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.
