Anchor Standards for Language
Language Standards for Grades 9–12
Conclusion
Implementing Formative Assessments to Guide Instruction and Intervention
A Collaborative Planning Team in Action
The Role of Assessment and the Common Core State Standards
Feed Up, Back, and Forward
Formative and Summative Assessments
What to Do When Students Struggle
Assessment, Intervention, and Instruction
Conclusion
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Douglas Fisher, PhD, is a professor of educational leadership at San Diego State University and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College. He teaches courses in instructional improvement. As a classroom teacher, Fisher focuses on English language arts instruction. He also serves as the literacy instructional advisor to the Chula Vista Elementary School District.
Fisher received an International Reading Association Celebrate Literacy Award for his work on literacy leadership and was elected to the board of directors in 2012. For his work as codirector of the City Heights Professional Development Schools, Fisher received the Christa McAuliffe award. He was corecipient of the Farmer Award for excellence in writing from the National Council of Teachers of English for the article, “Using Graphic Novels, Anime, and the Internet in an Urban High School,” published in the English Journal.
Fisher has written numerous articles on reading and literacy, differentiated instruction, and curriculum design. His books include In a Reading State of Mind, Checking for Understanding, Better Learning Through Structured Teaching, and Text Complexity.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in communication, a master’s degree in public health education, and a doctoral degree in multicultural education. Fisher completed postdoctoral study at the National Association of State Boards of Education focused on standards-based reforms.
Nancy Frey, PhD, is a professor of literacy in the School of Teacher Education at San Diego State University. Through the university’s teacher-credentialing and reading specialist programs, she teaches courses on elementary and secondary reading instruction and literacy in content areas, classroom management, and supporting students with diverse learning needs. Frey also teaches at Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego. She was a board member of the California Reading Association and a credentialed special educator, reading specialist, and administrator in California.
Before joining the university faculty, Frey was a public school teacher in Florida. She worked at the state level for the Florida Inclusion Network helping districts design systems for supporting students with disabilities in general education classrooms.
She is the recipient of the 2008 Early Career Achievement Award from the National Reading Conference and the Christa McAuliffe Award for excellence in teacher education from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. She was corecipient of the Farmer Award for excellence in writing from the National Council of Teachers of English for the article “Using Graphic Novels, Anime, and the Internet in an Urban High School.”
Frey is author of The Formative Assessment Action Plan, Productive Group Work, Teaching Students to Read Like Detectives, and Content-Area Conversations. She has written articles for The Reading Teacher, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, English Journal, Voices From the Middle, Middle School Journal, Remedial and Special Education, and Educational Leadership.
To book Douglas Fisher or Nancy Frey for professional development, contact [email protected].
FOREWORD
In his poem “We Make the Road by Walking,” Antonio Machado explains that our own footsteps make up the road we tread. The path only becomes clear with a backward glance. However, too many schools are in search of the perfect path—the shortest route to the Common Core. Teachers often become frustrated with their lack of progress or when one direction they have taken seems to lead nowhere. They blame themselves, they blame the standards, and they blame the process. Sometimes they even blame the students. Instead of pointing fingers, teachers should read Common Core English Language Arts in a PLC at Work™, Grades 9–12. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey demonstrate how collaborative teamwork—and a laser-like focus on student performance—can help schools create their own path to achieving the Common Core.
Teachers who are new to the profession often wish they had worked in the “good old days.” Alas, if thirty-two years in the classroom have taught me anything, it is that there were never good old days. My students have always been challenging, have always been averse to hard work, and have always been wonderful. What has changed is the stakes. More than ever before, students need to acquire high levels of literacy in high school in order to continue learning in postsecondary settings. This need for college and career readiness was the impetus for creating the Common Core State Standards.
The texts students will encounter in college and in job-training programs are highly complex. Students need stamina to negotiate pages of information-laden readings and the syntactical confidence to comprehend what they read. They need to bring a broad range of background knowledge and a robust vocabulary to these readings. They need to be independent readers who know what to do when understanding breaks down. The problem for most high school teachers is that, in their heart of hearts, they believe it is not their job to “fix” students who can’t read. Somebody else along the way has dropped the ball, making his or her job almost impossible. Teachers need to explore this assumption before they can make progress toward helping students meet the Common Core State Standards.
Will aligning curriculum to the Common Core turn our high schools into test-prep factories and our collaborative teams into benchmark assessment generators? Nothing in the Common Core recommends that approach. The standards place a high priority on a rich and rigorous literature curriculum along with a focus on informational texts. The standards also insist that literacy instruction is the shared responsibility of the entire school community, which is difficult to achieve since many content-area teachers already insist they have too much material to cover to spend instructional time focusing on literacy. Teachers need to recognize that reading and writing about different disciplines, such as history and science, deepen students’ understanding of what they are learning. Teachers also need to admit that some classroom practices have pushed students away from literacy rather than toward it. Instead of creating lessons that invite students to dig in and explore a text, many teachers make them answer questions rather than encouraging them to come up with their own. Literacy is an important building block for many other skills.
Such literacy of the standards must be assessed, however. That’s why the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) come in. PARCC and SBAC’s standards-based performance assessments