essays, speeches, opinion pieces, essays about art or literature, biographies, memoirs, journalism, and historical, scientific, or economic accounts (including digital media sources) written for a broad audience)  *arguments, informational text written to a broad audience.
Howard Gardner's response to CCSS in the New York Times:

To the Editor:
Re “Nonfiction Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills, Study Finds” (news article, March 12): It is instructive to know that second graders who received a Core Knowledge curriculum performed better than comparison groups on measures of reading. But every choice of curriculum — and, more important, every choice of an assessment measure — entails a value judgment.
Those educators who selected a reading program that valued fictional works presumably thought that was an appropriate emphasis. It is now up to those educators to provide measures that might reveal better performances on their curriculum — for example, richer imaginations by students or a greater likelihood of reading books of any sort outside the school environment.
HOWARD GARDNER
Cambridge, Mass., March 12, 201

CCSS - Webinar from New York:
Changes:
  1. K-5 - 50% informational text.  Why?
    1. General knowledge developed in these years that is the primary basis for later learning.
    2. Learn about the world through reading.
    3. Knowledge build through reading is coherent...or should be.
  2. 6-12 Reading in Content Subjects / Disciplinary Literacy
    1. ELA 50:50 - Lit base and Nonfiction
    2. Science and History - How much evidence and knowledge is gained from text?  How much knowledge is gained through text?
    3. It WILL take more TIME!
    4. Don't go outside of the text...simply read. The text will guide the challenge and thinking needs.  Let the text set the agenda.  Don't avoid the text, bring students closer to it.  (C: reading programs)  
  3. Text Complexity Matters
    1. CCSS lay out the expectations of level of text to master at each level.
    2. Why not leveled texts?
      1. Sacrifice academic vocabulary
      2. Keep students out of the game
      3. Because with scaffolding, students can learn to read appropriately challenging texts.
        1. chunking
        2. rereading and reading aloud
        3. discussion
        4. slow, deliberate, hard work creates critical thinking and the power of focus to reading.
      4. Extra support/time can provide extra time in the appropriately challenging texts.
    3. When leveled texts?
      1. Extra time and intensive support to learn a skill to apply to appropriately challenging text.
  4. Text Dependent Questions
    1. 80% of questions asked now can be answered without reading.  "Hover questions"
  5. Writing
    1. Write to sources - create arguements with evidence
    2. "Ready or Not" for high school, 8th grade, 7th grade, 6th grade... 
      1. When?
  6. Academic Vocabulary is the language of power!
    1. Tier 3 Academic Vocab is domain specific (often bolded and defined in the side bar)
    2. Academic Vocabulary that holds students back is "common" and learned through appropriately challenging text.
You must read like a detective and write like a conscientious investigative reporter!



A Common Core Standards - IRA Webinar - by Tim Shanahan (ShanahanonLiteracy.com):
  1. Introduction:
    1. First time students in US (45/50 states) are aimed at the same goals.
    2. 2014-15 - current state tests will be replaced by 1 or 2 exams.  Park and Smarter Balance (western states) consortiums.  
    3. Why standards?  raise achievement, compete better, and bring about equity.
    4. Why CCSS more challenging?  
  2. Higher level than previous standards (conversations predict that many US students won't pass.  ACT predicts that 60+% of students won't meet.)
    1. Backmapping:  CCSS began with college and career readiness and backmapped from there.  demand growth designed to ensure that students reach graduation targets. This means they are more challenging.
      1. Teachers will need to "ramp up their games"
      2. Teachers will need to figure out ways to make greater progress with kids at the beginning. "This will be much harder work than we are used to."
  3. Different style and organizational structure 
    1. Before - lists of skills, knowledge, and strategies.
    2. CCSS has a strong progression and organization that requires attention.
    3. EX: 2-4 lists of standards depending upon grade level:  literary, informational, science, and social studies materials.  Science and history begin in 6th grade.
    4. Ideal - follow the #1 through the grade levels.  
    5. Strong connections between comprehension, oral language, and writing.  What are the connections between standards.
    6. We must study the progressions. (Not just grade level)  Our goal is to trace the progressions and find the changes (where and when) - this allows you to understand what is actually required at a grade level.  (C: F&P)
    7. Do not create cross walks with old standards.  They are too different.  This would be a waste of time - safely set aside the current standards.
    8. Standards are heavily coordinated - cannot be divided that way.  We need to think about the texts they are reading and the kinds of work they are doing while reading.  Must be meeting all standards all the time.  
  4. Based on different theories of reading comprehension, writing, differentiated instruction than past standards.  
    1. Emphasis on literary theory vs psychological theory.  (cognitive sciences...) - tend to procedures and strategies to use while reading to guide their thinking.
  5. Major Challenges for TEACHERS moving forward:
    1. Teaching Challenge:  Challenging Text:
      1. Old Focus:  what cognitive skills and abilities did we want students to have?
      2. New Focus:  These ideas are less relevant and important and the most important factor is the text difficulty.  All the cognitive skills that have to be executed within texts of a specific difficulty range.
      3. The real goal is to be able to read at X level at Y grade level.
      4. #10 - they have to be able to do all the other skills at this level.
      5. Shift:  P or not depends on ability to read at a challenging text demand.
      6. Emphasis on stretching students to meet the demands of reading harder texts.  TEACH rather than placing students in lower readability levels.  Instead of moving kids to different books, the important educational move, how to scaffold challenging reading without telling the content or reading it to them.  YIKES!!  This has the promise to raise achievement.  AND, it requires new scaffolds - not getting them into easier materials. 
      7. Standards do not pay attention to variation in student needs. "Just right" is not about challenging texts.  It's OK to spend time to read materials out of level with students.  90% of time should be spent on challenging text.  How do we stretch to the challenging level?  What is the point at which we can't pull it off?
      8. ??Not a lot of evidence about spending time at instructional level - "just right".  There is a lot of evidence showing challenging text is effective.
      9. We will be spending a lot of time on text demand issues.
      10. Text Demand: Pay attention to 3 things: quantitative: lexile (to date hard to match the accuracy) and qualitative information: hard because ideas are complex or other language measures (coherence, PK text presupposes), personal (local concerns) - 
    2. Scaffolding:  Learn to Read, Read to Learn/Think, Access to Content - scaffolds should match the reasons they cannot read the text.  (Fluency work - turn lesson on its head:  fluency work first, comprehension, discussion)  Determine the problems students will have first and plan teaching accordingly. Read the text ahead of time, anticipate what will give kids trouble, provide support to surmount the trouble.  Taking kids through a text multiple times.
    3. 6th and up - Disciplinary Literacy:
      1. Past standards did not address.  If you can read anything, you can read anything.
      2. Research is revealing unique reading demands of the various disciplines.  Students benefit from specialized reading emphasis in history and science.
      3. Disciplinary Specifications:  format, layout, vocabulary, structure... how do students learn this.
      4. It is essential that science and history include texts in their instructional routines.  How to apply reading skills and strategies to content subjects but how to teach the uniques uses of literacy required by the disciplines.  They need to read history AS history.
      5. Content area reading is NOT study skills.  What are the specific demands of content area reading.  What types of reading....diaries, visual literacy, etc...
    4. Informational Text:
      1. New emphasis is equalized with narrative and informational text.  Students will be required to do much more of this type of reading.
      2. Text selections are going to need to shift greatly.  Primary grade teachers raise comfort level working with informational text.  Guard against information text being taken over by literary treatments of factual information (biography).  Really the emphasis is on factual information AND exposure to different structures and language.
    5. Close Reading:
      1. Demand for close reading!
      2. Literary Theory - "New Criticism" - 60-70 years! - degree in English! 
      3. Expected to engage in deeper analysis of the text and its meaning and implications.  (Less emphasis on PK, Comprehension, picture walked, etc...)  The idea is spend more time on careful reading and weighing author's diction, grammar, and organization of the text.  Rereading will play a greater role in teaching reading.
      4. Must take kids through a text multiple times.  Fluency - comprehension - criticism, evaluation, interpretation...
    6. Multiple Texts:  
      1. Kids are interpretting groups of text.
      2. Interpretation, evaluate, synthesis of multiple texts - at every grade level.
      3. 10% of the time is spend on multiple texts.
      4. Teachers will need greater combinations of texts that can be used together.  
      5. Need for greater emphasis on text synthesis - how to combine the information from multiple sources into one's own text or presentation.
      6. Need for greater emphasis on greater analysis and evaluation.
    7. Writing About the Text:
      1. Old:  writing free skill or subject.  Write about something that requires low information or widely available PK.
      2. Core:  emphasis on the use of evidence in writing. 
      3. Move from writing stories or opinion pieces to writing about the ideas in text.  (reacting to is or using the information in some way.)
      4. More closely integrated with reading classrooms.
      5. amount of writing about what is read will increase.
      6. Greater emphasis on synthesis of information and critical essays (more research)
    8. Argumentation:
      1. Text is not a form of neutral information.  CCSS:  premise - text and other forms of language are a formo fargument.  Crital reading, writing and argument take center stage.  Treating text as form of arguement in analysis.
      2. Discern the arguments - author's perspecite and tone.
      3. Emphasis - use of evidence, using text evidence in making own arguments.  
    9. Technology:  No special technology standards.  Cannot meet the standards without using these...
      1. Kids can generalize their reading and writing skills to any technology that comes up.
      2. Students need to search, read, and use information drawn from the internet.
      3. Word processors and other tech supports
      4. Presentation softwares
      5. Various online references
  6. Conclusion:
    1. PD and materials transformation if schools will be successful.
    2. How do we do this?  Goal - get ready for 2014-15.  Starting point:  we have to get the line teachers up to speed.  Must have to sit down and look at the alignment.  Pull out the themes.  Follow the progressions.  Get their hands on them and undestand what they are all about.  Training how to ... close read, read hard text, read informational text, etc...


Quick read with resources:  "How to Switch from Persuasion to Argument" - from Eye on Education

Argument is an important part of the CCSS in both the reading and writing - "...argument is one of the guiding beliefs of the CCSS - both being able to recognize it in text and then producing it in writing."   An argument essay will be a field test writing prompt this year on the PAWs test AND they are considering adding a field test question/writing prompt to the science PAWs test..

We've been talking about supports and scaffolds used to allow 100% of our students to be successful at all tasks in all of our studios.   

Here are a couple for writing argument essays:

1.  Sentence frame for argument:

In discussions of _____________, one controversial issue has been
___________________________. People who believe____________
claim that________________________________. On the other hand,
those who believe _____________________________ assert that
______________________________________________________.
My own view is __________________________________________


2.  Structuring a Writing Task:  3 parts

Part One: State what you want the students to do, carefully choosing your
                task verb. Be sure the students understand the task verb (analyze,
                explain, describe, compare, tell a story…) 
(Clear directions allow for independence from the teacher!  It also supports students who are not auditory by nature.)

Part Two: Provide a short word bank (list of 5-10 words that will work well in
       this writing task, but that the students would probably not have thought of
       by themselves:
(The words chosen can be differentiated OR higher writers can get the words, others can get words with definitions and/or pictures...)

Part Three: Provide 2 or 3 sentence frames that will work well in this writing task:
(Expectations for use can vary:  is it voluntary? used to plan and then revised out if possible? used.)
Best Practices - Bringing Standards to Life in America's Classrooms by Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde


3 Principles of Best Practices and CCSS:
  1. Student Centered: challenging, authentic, experiential, holistic
  2. Cognitive:  Constructivist, developmental, expressive, reflective
  3. Interactive:  democratic, collaborative, sociable

Best Practice structures (use these, focus and conquer!):


  • Gradual Release
  • Workshop
  • Strategic Thinking - Goal: provide "thinking-centric" scaffolds before kids enter a text, while they are reading, and after they have read.
  • Collaborative activities
    • Through Collaboration, Students will...
      • initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grade-level topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
      • propel conversations by posting and responding to questions that probe reasoning and evidence; ensuring 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.
      • 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 is needed (CCSS Initiative 2010).
  • Integrated units
  • Representing to Learn (multiple representations)
    • Writing(Talking) to Learn:
      • writing/talking can be a tool of thinking as well as a finished product.
      • Help students to encounter, probe, explore, and remember the content of the curriculum.
      • Help students react, record, speculate, compare, analyze, or synthesize the ideas in the curriculum
  • Formative-Reflective assessment
    • Main goal:  helping students to set goals, monitor their own work, and evaluate their efforts.
    • Terminate all assessment efforts that do not usefully steer instruction, advance kids' learning, teach students to self-evaluate, or produce artifacts worth sharing/saving.
    • Overlap assessment and instruction (conference)
    • CCSS:  Students must practice showing what they know out loud, in front of an audience.
    • Goal:  look at student growth in a wider variety of ways (triangulates - looking at the child from several angels over time); commit to the principle the most valuable assessment is formative, aimed at understanding a child's development and making instrucional decisions about that child; employs data that is descriptive or narrative; involves students in developing meaningful responses and calls on them to keep track of and judge their own work; where possible, abolishes or deemphasizes competitive grading systems; involves thoughtful collaboration and discussion with other teachers as they visit each other's classrooms and look at student work together; employs parent-education programs to help community members understand the value of new approaches and invites parents to participate.
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