Pathways to the Common Core, Chaps. 6-11

Wow, what an amazing book.  This book has revolutionized the way that I am currently thinking about my reading, writing, and ELA instruction.  As I was reading the chapters about Common Core's writing standards and expectations, I was thinking about my students and their experience as writers.  The third graders at my school have recently finished their writing assessments, and all of the teachers had to grade the informational, persuasive, and narrative writing.  I was struck by the poor the quality of most students' writing, especially when I consider the expectations of Common Core.  One of our school goals is to improve writing because of the extremely low scores on the fifth grade writing assessment, but we have received no training or information about how to improve our writing instruction.  I wish that everyone would read this book at my school and realize that we need to spend some serious time in collaboration with one another, in order for teachers to adopt best practices.  One pattern that I noticed in every chapter was the call for teachers to come together to collaborate, look at student work, and determine learning progressions together.  Although this suggestion seems very simple, this is simply not happening at most schools.  One of the studies that the authors cited stated that "encouraging teachers within a school to observe each other, to plan together, and to adopt shared teaching methods can dramatically improve teaching and learning in a school.  Good practices in one classroom can become schoolwide shared practices" (p. 183-184).  I cannot say enough about how collaboration has been the main factor in my improvement as a teacher over the past 2 years.  Although my team is more cohesive than most, I still wish that we could plan more collaboratively so that we could more easily share best practices.

It was intriguing to learn more about the speaking and listening standards in chapter 10, because I have honestly never "devoured" these standards.  I tend to plan lessons and activities around speaking and listening a lot naturally, so I have never felt the need to take a deep look at these standards.  However, this section opened up my eyes to all of the diverse ways that our students should be practicing speaking and listening.  I have realized that I have not utilized technology in all of the ways that I could have, and when I do, I am certain that the technology detracts from the focus on reading, writing, speaking, and listening.  It was important to be reminded that "all of this is not technology for technology's sake" (p. 167).  That sounds obvious but I wonder how many times I have utilized technology for a meaningful purpose.

Lastly, I was challenged and inspired by the section about the language standards.  I have always struggled teaching ELA, and I have not yet figured out a way to do it that is contextualized, meaningful, and not painful.  Because I have an ESOL teacher in my classroom during this time that needs to be explicitly be teaching ELA standards, my ELA block has mirrored more of a traditional grammar approach (ugh).  I love how the authors gave me confidence that the criticisms that I have (about the way in which my school organizes ELA) are backed up by research.  "The CCSS use verbs such as use, form, and produce rather than explain or define when describing what students should know and be able to do with language" (p. 172-173).  I have been trying to emphasize this whenever planning with my ESOL or other third grade teachers.  However, we are still emphasizing that students know the difference between nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, etc.  It is pretty miserable and the kids hate it.  One of the main reasons that my school organizes their ELA block like that is because the CRCT is not aligned to the CC and does expect students to be able to identify, sort, and categorize the different parts of speech.  Lately I have noticed that my students don't have many "word attack" (that's what I call it) strategies, and that it would be much more helpful to teach those strategies rather than teaching the difference between abstract and concrete nouns.  "This emphasis on skills over memorization is also clear through the CCSS authors' direction toward 'flexible use' of strategies...students should be able to determine the meaning of unknown or multiple-meaning words and phrases by 'choosing flexibly from a range of strategies'" (p. 173).  I think that THIS is what my ELA instruction should be all about.

Overall, this book challenged, convicted, and inspired me in so many ways.  I am thinking about the ways in which I can present what I have learned to my team and possibly my principal.  I feel so passionate about teachers implementing good practice (that has research supporting it), and I think that the ideas from this book can benefit the students in my school.  This book helped me reflect on all of the ways in which my school (including myself) is approaching literacy in the wrong way.  It has been discouraging to be teaching at a school that has some of the lowest scores in our county despite all of the dedicated, passionate teachers in my school.  The teachers are doing everything they know how to do in the best way possible, but the problem is that we have not been trained or equipped to implement good practices (that actually help students) in our classroom.  This book is a step in the right direction, and I will continue to think about what the next steps should be for me and for the rest of the teachers at my school.