Purpose of This Book
We hope we have made the case, however briefly, that a PLC at the school or district level is vital to school change. Furthermore, collaborative planning teams functioning within the school’s PLC provide embedded professional development that sustains change.
In fact, chances are good that you are interested in this book because it promises to link an important change—implementing the Common Core State Standards for English language arts—with a process you already know to be powerful: professional learning communities. The remainder of this book provides collaborative teacher teams with information about the what and the how of teaching students to master these standards, including how to develop effective formative assessments and respond when students fail to make progress. We expand the Common Core standards so that you and your team can examine them in detail. You will find that each chapter begins with questions for your team to consider, and we invite you to return to these after you examine the standards to discuss implications for instruction, curriculum, assessment, and intervention.
Organization of This Book
This book has been crafted with your collaborative team in mind. Use it as a workbook—mark it up, dog-ear the pages, highlight passages that resonate, underline the ones that raise a question. In the same way that the Common Core ELA standards focus our collective attention on the practices of close reading and argumentation, we hope to contribute to a similar process for your team. The conversation begins in chapter 1 with an overview of the CCSS and the major shifts in our practices as these relate to informational texts, the role of speaking and listening in learning, the development of academic language and vocabulary, and the importance of argumentation in writing. Later in chapter 1, we explain how the standards are organized, so that the thirty-three-page original CCSS document and its three appendices become a bit less bewildering. We also discuss what the standards don’t say: about English learners (ELs), students with disabilities, and those who struggle with literacy. The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), developers of the CCSS, provide some general guidelines for students learning English and those who struggle in school, but these are brief summaries and will likely generate a great deal of additional ideas for implementation over the next several years (for more information, visit www.corestandards.org/the-standards for the documents “Application of the Standards for English Language Learners” and “Application to Students With Disabilities”). Importantly, these gaps highlight why PLCs are so important. In the words of the NGA and CCSSO (2010a):
While the Standards focus on what is most essential, they do not describe all that can or should be taught. A great deal is left to the discretion of teachers and curriculum developers. The aim of the Standards is to articulate the fundamentals, not to set out an exhaustive list or a set of restrictions that limits what can be taught beyond what is specified herein. (p. 6)
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 form the heart of this book because they each focus on a specific strand addressed in the CCSS. Reading is the subject of chapter 2: each and every standard is examined as it applies to literary and informational texts. Chapter 3 turns the spotlight to the Writing standards, and similarly reviews each standard as it applies to the major text types students produce: narrative, informational, and persuasive. In chapter 4, we discuss the two sets of Common Core standards that are integral to what we teach and how students learn—through speaking and listening and by understanding and producing academic language and vocabulary.
Chapter 5 returns to the subject of student consideration in the CCSS, including discussion on using formative assessment processes and summative assessment instruments informatively, and designing and implementing interventions for students who are not performing at expected levels.
Know that this book has been designed with you in mind. All of the research cited is specific to the high school grade levels. In addition, we’ve designed scenarios written from the perspective of teachers and students in grades 9–12 to illuminate the standards.
These scenarios are fictionalized accounts of our personal teaching activities and our collective experience working with teachers across grade levels in schools with diverse populations. We have developed these scenarios as a way to make the ELA standards come alive for you. We want you to personalize this experience as you and your collaborative team plan for implementation of the Common Core for English language arts. To begin this process, we encourage you to reflect on and discuss with your colleagues the following questions.
1. What is the status of collaborative teams at your school? Acknowledging the reality of your school’s commitment to an effective PLC process is a critical first step that can establish the future direction for collaborative professional growth. Recall the six characteristics of effective PLCs (pages 1–2) and consider the extent to which your PLC embodies these characteristics. If you want to delve deeper into your school’s PLC status, you can explore where your school would place on the PLC continuum: pre-initiating, initiating, implementing, developing, and sustaining (DuFour et al., 2010). Visit www.allthingsplc.info and search the Tools & Resources section for helpful PLC reproducibles, such as the PLC continuum reproducible “Laying the Foundation of a PLC” from Learning by Doing (DuFour et al., 2010).
2. How are your students performing? Are there areas of need in terms of curriculum development? Are there areas of need in terms of instruction? Are there areas of need in terms of assessment? These questions address key topics for your PLC to consider as you focus on the current status of your school’s language arts programs in relation to the expectations of the Common Core ELA standards. Discussions with your collaborative team will enable you to gain insight into where you are and where you need to go to support and advance your students’ language development.
We’ve designed this book to guide the conversations that are necessary to fully implement the Common Core State Standards. As such, it should serve as a resource that you return to regularly to consider the ways in which student learning can be improved. The anchor standards and the grade-level expectations are the outcomes expected of us as teachers. Common Core English Language Arts in a PLC at Work, Grades 9–12 provides the process to get there.
CHAPTER 1
Using Collaborative Teams for English Language Arts
KEY QUESTIONS
• To what extent does your team understand the conceptual shifts represented in the Common Core State Standards for English language arts?
• How often are informational texts used in instruction across the day?
• To what extent do teachers at your school use complex texts?
• Do students routinely discuss and develop texts that feature formal argumentation, claims, and evidence?
• To what extent do teachers at your school focus on speaking and listening activities?
• In what ways do teachers at your school develop academic vocabulary and language?
The tenth-grade English