9 7. Evaluate • Letter (Samantha, ELA, Letter to John Green) • Sudoku Puzzle (Damon and Cameron, Math, Puzzle as math process)
10 8. Explain • Math Discussion (Gabriel, Math, Teaching fellow students) • Personal Essay (Ali, ELA, Personal essay) • Math Writing (Zoe and Caleb, Math, Explaining solution to Rubik’s Cube problem)
11 9. Imagine • Science Project (Elizabeth, NGS, Robot project) • Narrative Writing (Emilio, ELA, Dystopian class project)
12 10. Integrate • Informational Writing (Claire, ELA and WH, JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis speech) • Informational Document-Based Question (Max, SS, DBQ on industrialization)
13 11. Interpret • Analytical Essay (Justin, ELA, Interpretation of a graphic novel) • Interpreting a Data Set (David, Science/Math, Graph on China’s economic growth)
14 12. Organize • Analytical Essay (Gaby, ELA, Hamlet quest for justice) • Science Writing (Quinn, ELA and Science, water quality and sources)
15 13. Summarize • Main Ideas (Cody, ELA, Billy Collins poem paraphrase) • Speech (Ansley, SS, Model UN summary speech)
16 14. Support • Analytical Essay (Landon, ELA, Blake poetry paper) • Science Writing (Micca, Science, Evidence from observations)
17 15. Transform • Poetry (Katy, ELA, Poetry based on a work of art) • Transforming Data (Madison and Quinn, Science, Measuring and comparing wingspans)
18 Appendices I. The Other Words II. Academic Writing Moves III. Working With the Words Across Disciplines IV. Academic Moves: Etymology V. Teaching by Design Using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge Model VI. Standards Correlation Chart (Texas, Florida, Indiana, and Virginia) VII. Anchor Charts VIII. Graphic Organizers
19 Glossary
20 Index
Other
Introduction The Language of Learning Words That Make the Mind Work
The genesis of this book stems from something most of us do nearly every day at work: waiting to get on the copy machine to run off a few handouts for class. One day as I (Jim) waited impatiently to get my turn, I began surveying the stacks of handouts that waited to be retrieved and distributed to students. I found myself reflexively drawn to the language of the directions, problems, and prompts.
While the machines whirred out my colleagues’ copies (and I wondered if I would get mine made in time for class!), I became fascinated with the handouts—the words, sentences, and general demands that such language makes on students’ minds. I realized that these simple photocopies were what teachers are really putting in students’ hands and telling them to do. Writing about the challenges and needs of English learners (ELs), Heritage, Silva, and Pierce (2007) insist that the challenge for teachers of ELs is to “plan instruction that meets the language learning needs of students to ensure that their ability to speak, listen, read, and write in academic subjects across the curriculum does not lag behind that of their peers” (p. 171).
The thing is, such “challenges” are by no means limited to ELs, for as these authors subsequently note, borrowing from Vygotsky, “language and thinking develop simultaneously through everyday sociocultural experiences, and [such] thinking occurs through scaffolded interaction . . . that takes place [during] more structured experiences” (p. 182). Nor, for that matter, are these challenges matters of vocabulary alone; rather, these obstacles to entering the academic world are as much about the cognitive or mental “moves” students need to be able to make when thinking and doing the work required by our different disciplines.
As if they had heard my thoughts, the teachers gathered around the copy machine began lamenting their struggles to get students to read, to write, to speak about—in short, to think in—their discipline. By this time, I had discovered and begun flipping through extra copies of textbooks stored in the copy room, finding in their directions and prompts the same words asking for the same mental moves and processes that the teachers around me complained their students could not do. There was, in other words, what Graff and Birkenstein call a “deep, underlying structure, [an] internal DNA” common to the academic and cognitive moves these various disciplines—and teachers—were asking students to make (2014, p. xxi).
At the word level, my colleagues were frustrated by students’ lack of familiarity and fluency with “Tier Two” words, which are those words of “high utility for mature language users . . . found across a variety of domains” (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2013, p. 9). It is facility with these “mortar words” that allows students to connect the “bricks” of the larger ideas we are trying to convey in our classes and teach our students to understand. The hope is that students can do these things—for example, analyze, argue, determine—with some fluency when reading, writing, or thinking about the complex, abstract, and higher-order ideas they encounter as they move from grade to grade (Zwiers, 2008, p. 24). These academic moves, captured in the fifteen words that compose the chapters in this book, are at the center of new SAT changes. As Cyndie Schmeiser, chief of assessments for the College Board, reported: “Gone from the SAT are words like turgid, sagacious, (and probably, umbrage!) and instead, words that gain their meaning from context. . . . Words kids will use in college and the world . . . synthesize, analyze” (2014).
From the start, we asked how we might address the need to teach students these academic and mental moves crucial not only to English but also to all core academic subjects. After much discussion and many e-mails, we arrived at what seemed a concise but useful list of fifteen words that we immediately realized were, as mentioned above, not merely words but essential moves in the classroom as well as on assessments, such as the Common Core and the SAT and ACT. We also took the extra step of checking these words against such standards documents as the Common Core State Standards so as to ensure these were the words most commonly used to describe what students should know how to do. Some years back, in his book To Think, Frank Smith grappled with the same question, eventually arriving at 77 “thinking words” (1990, p. 2). Smith’s list includes all the words discussed here, but many more than any of us have time to use (or teach!) when designing lessons, assessments, or writing prompts.
The fifteen “academic moves” presented here, along with the second list of alternative moves that are not so easily tested but nonetheless vital to more innovative and ambitious