Literacy Strategies and The Common Core: Helping Students to Become College & Career Ready

1. Literacy Strategies and The Common Core: Helping Students to Become College & Career Ready

2. Instructional Leaders • Why should we care about CCSS? (besides the 2014 testing date?) • What are the standards and what skills do they require students to have and master? • How might the standards be incorporated into our classroom to ensure rigor and relevance?

3. Why We Should Care • “Writing well is not just an option for young people—it’s a necessity” (Writing Next). • “Every year in the United States large numbers of adolescents graduate from high school unable to write at least at the basic levels required by colleges or employees. In addition, every school day 7,000 young people drop out of high school, many of them because they lack the basic literacy skills to meet the growing demands of the high school curriculum” (Graham and Perin 2007). • Only about 1 in 17 seventeen-year-olds can comprehend specialized text, for example, the science section of the newspaper. (National Institute for Literacy)

4. • The number of engineering degrees awarded in the United States is down 20% from the peak year of 1985. (Tapping America’s Potential; www.tap2015.org) • Although U.S. fourth graders score well against international competition, they fall near the bottom or dead last by the time they are 12th graders in mathematics and science, respectively. (Ibid)

5. Why We should care • “According to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 33 percent of fourth graders cannot read at the basic level; 24 percent of eighth graders cannot read at the basic level. That is, when reading grade appropriate text these students cannot extract the general meaning or make obvious connections between the text and their own experiences or make simple inferences from the text.” Missouri is one of only two states, since 2009, who have seen 4th grade scores decrease. What’s also disconcerting is that Missouri 8th grade scores over the past two years have seen no improvement (NAEP 2011). • Question: How well will these students learn to understand, respect and use science?

6. Why We should care • “According to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 28 percent of Missouri 8th graders scored below the basic level for science, while only 36 percent of students scored at or above the level of proficiency. Only 1 percent of Missouri students scored at the advanced level in science. Additionally, 8th grade students in Missouri saw no change in their scores over the past two years. • Question: Do we see a correlation here?

7. Related? • Reading • Science

8. LexileFramework® for Reading Study Summary of Text Lexile Measures Interquartile Ranges Shown (25% - 75%) 1600 1400 1200 Text Lexile Measure (L) 1000 800 600 Personal Use Entry-Level Occupa-tions College Texts High School Lit. Military High School Texts SAT 1, ACT, AP* College Lit. * Source of National Test Data: MetaMetrics

9. Teaching Math and Science • “I don’t just teach mathematics. I teach young people to think. I teach them to read, write, reason, argue, discover, defend and hypothesize. You see, I am much more than a teacher of math. I teach students to think critically. Math is simply my tool.” • You are passionate about science. Chemistry, physics and biology excite you. Do you want your students to learn scientific principles, to think like a scientist? Then teach them to read and write, for that is the first step toward accomplishing your goal!

10. What is this all about? It’s about preparing our kids for the ever-increasing demands of the complex world in which we live… • where problems are becoming more complex and difficult to solve, • where information is compounding exponentially and is challenging to decipher, • where competition is fierce in the global economy, • and where our great country is starting to fall behind.

11. Are our Students ready for an entry-level job?Are you? Online Stopwatch

12. Reading Standards for Literacy

13. Literacy Bands—Progression of Standard 1 Science *Why the bands? *Look closely at the progression—how it evolves. *Unwrap the standard—what skills are necessary to master the standard?

14. Unwrapping the Standards One at a time…

16. Let’s look at the same standard across the content areas • Similarities? • What skills would be needed to meet these standards? • Why is shared literacy important?

17. Informational Text • Reading and learning from informational text is more challenging to students. • Informational text has a greater degree of text complexity. • Sentence fluency differs. • Technical vocabulary is new and often challenging. • The format/structure can be challenging. • What is light? Aristotle was one of the first to publicly hypothesize about the nature of light, proposing that light is a disturbance in the element air (that is, it is a wave-like phenomenon). On the other hand, Democritus—the original atomist—argued that all things in the universe, including light, are composed of indivisible sub-components (light being some form of solar atom). At the beginning of the 11th Century, the Arabic scientist Alhazen wrote the first comprehensive treatise on optics; describing refraction, reflection, and the operation of a pinhole lens via rays of light traveling from the point of emission to the eye. He asserted that these rays were composed of particles of light. In 1630, René Descartes popularized and accredited in the West the opposing wave description in his treatise on light, showing that the behavior of light could be re-created by modeling wave-like disturbances in a universal medium ("plenum"). Beginning in 1670 and progressing over three decades, Isaac Newton developed and championed his corpuscular hypothesis, arguing that the perfectly straight lines of reflection demonstrated light's particle nature; only particles could travel in such straight lines. He explained refraction by positing that particles of light accelerated laterally upon entering a denser medium. Around the same time, Newton's contemporaries Robert Hooke and Christian Huygens—and later Augustin-Jean Fresnel—mathematically refined the wave viewpoint, showing that if light traveled at different speeds in different media (such as water and air), refraction could be easily explained as the medium-dependent propagation of light waves. The resulting Huygens–Fresnel principle was extremely successful at reproducing light's behavior and, subsequently supported by Thomas Young's discovery of double-slit interference, was the beginning of the end for the particle light camp.

18. Literacy Bands—Progression of Standard 1 Science *Why the bands? *Look closely at the progression—how it evolves. *Unwrap the standard—what skills are necessary to master the standard?

19. Unwrapping the Standards RST - 2

20. Unwrapping Reading Standard 2: Your Turn

21. The Why . . . The What . . . Now the How! Reading Informational Texts—Close Reading with Text Dependent Questions

22. Close Reading • Close Reading – A thoughtful, disciplined reading of a text. • Skilled readers do not read blindly, but purposely. • They have an agenda, goal, or objective. • Their purpose, together with the nature of what they are reading, determines how they read. • They read in different ways in different situations for different purposes. • Implications: Even good readers, those who enjoy reading, may not have the skills to read their science textbook. • Reading for sheer pleasure requires no particular skill level. • To learn a new subject requires close-reading skills in internalizing and taking ownership of an organized system of meanings.

23. A Close Reading of Einstein’s Letter • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwHds1any9Y&feature=related • As you read: • First read the entire article and highlight words that “stand-out” or seem particularly important. (For example, “sir”) • Now to the side, write an explanation next to one of your highlighted words/phrases, explaining why you found that highlighted word or phrase important/meaningful. • Pair share/whole class cold call. • Close read of paragraph 1—scaffolding questions for success, moving from comprehension questions to analysis. • Now that we’ve done a close read of paragraph 1, summarize on a post-it what Einstein’s purpose for writing President Roosevelt. • Pair share summary. Whole class share—similarities in main ideas. • Close read of paragraph 2. (Repeat above steps) • Finally, take a few minutes and write an objective summaryof the text…Finally making connections between the main ideas within each paragraph. • Main Ideas • Read Closely and Comprehend • Einstein's goal/purpose

24. Einstein’s Letter….Text Dependent Questions. • Now we will reread and analyze the text – Author? Purpose? The Audience? (Close reading with specific questions) • Missing a cordial opening and closing to the letter. What does this imply? • 1st paragraph: Authors voice? Tone? Purpose? (Why is he writing FDR?) • 2nd Paragraph: What is the purpose of this paragraph? Why mention Joliot…Fermi and Szilard (repeated from first paragraph). What is he implying about FDR’s administration. • 3rd paragraph: Find words that would grab FDR’s attention. Why is “new’ used two times? Purpose? A “single” bomb…Why single? • 4th paragraph: Why did he point out our lack of uranium and list where uranium could be found? • 5th – 7th paragraphs: The purpose of the listing? He suggests a plan for security…What does that imply? From the readers perspective (FDR) what aspects of Einstein’s plan might prove beneficial? Disconcerting? • 8th paragraph: What is Einstein’s purpose here? Why end the letter discussing the sale of uranium?

25. Text dependent Questions: Making Connections • Bigger Questions: • What tactics does Einstein use to draw attention to the need for a nuclear program? • If you were FDR, how would you have assessed the validity of the letter? • Einstein later described the letter as the “one great mistake in my life”. Why do you think he may have considered signing this letter as a mistake?

26. Text Dependent Questioning • Good text dependent questions will often linger over specific phrases and sentences to ensure careful comprehension of the text. • Text dependent questions ask students to analyze paragraphs on a sentence-by-sentence basis and sentences on a word-by-word basis. • Text dependent questions often require students to move beyond what is directly stated and make non-trivial inferences based on evidence in the text, demanding a close attention to the text in order to answer fully. • An effective set of questions might begin with relatively simple questions requiring attention to specific words, details, and arguments and then move on to explore the impact of those specifics on the text as a whole.

27. Creating text Dependent Questions • How to create Text-Dependent Questions for Close Analytical Reading of Texts: • Identify the Core Understandings and Key Ideas of the Text. (What do you want students to understand from the text?) • Start Small to Build Confidence. (The opening questions should be ones that help orientate students to the text and specific enough for them to answer so they gain confidence.) • Target Vocabulary and Text Structure. (Locate and question powerful words that are connected to key ideas.) • Tackle Tough Sections Head-on. (Craft questions that support students in mastering these sections—sentence by sentence.) • Sequence Text Dependent Questions. (Questions should build toward more coherent understanding—to bring students to a gradual understanding of its meaning.) • Identify the Standards That are Being Addressed. (Form additional questions that will exercise those standards.) • Create the Culminating Assessment. (Develop a culminating activity around the key ideas that involves writing and can be completed by students independently.) • Try it!

28. Become Literacy Leaders • Your Task as Literacy Leader: • Train your PLC colleagues—Close Reading of a text! • Together brainstorm ways to implement the strategy (text, text dependent questions, standard(s) to address, common formative assessment). • Decide when you’ll implement the strategy. • Implement the strategy • Reflect on the strategy and how well students met the standard(s). • What was it like modeling the reading/writing standards in the classroom? • What were the challenges/benefits of the assignment and scoring? • How did the process help student learning? • Share reflections, results of common formative assessment, and some student example in PLCs. • Bring PLC feedback to next literacy training—be ready to share the text selected, the text dependent questions created, the standards addressed, and the common formative assessment results.