• How will high school students be prepared for college and career reading demands?
The eleventh-grade students in Arthur Ngo’s English class are wondering about the poem he just gave them. It seems too simple. “My Papa’s Waltz” (Roethke, 1975) is easy enough to read and not all that complicated to understand, right? But Mr. Ngo has other plans.
“This is in nearly every anthology you see on 20th century American poetry,” he explains. “But why? What makes this such an enduring poem? We’re going to try to get to the root of this. I’ve got two purposes for our lesson today. One is to examine memory and speculate on whether this is a fond memory or a disturbing one. That’s connected to our overall unit on memory in literature and science. The second purpose relates to the structure of the poem itself. We’re going to look at how the form of the poem relates to the content.”
With that brief introduction to the poem, Mr. Ngo invites his students to read the poem silently and annotate as needed, especially when identifying poetic structures and content that may be confusing or troubling. He also reminds them to read the poem silently several times. While they read, he plays soft music from his laptop (he calls it “music to read by”). His students are accustomed to this, but Mr. Ngo has more in mind this time. He has chosen “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss (ClassicalMusicOnly, 2008). Without realizing it, students are listening to a waltz while reading the poem. After they have read the poem, he invites discussion.
“What’s the story of this poem?” he begins.
Over the next several minutes, they discuss the content. A large number of students remark that it’s about abuse, but he reels them in.
“That’s interpretation, and we’ll get there, but let’s slow down,” he says. “First, I just want the story.”
They describe a domestic scene of an inebriated father dancing his young son around the kitchen while a disapproving mother looks on.
“Now I’d like for you to look at the poetic structure. What are you seeing and hearing?” he asks.
Once again, they deconstruct the poem, noting the poet’s use of slant rhyme (dizzy and easy; pans and countenance), its ABAB rhyme pattern, and its use of quatrains. He draws their attention to the beat, while bringing the music’s volume back up.
“I’m playing a waltz, which has a distinctive rhythm. One, two, three, one, two, three …” he drums out. “In poetry, we call it iambic trimeter.” He adds an online metronome to mirror the beat and lowers the volume of the music a bit, saying, “Now read the poem aloud at your tables, and tell me what you notice about the meter.”
As the students fall into the recitation, he travels from table to table so he can listen to their observations and look at their annotations. As he circulates from one group to the next, he gathers informal data that he will use to formulate his next instructional steps. His observations confirm what he had anticipated: they have not yet discovered the misstep. After the class shares their thoughts on the connection between the meter and the action in the poem, Mr. Ngo asks them to listen again.
“This time we’re going to listen to Roethke read his poem,” he says, “and I want you to listen closely as you follow along in the reading. There’s a stumble somewhere in this poem. It’s subtle, but it’s there.”
With that, he plays the online metronome and an audio file of the author twice.
“Did you hear the stumble, when he misses the beat? Talk with your table about where you think it is,” he instructs them.
Within a few minutes, some of the tables have reached consensus. One of these tables says, “‘At every step you missed.’”
“Let’s listen again to see if we can hear it, now that you know where to find it,” says Mr. Ngo. He plays the recording and the metronome. “Roethke’s helping us visualize this scene,” he says, “and he’s using the sounds of the language to let us feel unbalanced for just a moment.”
A Collaborative Planning Team in Action
Before delving into the main purpose of this chapter, which is to examine the Common Core State Standards for reading in grades 9–12, we want to comment on Mr. Ngo’s curricular decisions and the contributions of his collaborative planning team, composed of the English faculty in all four grades, toward this effort.
Working together, Mr. Ngo and his collaborative planning team developed a consistent and coherent approach for planning the instructional unit by taking the following actions.
• Examining the text exemplars list in appendix B of the CCSS (NGA & CCSSO, 2010c) to gain a sense of the text complexity appropriate for high school English students
• Identifying texts they currently use in their classrooms and redistributing across the grade levels as needed
• Creating a list identifying a range of informational texts and literary readings that represent a progression of complexity throughout the school year
• Matching identified texts to concepts and content to be taught in English across the grade levels
• Developing lessons to be delivered and common formative assessments to be administered
• Discussing findings with one another during their weekly meetings to plan interventions for students in need of extra supports, including those who struggle to read and comprehend grade-level texts
• Developing a classroom observation schedule so they could spend time in one another’s classrooms
In other words, Mr. Ngo didn’t develop and teach this unit on memory alone. He relied on the collective strengths of his collaborative planning team to develop this unit and analyze student outcomes. However, before the team could engage in these actions, members had to analyze the Common Core ELA standards and compare them to their existing curriculum and instruction. They used four questions to guide their analysis.
1. What is familiar in the CCSS at each grade level?
2. What appears to be new based on prior standards?
3. What may be challenging for students?
4. What may be challenging for teachers?
This initial conversation allowed the teacher team to begin analyzing its current status in curriculum and instruction. Importantly, the teachers included student learning from the outset.
“I didn’t really know what I should anticipate in terms of misconceptions or naïve understandings,” says Mr. Ngo. “The team alerted me to the fact that the students might not notice the meter and its relationship to the waltz, since a lot of them are not familiar with this dance. And they advised me that lots of kids believe this poem is about child abuse.”
Based on its initial work, the team was able to identify areas of need regarding professional development and materials acquisition and to set the stage for later decisions regarding curriculum development, data analysis, intervention, and collaborative observations. A copy of this initial tool Mr. Ngo’s collaborative planning team used appears in figure 2.1. Visit go.solution-tree.com/commoncore for an online-only reproducible of figure 2.1, which your collaborative team can use to analyze other reading standards.
Anchor Standards for Reading
The Common Core English language arts standards are organized across four strands: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language. As discussed in chapter 1, a set of K–12 anchor standards for college and career readiness frames each strand. These anchor standards articulate the overarching goals that shape the grade-specific standards and are designed to create commonality across elementary, middle, and high school.