What’s In and What’s Out for ELA Materials?

1. What’s In and What’s Out for ELA Materials? Susan Pimentel June 28, 2012

2. What’s In and What’s Out?

3. 1. Complex Texts CCSS Materials should include: • Concrete evidence that texts align with the complexity requirements outlined in standard 10 • Extensive opportunities for all students to encounter those texts, including • Read alouds in elementary school • Shorter, challenging texts to allow close, sustained reading of complex texts

4. 2. Texts Worthy of Close Attention CCSS Materials should include: • Works of exceptional craft that span eras, cultures, and genres • Texts that are a rich repository of ideas and information • Specific texts (or text types) named in the standards

5. 3. Balance of Literary and Informational Texts CCSS Materials should include: • Equal measures of literature and informational texts in K-5 • Substantially more literary nonfiction in ELA in grades 6-12

6. 4. Coherent Sequences of Texts CCSS Materials should include: • Sequences of texts that provide students with well-developed bodies of knowledge • Specific anchor texts for especially close and careful reading • Additional, topically related texts that enable students to read widely

7. 5. Text-Dependent Questions CCSS Materials should include: • A significant percentage of text-dependent Qs (80-90%) • Qs that are text-specific rather than “cookie-cutter” • Effective sequences of Qs that build on each other so students stay focused on the central ideas of the text & learn fully from it • Culminating text-based assignments that integrate reading and writing (and perhaps speaking and listening too)

8. 6. Evidence-Based Analyses CCSS Materials should include: • Writing to analyze sources as a key task (arguments and writing to inform) • Extensive practice with short, research tasks • How to plan substantive academic discussions that ask students to draw on textual evidence

9. 7. Academic Vocabulary CCSS Materials should include: • Frequent and systematic attention to vocabulary (in every reading) • A keen focus on words that appear frequently in a wide variety of texts/disciplines • How meanings of words vary with context • A focus on word choice

10. 8. Emphasis on Reading and Re-Reading CCSS Materials should include: • Reading passages that are at the center lesson (and the layout) • Highly focused pre-reading activities (no more than 10% of time) • Scaffolds & pre-reading activities that do not preempt or replace the text

11. 9. Reading Strategies CCSS Materials should: • Put the text first and reading strategies second • Introduce strategies when they: • help clarify a specific part of a text • are dictated by specific features of a text • assist with understanding more challenging sections

12. 10. Pre-mediation CCSS Materials should include: • Supports to students at the front end rather than always at the back end, including: • Extra time and read-throughs of the text prior to full class study • Extra attention to challenging sections, key phrases, or on the organization of the text • Work with tough vocabulary in context • Building background knowledge with other texts on the topic

13. It all boils down to. . .

14. Texts Worth Reading and Questions Worth Answering!