Focus on Text

Tackling the Common Core Reading Standards, Grades 4-8

Amy Benjamin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317820819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Secondary Education

As schools shift to the Common Core, many English language arts teachers are left with questions about how their classrooms should look. Is fiction out? Can I still do strategy instruction? Does close reading mean deliberating on each word? Finally, there's a resource with all of these answers and more. In Focus on Text, bestselling author Amy Benjamin provides practical guidance on how to realistically implement the Common Core reading standards. Part I of the book examines misconceptions about the standards and what's really required. It also takes you inside classrooms to see how teachers are modifying their instruction. Part II tackles each reading standard for grades 4-8. You'll learn how to teach the standards with literary and informational texts and how to use them as a springboard for instruction in writing, language, speaking, and listening.

Topics include…
• Defining close reading and how is it different from word-by-word reading. When and how do students need to go over a text meticulously?
• How to use scaffolding through background knowledge to help students with challenging texts
• The best instructional practices to help students increase their range of reading and level of text complexity
• Ideas for teaching key concepts such as text structure, point of view, theme, stated and implied meanings, and the progression of ideas and characters
• Tweaking your assessments to better align with the Common Core--how to create reading check quizzes, unit tests, and cold reading tests to see if students are growing as readers.
• And much, much more!

Throughout the book, you'll find teaching tips and practical resources to use with students, such as question starters and sentence stems. You'll also get a wide variety of classroom examples at different grade levels and with different texts. Whether you're experienced with the Common Core or just getting started, this book will give you exciting new ideas for making them work in your own classroom so your students grow as readers!

Part One
How the Reading Standards Are Being Implemented

1
Inside Classrooms

How Exactly Has the Common Core Been Changing America’s Classrooms?

The Common Core State Standards have been described with words like “dramatic changes,” “overhaul,” “reform,” “retool,” and, “instructional shifts.” So what exactly are educators saying about how the Common Core Literacy Standards, now in place for several years in most states, have actually changed their day-to-day classroom goals, plans, and actions?

In my work in education, I’m always most interested in what happens in classrooms. That is because I spent thirty-three years as a plain old teacher. I was always bemused by the difference between the educational schemes being hatched by state, district, and even building levels, that didn’t affect me at all as a teacher. That means, accordingly, that any number of committees, task forces, flow charts, and strategic plans that occupied the higher-ups more often than not made no difference in how or what my students learned. “Education is cyclical. Education is trendy. Education is faddish. This too shall pass.” We often hear these observations.

The Common Core State Standards are not radical. They build upon existing state standards. Let’s say you have three school-aged children of your own. Your first-born is in the tenth grade, your middle child is in seventh grade, and your baby is in second grade. Are the children and teenagers themselves likely to notice significant differences in their education, compared to that of younger siblings? Well, the tenth grader might say to the seventh grader: “Hey, you guys are reading A Long Walk to Water? We read that in ninth grade.” Your seventh grader might say to your second grader: “Whoa! These are your vocabulary words? These are hard. I don’t even know some of these words.” In other words, the changes that are most noticeable because of the Common Core are those that involve the ramping up of the complexity of whole-class texts and the emphasis on academic vocabulary.

Note

The Common Core State Standards are not a curriculum. The Standards are skills-based targets. A curriculum consists of specific content, as well as the targets for learning and assessments. Districts have the local control of the learning materials to be used to get students to where they need to be. Some districts allocate more control than others to individual teachers and departments. Also, some states are what the textbook publishers call “adoption states,” meaning that these states (famously California, Texas, and Florida) give their seal of approval to a limited number of textbooks from which the districts may choose. Therefore, the newest editions of textbooks reflect the Common Core, and educators draw their curriculum largely from these textbooks; but the Common Core itself does not constitute a curriculum.

The other changes, those that are indeed important but surely not dramatic, would be, and have been, noticed by teachers and administrators, if not so much by students themselves or parents. But the expectations of the Common Core do require pedagogical changes which have already been instituted, to varying degrees, in classrooms. I spoke to ten teachers at grade levels 4–8 about how the Common Core Literacy Standards change that pervades their teaching. “It doesn’t have to be the most significant change. Just one difference that the Common Core Literacy Standards have brought about for you as a teacher that you think has affected how and what your students actually learn. And have altered your day-to-day classroom lives, not just a single lesson.”

Grade 4

Amanda L. teaches in a suburban school with very high expectations. The community is notoriously well-heeled and well-educated, and the parents are highly knowledgeable and actively involved in their schools. Although Amanda’s district maintains its “Number One in the County” status on the first round of Common Core-based state assessments, there was a significant drop in the grades of the students in grades 4–8, district-wide. The parents, citizens, and board of education are nervous about the drop in scores, fearful that they will lose their high status in the county if neighboring school districts start soaring ahead (and this district does not). Amanda has been teaching for about ten years.

Amanda says: “One of the biggest differences since the Common Core is that now I work with the students more on paraphrasing and summarizing informational text. Of course, everyone knows that the Common Core involves having students read more nonfiction, and, believe me, the District was fast to provide us with new books, great classroom magazines and online resources. But, in the past, we had our 90-minute reading block in the morning, where we used a workshop approach and leveled texts. Almost all of the writing was based on the children’s own personal experience and opinion, with some book reports and creative writing. The science, math, and social studies did not involve writing. Now they do.

“And I don’t ask them just to answer the end-of-the-chapter questions. All they did was to look at the questions and try to find the answers piecemeal in the text. They wouldn’t read the whole thing. Now they have to, because I make them summarize what they read, either in writing or in their own words out loud in their groups. Each group has to work on a summary, and I tell them that I want to hear a lot of talking in the group as they are doing that. It’s no problem asking fourth graders to talk. But they don’t want to focus. I make them focus on what they read about.

“Paraphrasing is a big, big skill. I tell them: Turn the sentence inside out, which means to begin the sentence with a different word from the sentence you are paraphrasing. Decide which words you can’t change and which ones you can. For example, if it’s a sentence about biodiversity, they can’t be trying to replace the word biodiversity with a synonym. Words in the glossary don’t have synonyms, I tell them. But, let’s say the sentence is something like, ‘If you are looking for biodiversity, the co-existence of multiple life forms, you’ll find it in a river,’ I don’t want them to change biodiversity, river, or life forms. But I want them to see that they can replace ‘If you’re looking for,’ with ‘You can find …’ or something like that. Instead of multiple, they can say many or even numerous. Instead of co-existence, they can express the concept of many life forms living together. And it’s more than just substituting one word for another. That’s why I stress that they have to turn the sentence inside out. For a sentence like this one, they could maybe start with river (Rivers are one place where you will find biodiversity). And then, they need to practice sentence combining or sentence dividing: Biodiversity means that many different life forms live together. If you don’t teach them that paraphrasing can also mean dividing one sentence into two, they will make a mess with all of the words. Dividing the sentences helps them control the main ideas. Keep it simple. That helps. But it’s a skill that we practice at least three times a week.

“In science, social studies, and even math, I have them work in groups, with each group having to work together to write a paraphrase of the longest sentence in a paragraph. Then the groups read their work aloud to the class. That helps them learn the material, also, because each group is working on a different paragraph in the section of the chapter.

“And when we work on summarizing, I find it’s extremely helpful to give the kids a shell, by that I mean a framework of sentence starters and transition words that will help them organize the information. These are simple frames, like: The section is called ____________. It’s about _______________________. It describes (or explains, or compares, or shows you how to …, etc.) _____________________.

“And then one more thing we do with the informational text, especially the science text, is that I have them decide what one question a paragraph is answering. Then, they write the question on a sticky note in the book and pass it to a partner. The partner has to read the paragraph and answer the question. It’s can’t be a yes/no question. This teaches them that every paragraph in informational text answers one main question. But it’s hard to get them to understand the difference between a main idea question and a detail question. We work on that. It’s hard, especially for some kids. When kids are having a hard time seeing the big picture, rather than a detail in a paragraph, I might make it more general: ‘Look at your sub-heading. Turn it into a question.’ It gets them to focus on the section as a whole.”

Stephen G. teaches fourth grade in a district with a very mixed demographic. The school where Stephen teaches serves a community whose low socioeconomic levels, high number of non-native speakers of English and high mobility rates are markedly different from those of the other schools in the district. These conditions cause Stephen’s school to have much lower test scores than those of other schools, and place his school under close scrutiny as well as an ever-changing carousel of “new programs” to raise scores.

Says Stephen, “The biggest change for us is that they don’t want us to use leveled texts anymore. Well, I shouldn’t say anymore like that. We can still use our classroom libraries for choice reading, and those are leveled texts, but we have to let the children choose any text they want. Instead of organizing the books by levels, now we organize them by topics. That has created some problems and it goes against what we have been told was right for a lot of years about matching kids to texts at their levels. It’s getting used to a different philosophy about kids and reading, and, to be honest, some of us don’t know if this is the right way.

“Now we have a science book that my students can’t read by themselves. I’m not allowed to read aloud to them, except to get them started. So my science lessons have become much more of a reading lesson. I’m not saying that’s bad, it’s just that science used to be a lot more hands-on, and the kids were interested in it. Now, we don’t have time for the labs. We still do some labs, but not nearly as much.

“Same with social studies. Our social studies time used to be very project-based, like the science. We had a lot of learning stations with geography games and jigsaw puzzles to learn the states, like that. We had crafts stations where kids would create flags for the different countries and do things like cave paintings and make vacation boxes to learn about different places in the world. The kids learned. We can still do those things, but we have less time for them because now the kids have to combine some kind of literacy activity with the projects. I make them write one complete sentence for their activity on an index card. And in their sentence they have to use a social studies vocabulary word from a list that I made for each station. To give you an example, they might be clipping images from the Internet to make a collage on a Power Point screen for a country, or a region, or a state, or a type of climate. Now they have to write a sentence that uses one word from the Academic Word List and another word from the Unit List. The Academic Word List would be all-purpose words like specific, previous, purchase, obtain. The Unit List has words just about the topic, like arid, mountainous, coast, Great Lake.

Grade 5

Elizabeth S. teaches fifth grade in a rural area in a Midwestern state. Some of the children of her school are in families of migrant farm workers, many of whom are undocumented residents.

“It’s been hard to get used to giving students challenging text and doing whole class lessons because so many of my students don’t speak English outside of school. I have to teach a lot more vocabulary, but we have a much better way of doing it than giving out word lists and filling in workbook pages. Most of my ELL’s speak Spanish—not all of them, we have a lot of Mennonites here who speak German—but for the ones who speak Spanish—and I don’t have much Spanish myself—the word components are very helpful. They’re helpful for all of the children. Because of all the Latin that’s in academic words—the prefixes and roots, I mean.

Elizabeth told me that she covers the walls of her classroom with visuals of the common Latin-based prefixes.

Tip

The Latin-based prefixes appear more regularly in informational text than in literary text. The prefixes that students should recognize in grades 1–3 are re-, ex-, pre-, un-, dis-, non-, im-, mis-, mini-, maxi-. The prefixes that they should recognize in the intermediate grades are co- (con-, com-) syn- (sym-), in- (en-, inter-), sub- (sup-), e (ex-), a- (ab-), and the numerical prefixes mono-, uni-, bi-, tri-, quad-, cent-, mil-).

“But you can’t just give them a list of prefixes and say ‘go learn these’ and give a quiz. We have visuals around the room to refer to, and we do that all the time. We preview the articles and we look for words with the prefixes. The kids who know Spanish have an advantage because so many of these prefixes are found in everyday Spanish words. You’d be surprised how many English words they can figure out just from using their Spanish.

“In informational text at grade level, you’ll find at least a half a dozen words that have these prefixes, but the prefixes don’t always add understandable meaning to a word.

“For example, on a page, we might run into the word replace or reclaim, and that will be good because you can see how the prefix changes the meaning of the root word. But on that same page, we’ll also run into develop, important, and collect. It’s much harder to explain whether or not these words even have prefixes because they are not being added to an existing actual word. But even then, at least the children are trying to figure out a word based on a word-learning principle, and it gives us a chance to talk about how words really work. I still say it’s better than the workbook with unrelated words approach, where the words are not grouped according to structure, and there’s no context.

“We also have learning centers for the prefixes and roots. The other fifth grade teachers and I created word kits with laminated index cards in different colors for the prefixes and the roots. The children play with these, putting them together to form possible words. They do this in teams, to see how many words each team can put together. If a word is challenged, they have to show that it is in the dictionary. If not, that team loses. They’re learning a lot of words that way, and being reminded again of the words that they do know. It’s reinforcing.”

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Meet the Author
• Introduction
• Part One How the Reading Standards Are Being Implemented
• Part Two A Close Look at Teaching Each of the Reading Standards
• Appendix A: The Reading Standards, Grade by Grade
• Appendix B: The Other Literacy Standards
• References