Group items tagged

"Each Friday we collaborate with a classroom in New Jersey to test and publish three short writing ideas that address Common Core Standards and that are grounded in New York Times content. This week, all three prompts focus on the common theme of life on a coastline - a topic of great importance to our classroom collaborators, who recently went through weeks of disruption because of Hurricane Sandy."

"Last year, Mr. Olsen and Ms. Gross, who work at High Technology High School in Lincroft, N.J., a school that U.S. News ranks as the No. 1 S.T.E.M. school in the nation, created short daily reading and writing prompts for their students to use with that day's Times. They told us they wanted to do it again this year, but wanted to tailor the tasks more closely to Common Core demands. So we agreed. Each week, they will send us the questions they tried in class that they and their students felt were the most successful. So, beginning Sept. 21, each Friday you'll find three quick, classroom-tested tasks that ask students to do Common Core-focused work with that week's Times. Our hope is that you'll see at least one each Friday that works for you, and that you'll write in and help us shape the feature as we go. It's an experiment, after all."

Other than a mention of the need to "evaluate information from multiple oral, visual, or multimodal sources," there is no specific reference in the common standards to critical analysis and production of film, television, advertising, radio, news, music, popular culture, video games, media remixes, and so on. Nor is there explicit attention on fostering critical analysis of media messages and representations. A 1999 national survey of state standards found elements of media literacy in almost every state's teaching standards. As states adopt the common-core standards, the result may actually be a reduced focus on media and literacy instruction formally contained in state standards. We therefore recommend four ways to address the common standards' limited focus on media/digital literacies:

"Students who write for their teacher write for a grade. Students who write for an audience write to connect, to argue, to entertain, to inform. And when they have other purposes for their writing other than a grade, they begin to care about the craft, choose carefully their words, shape thoughtfully their sentences. Isn't this the goal of writing standards? So the question is: Does your school provide or cheat your students out of an audience? Or, to cut to the chase: Does your school actively support a newspaper or broadcast program? If it doesn't, please stop going on about how you're meeting the Common Core standards. Because in spirit you're not."

Nice article about how to use badges with the Common Core. I'd love to see how we could do this at Central. If there was only more time in a day....

"For years, we've thought that the answer to boosting adolescent reading comprehension lay in building students' vocabulary. Teens often struggle with the jargon and advanced terminology they encounter as they move into middle and high school, so educators have designed curricula and interventions that explicitly teach these complex words. But these strategies aren't always fully effective, according to literacy researcher Paola Uccelli. As she writes, many of these interventions have yielded "significant growth in vocabulary knowledge yet only modest gains in reading comprehension." Too many teens still struggle to understand assigned texts. Uccelli's research explores a new approach. By focusing on how words connect in academic texts - and by recognizing that this connecting language is a possible source of difficulty for adolescent readers - teachers may be better able to equip middle and high school students with the tools to comprehend the texts they're reading for higher-order learning. Her work identifies a set of language features that are common in academic text but rare in informal spoken language. She's found that many of the most common language features of middle school texts are unknown to large proportions of students, even by eighth grade. "

"a list to help your students more easily connect the literature they're reading to the world around them - and to help teachers find great works of nonfiction that can echo common literary themes."

Poetry's role in the common core skill set!

"Educators around the country are exploring innovative ways to teach the new common-core literacy standards, and some are calling attention to an approach they say is working well: interdisciplinary thematic units."

The Common Core: What Danielson would do!

reading non-fiction as inquiry - plug in author for scientists in the chart to add an inquiry angle to the text.

Good overview of competency grading - common assessment use and PLCs

NY state resources for the common core - k-8 for now but good frameworks and test blueprints

"Back in January, when I asked high school seniors to send in college application essays about money, class, working and the economy, I wasn't sure what, if anything, would come in over the transom. But 66 students submitted essays, and with the help of Harry Bauld, the author of "On Writing the College Application Essay," we've selected four to publish in full online and in part in this column. That allowed us to be slightly more selective than Princeton itself was last year. What these four writers have in common is an appetite for risk. Not only did they talk openly about issues that are emotionally complex and often outright taboo, but they took brave and counterintuitive positions on class, national identity and the application process itself. For anyone looking to inspire their own children or grandchildren who are seeking to go to college in the fall of 2014, these four essays would be a good place to start."

Tips for teaching and studying non-fiction. Genre study

For those of you who do the six word story - this lesson focuses on close reading and word choice.

"The Common Core State Standards--has, in some places, contributed to narrowing students' experience of writing inside school. In that contradictory and shifting environment, the NCTE Executive Committee charged a committee to update the Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, attempting to reflect some of the historically significant changes of recent years. What follow are some of the professional principles that guide effective teaching."

"To read a text closely one must only rely on the words in the text and their relationships to each other. They don't turn to other sources. Close readers learn to notice metaphors or symbols, interesting juxtapositions of information, ambiguities, and the like (clues authors might have left behind to reveal the text meaning to those who read closely).             The Common Core State Standards require that we teach students to be close readers-to not only grasp the literal and inferential meanings of a text, but to understand how an author's word choices and structures convey higher-level meanings; how to figure out the subtler aspects of a text.             As such, close reading only makes sense is if texts have deeper meanings. If there aren't deeper meanings requiring such text analysis, then close reading would have no value. That means close reading requires certain kinds of text complexity."

"How can we honor this process and make school writing about discovery? Instead of leading students to feel that school writing must be separate from their lived realities, how can writing allow students to find meaning through a process of creating? At Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, where I teach, we adopted common language to help us unify our writing instruction. Throughout the four years of high school, we emphasize thesis statements and the crafting of arguments. While I believe there is much value to this approach, I've also come to believe that we should do more to help young people develop their writing craft."