Implementing Common Core State Standards In English Language Arts

1. Implementing • Common Core State Standards • In • English Language Arts

3. Anne Ruggles Gere • Director, NCTE’s Squire Office of PolicyResearch • Former President, NCTE • English Professor, University of Michigan • Chair, ACE’s MLA-NCTE Committee to Review CCSS • Editor, NCTE Series: Supporting Students in a Time of Core Standards

4. Session Objectives: Introduction of NCTE and its support for ELA teachers Policies to enhance implementation of CCSS Development of Individual State Action Plans Guided Activity Questions and Answers

5. Efforts to Support Teachers • On-going • Publications and Conferences • Connected Community and Pathways • Professional Development • New • Common Core Virtual Conference • Common Core Book Series

6. Virtual Conference on CCSS Keynote by Sarah Brown Wessling, National Teacher of the Year (Subsequent sessions divided K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12) Session Two: Understanding CCSS Session Three: Teachers Enacting CCSS Session Four: Planning for CCSS

7. Book Series 4 books in grade level bands NCTE Principles in action with Common Core State Standards Emphasize multiple ways to teach and assess CCSS

8. Organization of Books overview organization of standards provide narrative vignettes juxtaposing two teachers from various parts of the country teaching one of the new Common Core concepts chart practices guiding questions for implementation and study

9. Policies for Implementing Common Core State Standards NASBE+NCTE=Excellence in Literacy Education

10. Topics for Individual State Action Plans Transition Curriculum Linkage with Higher Education

11. Linking Policy with Research-Based Principles Literacy Instruction across All Disciplines Necessity of Teacher Quality Focus on Students

12. Literacy across All Disciplines CCSS Requires Literacy in History, Social Studies, Science, and Technological Subjects LEARN Act Writing and Learning

13. Teacher Quality Teachers with four characteristics, or dimensions, of teacher quality consistently generate higher student achievement: content knowledge, experience, teacher training and certification, and general cognitive skills. (Center for Public Education, 2005). Teacher quality more heavily influenced differences in student performance than did race, class, or school of the student; disadvantaged students benefited more from good teachers than did advantaged students (Nye, Konstantopoulos, & Hedges, 2004). Achievement gains from having an effective teacher could be almost three times as large for African American students than for white students, even when comparing students with the same prior school achievement (Sanders & Rivers, 1996). The effects of teacher quality accumulate over the years. (Sanders & Rivers, 1996; Jordan, Mendro, & Weerasinghe, 1997). A background in the subject matter being taught makes a difference in how well students perform. The presence of a teacher who does not have at least a minor in the subject matter that he or she teaches accounts for around 20 percent of the variation in NAEP scores (Darling-Hammond, 1999).

15. CCSS Focus on Students Meaning Making Independent Learning Transfer of Learning College and Career Ready

16. Policies for Transition State Literacy Teams Professional Development Alignment with Existing Standards Moratorium on NCLB Testing Digital Resources Formative Assessment

17. Examples from States Delaware’s KUDs Louisiana Literacy Project Kentucky’s Comprehensive Literacy Program

18. CCSS and Curriculum Not Coverage but Spiraling Integration Non fiction Textual Complexity

20. Teacher Role in Determining Text Complexity The use of qualitative and quantitative measures to assess text complexity is balanced in the Standards’ model by the expectation that educators will employ professional judgment to match texts to particular students and tasks. Numerous considerations go into such matching. For example, harder texts may be appropriate for highly knowledgeable or skilled readers, and easier texts may be suitable as an expedient for building struggling readers’ knowledge or reading skill up to the level required by the Standards. Highly motivated readers are often willing to put in the extra effort required to read harder texts that tell a story or contain information in which they are deeply interested. Complex tasks may require the kind of information contained only in similarly complex texts.

21. Policies for Curriculum Teacher Teams CCSS plus 15% Cross-disciplinary Perspectives New Materials

22. Example from States Wisconsin and Teacher Teams Minnesota and New Media Maryland and Assessment

23. Policies for CCSS and Higher Education College and Career Ready Professional Development 21st Century Literacies

25. Professional Development Support professional development opportunities that allow for teacher collaboration within and across grade levels to share and analyze practices that improve achievement.

26. Assessment Literacy The teacher is the most important agent of assessment. Most educational assessment takes place in the classroom, as teachers and students interact with one another. Teachers design, assign, observe, collaborate in, and interpret the work of students in their classrooms. They assign meaning to interactions and evaluate the information that they receive and create in these settings. In short, teachers are the primary agents, not passive consumers, of assessment information. It is their ongoing, formative assessments that primarily influence students’ learning.

27. Questions and Answers

28. Guided Activity Developing Individual State Action Plans Posting Plans Reflecting on Plans