Reading and Writing Independence
There are two essential literacy activities that students must be willing to do independently before they leave kindergarten: (1) recreational reading and (2) first-draft writing. At every grade level, teachers have the challenge of making sure they have books available that all their students can and will want to read independently. They also have the challenge of establishing an atmosphere in which all students are willing to take the risk of writing independently, even though they know they can’t yet spell every word correctly or abide by every grade-appropriate usage, capitalization, or punctuation convention. It does students no favors to allow them to resist independent reading or writing. Students’ willingness to engage in these two activities is foundational for literacy growth.
Once students are willing to read and write independently, teachers can use a variety of instructional tasks to help them improve. In reading, many of these are complex comprehension tasks. In writing, many of these are complex revision and editing tasks. A dilemma that all teachers face is how much support to give in order to help students improve their reading comprehension and writing.
Gradual Release of Responsibility Model of Instruction
Many educators suggest that instruction should follow a gradual release of responsibility model (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983; Wilhelm, 2001). Where appropriate, teachers begin by assuming all the responsibility, modeling and thinking aloud about what they want students to do. This step can be most easily understood as “I do, and you watch.” Next, teachers invite students to join them in deciding how to perform the task. This step can be thought of as “I do, and you help.” In the third step, students assume much of the responsibility by working together in small groups, and the teacher becomes the coach, providing guidance and redirection as needed. This stage can be thought of as “You do it together, and I help.” During this stage, the teacher observes the interaction among the students and formatively assesses how individuals are progressing and what kind of further instruction they need. Finally, when the teacher sees that students understand the task, students complete a task on their own that shows they have moved from teacher dependence to independent application. This final stage is the point at which summative assessment eventually takes place and can be thought of as “You do, and I watch.”
Essentially, the gradual release of responsibility model requires lots of teacher and peer modeling and support for the first several lessons. During subsequent lessons, however, you remove some of that support until students are ready to work through the lesson framework on their own. At that point, you’ll be able to use a summative assessment to document whether each student has moved from teacher dependence to independence. This way of thinking about instruction is intuitively appealing because it describes the way many of us learned most of the complex routines we perform. How did you learn to bake? To play tennis? To master all the technology you need in a modern classroom? Chances are, you watched someone, helped, tried it out with some friends or your mentor nearby, and eventually could orchestrate this complex task on your own without even thinking about it.
Thus, within most of the lesson frameworks that make up this book, we employ the gradual release of responsibility model to help you teach your students how to perform the complex tasks of thinking deeply about texts as they read and conveying ideas clearly and convincingly as they write. The two lesson frameworks designed primarily to build fluency, Poetry Aloud and Plays Aloud, do not follow this model because they are intended primarily for developing oral reading skills.
Twenty Lesson Frameworks to Teach the Standards
Since 2010, when the standards first appeared, we have been working with teachers to develop, adapt, and tweak their lesson plans so they are working on multiple standards simultaneously. This book is a result of that collaboration. Each of the twenty chapters presents a lesson framework you can adapt to your students, curriculum, and grade level. Some of these include graphic organizers and anticipation guides you may already use. Others (like What’s Your Opinion?) will provide a fresh approach to meeting the standards. Our hope is that by using a variety of these lesson frameworks, you can provide multifaceted learning opportunities in which your students talk, listen, read, and write to become more competent and confident English language users. As your students develop these critical communication skills, they will also be learning the knowledge and strategies necessary to achieve the worthy objectives delineated in the CCSS ELA.
Because improving reading comprehension and writing are two umbrella goals of the CCSS ELA, many of the twenty lesson frameworks teach at least one of the Reading standards or one of the Writing standards. In turn, helping students achieve these two goals serves the third goal of enabling them to read and write independently. Of course, as promised, every lesson framework also teaches more than one standard.
Think of these lesson frameworks as recipes. We both like to cook, and we generally follow recipes when we do. We have a friend who is both an excellent and a creative cook—she can just look in her cupboard and refrigerator, see what’s there, and prepare something delicious that uses what she has. She doesn’t usually measure and claims she rarely makes the exact dish twice. Why don’t we cook like Sharon? Because if we did, the quality of our culinary life would noticeably decline! Whatever ability she has to create a new recipe on her feet and have it turn out well is a talent both of us lack. However, we are reasonably competent at choosing tasty and nutritious recipes, tweaking recipes after we have followed them carefully a time or two, and consistently getting good results with them from then on.
Certainly, there are teachers who can create successful lessons that neither they nor anyone else has seen before. We admire and sometimes envy them, but in our experience, they are very rare. Most good teachers we have known benefit from having effective lesson frameworks. They use their professional expertise and knowledge of their students and materials to plan, tweak, pace, and repeat lessons as necessary in order to maximize effectiveness. The lesson frameworks in this book can be seen as a set of recipes for teaching the CCSS ELA. As with culinary recipes, each framework exists because it does something the others do not. However, across all twenty, most of the standards are taught. In fact, the most important or challenging standards for reading comprehension and writing are taught in several lesson frameworks, because students benefit from repetition with variety.
Table I.4 outlines the twenty lesson frameworks (and chapters), as well as the college and career readiness anchor standards and grade-level standards that each addresses. (The grade-level standards are specifically for lesson frameworks focusing on Reading Standards for Literature and Reading Standards for Informational Text—RL and RI, respectively.)
How to Use This Book
Treat this book as you would a cookbook. Don’t feel like you should start at the beginning and read to the end. Each chapter can stand alone. Scan the brief introduction and feature box introducing the standards to each framework, and use table I.4 to find lesson frameworks that will teach something your students need right now.
Table I.4: Twenty Lesson Frameworks and the CCSS
Each chapter offers a sample lesson with tips to guide your instruction and ends with a section that breaks out the standards and explains how the lesson framework helps teach them to students. As noted, many lesson frameworks follow the phases of the gradual release of responsibility model: “I do, and you watch,” “I do, and you help,” and “You do it together, and I help.” These chapters conclude with a focus on the final phase—“You do, and I watch”—by looking at implementing the lesson framework across the year.
When you have located frameworks your students need, consider how successful they will be with them and how much they will enjoy participating in the lessons. To build their confidence (and yours!), begin with the lesson frameworks you think students will enjoy most. Mark the others they need, which might