Gearing up for the Key ELA Shifts

What’s the Significance of Gearing up for the Key ELA Instructional Shifts in the College and Career Readiness Standards?

By Diana McIntyre, Nevada State Leadership Professional Development Coordinator

By now, instructional leaders are aware of the shift in what students, teachers and educational facilities are expected to accomplish in the near future with the implementation of the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS).  The road ahead will dictate the necessitation for acquiring challenging curriculum, providing quality teacher professional development, and refining instructional practices to integrate more rigorous student expectations, higher-level questioning and opportunities to learn.

The American College Testing (ACT), ACT INC., produced a study in 2006 that pointed out that a student’s greatest predictor of success and careers is the ability to read complex text.  The most important implication of the study involves what students could read, in terms of its complexity, proved at least as important as what they could do with what they read.

Shift 1-Text Complexity: Regular practice with complex text and its academic language.

All students must be exposed to complex text and its academic language regardless of their reading ability.  This can be achieved through close reading of a passage, read aloud, shared reading, independent reading, multiple exposures to text, providing sequences of text, reading for a variety of purposes, as well as reading both fiction and informational text.

Significantly, student instructional support is now provided while students read, from context, rather than the previous way of providing pre-teaching before reading.  Students learn to become autonomous text users with regular practice with complex text.  There’s something to be said for the vocabulary acquisition that transpires from within exposure to the text as opposed to simply pre-teaching vocabulary that leads into a text.

Effective methods to scaffold complex text include reading the text aloud, providing opportunities for rereading text through small collaborative group discussion, chunking portions of text to support comprehension, use of graphic organizers and visuals.  Some students will require timely one-on-one teacher interventions depending on their individual needs.  As well, differentiating instruction offers students a choice with which to demonstrate their knowledge.

Shift 2-Evidence:  Reading, writing, speaking (and listening) grounded in evidence from text, both literary and informational.

Text based activities require teachers to engage students with focused, open ended, higher-order questions that require learners to return to text to carefully gather evidence for the answer.  The text or passage is now the main focus of a close read.  Moreover, when text dependent questions are used to drive a close read, numerous standards are activated.  Previous practices involved asking surface comprehension questions that students answered individually, mostly from memory or opinion.      

With the CCRS priority of getting students to learn to read complex text independently and proficiently, together, teachers and learners dissect the distinctive complexity of a passage through questioning and deep discussion.  For successful collaborative discussion, students must understand expectations that include employing accountable talk-language stems. 

Accountable talk guides students in the entire discussion, supports students in connecting their ideas to the preceding speaker’s ideas, helps students elaborate and build on ideas and each other’s contributions, produces talk that remains related to text, avoids multiple conversations, is focused on issues rather than participants, assists students in summarizing and paraphrasing each other’s arguments, and ensures students understand one another.        

Each time students return to text to discuss and gather evidence, they are automatically rereading which inevitably increases their fluency.                                                   

                                                     

The College and Career Readiness Standards writing asks the learner to produce effective argumentative and informative writing, is routine and goes hand-in-hand with reading.  The CCRS expect a learner to draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research compared to previous forms of writing that mostly asked students to write opinion pieces.  Previous methods were not preparing students for the demands of college and career because students were not making the connection in how to transfer their understanding of opinion writing to other forms of writing. 

Shift 3-Knowledge:  Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction.

The vast majority of required reading for college and career is non-fiction.  The CCRS support learners in becoming acquainted with reading different types of informational text across the curriculum:  history, social studies, science, technical subjects, and the arts.  Generally, informational text is more challenging for students to read than narrative text, and Adult Basic Education (ABE) students should be reading much more informational text than fiction in their classrooms. 

Literacy blocks that promote fictional stories and squeeze out content based reading are a thing of the past.  The CCRS ensure integrated subjects to furnish students with skills needed to acquire information from content-specific nonfiction texts.  Nonfiction texts become a steadfast vehicle for absorbing and comprehending content as students construct knowledge through the close reading of a variety of text materials.     

Without doubt, the CCRS English Language Arts (ELA) key shifts are today’s priority in the ABE classroom in preparing students to become college and career ready.