State+Guidance+Documents

• Conventions of Standard English • Knowledge of Language  • Vocabulary Acquisition and Use
 * Language Curriculum Guidance **

 We must take a hybrid approach to matters of conventions, knowledge of language, and vocabulary. In many respects conventions, knowledge of language, and vocabulary extend across reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Many of the conventions-related standards are as appropriate to formal spoken English as they are to formal written English. Language choice is a matter of craft for both writers and speakers. New words and phrases are acquired not only through reading and being read to but also through direct vocabulary instruction and through purposeful classroom discussions around rich content.

 The inclusion of Language standards in their own strand should not be taken as an indication that skills related to conventions, knowledge of language, and vocabulary are unimportant to reading, writing, speaking, and listening; indeed, they are inseparable from such contexts.

 Appendix A provides detailed information on teaching Language on pp. 28-35. Click the following link to access Appendix A.

 http://dc.doe.in.gov/Standards/AcademicStandards/PrintLibrary/commonCoreEnglish/AppendixAGrade6.pdf

 Learn more about:
 * Teaching and Learning the Conventions of Standard English
 * Progressive Language Skills in the Standards
 * Acquiring Vocabulary
 * Three Tiers of Words
 * Conventions of Standard English
 * Knowledge of Language
 *  Vocabulary Acquisition and Use

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> We must take a hybrid approach to matters of conventions, knowledge of language, and vocabulary. In many respects conventions, knowledge of language, and vocabulary extend across reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Many of the conventions-related standards are as appropriate to formal spoken English as they are to formal written English. Language choice is a matter of craft for both writers and speakers. New words and phrases are acquired not only through reading and being read to but also through direct vocabulary instruction and through purposeful classroom discussions around rich content.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> The inclusion of Language standards in their own strand should not be taken as an indication that skills related to conventions, knowledge of language, and vocabulary are unimportant to reading, writing, speaking, and listening; indeed, they are inseparable from such contexts.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">By the end of the year, students read and comprehend in the grades 6-8 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. Follow this link to Appendix A from the Common Core State Standards for more information regarding text complexity: <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Broad, wide reading is the heart of the language arts. How do we get students to engage in close, purposeful reading almost daily and then use that reading as the basis for writing and discussion? Students enjoy current issues and events, especially when they are framed in controversy. Students will talk and write with enthusiasm when asked to read and exchange opinions about controversial issues and people. It is recommended that one day a week be set aside to read current articles and opinion pieces. As students' interests in the issues of their own time increase, they will be far more interested in issues, people and literature of the past. Current events animate student interest in literature, politics, and history. When teaching literature, it can be juxtaposed with a close reading of two opposing articles the same topic or event. Assembling such reading materials--with good questions--should be part of building the school's curriculum.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Reading Informational Text Curriculum Guidance **
 * <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Key Ideas and Details
 * <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Craft and Structure
 * <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
 * <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">[]

//<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">The Week //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> is a weekly news and opinion magazine with articles which are excellent for lessons in how to closely read and annotate. //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">The Week //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> includes a feature called "Controversy of the Week." It starts with a summary and is then followed by about six brief summaries of opinion pieces from across the political spectrum--all in about half a page. This is highly readable and interesting, perfect for teaching students to make inferences, draw their own conclusions, argue, problem solve, and reconcile conflicting opinions (Conley, 2005). //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Weekly Reader, TIME for Kids, KidBiz, //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> and //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Junior Scholastic //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> contain rich, readable news stories. Articles such as these also make great exemplars to use when teaching writing, too. Editorials from //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Newsweek //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> and //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">The Wall Street Journal //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> are also great resources. Articles such as these also make great exemplars to use when teaching writing, too.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">• Key Ideas and Details <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> • Craft and Structure <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> • Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Reading Literature Curriculum Guidance **

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Literature, art, and poetry enlarge us and refine our values and sensibilities. Through them, we are able to uncover and refine "our central convictions about politics, love, money, the good life" (Edmundson, 2004). The ideas and characters enlarge us and allow us to acquire the knowledge essential to critical thinking. Students need extended daily opportunities to read, much of it for pleasure. When we continue to teach reading skills, we prevent the rapid acquisition of knowledge and vocabulary. Students aren’t truly mature readers until they can read and recognize about 50,000 words. This many words can’t be learned by having students sound out, syllabicate, or learn each one. The only way they can be learned is for us to ensure that they read enormous amounts of reading material. As language arts curriculum is designed, time to read must be guarded. It is through reading that vocabulary, general knowledge, and thinking skills are developed. Instead of learning through skills activities, students should be reading short and long literary and nonfiction works. During much of this reading, students should be underlining and annotating their texts and discussing their readings as well as writing short essays about them where they argue, infer, and draw their own conclusions about fictional and real-life characters. This is how we prepare students for college, careers, and citizenship, as well as the standards tested on high stakes tests, not through worksheets and short passages which pull out isolated skills from the learning targets below.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> In selecting literary texts and determining the kinds of tasks students should be asked to complete while reading these texts, curriculum developers should start with recommendations from the exemplar texts found in Appendix B of the Common Core State Standards: http://dc.doe.in.gov/Standards/AcademicStandards/PrintLibrary/commonCoreEnglish/AppendixB_Exemplar_Texts_Grades6-8.pdf

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Curriculum developers could also consult the Indiana Reading List: http://dc.doe.in.gov/Standards/AcademicStandards/PrintLibrary/docs-ReadingLists/2003-ReadingList-06-08.pdf

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Building knowledge systematically in English language arts is like giving students various pieces of a puzzle in each grade that, over time, will form one big picture. At a curricular or instructional level, texts—within and across grade levels—need to be selected around topics or themes that systematically develop the knowledge base of students. Within a grade level, there should be an adequate number of titles on a single topic that would allow students to study that topic for a sustained period. The knowledge students have learned about particular topics in previous grade levels should then be expanded and developed in subsequent grade levels to ensure an increasingly deeper understanding of these topics.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> English language arts courses should be integrated with rich, age-appropriate content knowledge and vocabulary from history/social studies, science, and the arts. The following recommendations and guiding principles may inform the selection of meaningful topics and coherent texts:

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> 1. Topics should be selected based on their importance and relevance to key literary, historical, scientific, or artistic concepts for a particular grade level or course. Educators from all disciplines should carefully examine their academic standards in order to find meaningful interdisciplinary relationships. Once these areas are identified, teachers may select a few key topics over the course of the year that should be consistently and purposefully integrated into multiple content-area courses. The key is to ensure that the selected topics are worth the valuable concentration of instructional time.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> 2. English language arts educators and their content-area peers should collaborate on the selection of texts. Curriculum developers should take into account the knowledge and skills students are intended to acquire and develop in all content areas to ensure that interdisciplinary connections are made deliberately and effectively. In addition, English language arts educators and their content-area peers should collaborate, communicating clearly about the ways class learning objectives may be complementary. At times, English language arts teachers should select literary or informational texts that reinforce, extend, challenge, or fictionalize historical contexts or scientific ideas. In other instances, science and social studies educators may assist the English language arts teacher by providing informational texts that inform the reader’s appreciation and interpretation of a piece of literature. By designing instruction in this manner, students will be exposed to important ideas and concepts over a more sustained period of time while refining their understanding through the unique lenses of various disciplines.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> 3. Selected texts should systematically deepen student knowledge on a selected topic. Efforts to select coherent texts on a given topic must also attend to the ways in which the selections deepen student knowledge. Designing curriculum to support interdisciplinary connections is dramatically hindered if texts are redundant, dull, or only tangentially related. Students are not likely to remain engaged in the prolonged study of an idea or concept if they encounter repetitive instruction from one classroom to the next. Coordination between educators is vital to the sustained implementation of interdisciplinary instruction.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> 4. Texts may, and in some cases should, offer contradictory points of view, providing students opportunities to craft meaningful arguments and explanations. The selection of meaningful topics and coherent texts does not insist that uniform points of view are presented to students. In fact, students benefit from considering how opinions and ideas have evolved over time or continue to be sources of contention. Skillful educators will enable students to evaluate the quality and logic of statements and supporting details in informational texts as well as the selection and omission of details and actions in literary pieces.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Discussion is a critical companion to reading, and the Common Core State Standards for Speaking and Listening, which have replaced Indiana’s Academic Standards for Speaking and Listening, are designed specifically to provide plenty of opportunities for students to share their personal experiences and values, their opinions and interpretations, and support their arguments and provide evidence for their assertions. Students should have multiple opportunities per week to participate in discussions about their readings. To ensure that these discussions are engaging and successful, teacher teams should develop, refine, and share good questions and prompts and teach students to participate in discussions using criteria (posted in the room) such as: <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Students should learn to avoid using overgeneralizations and to distinguish between strong and weak support for their arguments and to disagree respectfully (Conley, 2005, p. 82). To learn these critical life and college-preparation skills, frequent discussion must be a part of literary and textual studies. Reading and discussion then form the basis for success on writing assignments.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Speaking and Listening Curriculum Guidance **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Comprehension and Collaboration
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Always cite the text when making a claim/argument.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">When commenting on or disagreeing with another’s conclusions, argument, or solution, briefly restate what they said, don’t interrupt, and be civil and respectful.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Be concise and stay on point.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Avoid distracting verbal tics (such as overuse of “like” and “you know”).

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> A formal writing assignment should result in one or more formal presentations. These might include the use of PowerPoint or other appropriate technology, but don’t let presentation devolve into an exercise in the features of software. Presentations should be based on the students’ formally written papers, ideally those which are based on research and which make an argument or solve a problem. These are ideal preparation for presentations, promoting both knowledge and confidence. Deep knowledge of a subject and a well-formulated argument are the best means to overcome stage fright.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Accountability for quality and learning are strengthened when presentations are made to an authentic audience. All students should be taking notes and evaluating presentations as a way to improve their own speaking and presenting skills. Students could also record and post their presentations on a class website or post them publicly for an authentic audience.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Curriculum developers should establish clear, quantitative agreements about the minimum number of writing assignments all students will complete in each grade. Teams must establish criteria for the number of pages for the agreed-upon papers, including both short and long research papers. There should be exemplar papers for each agreed-upon written assignment. Exemplar papers are exceedingly useful as both teaching and learning tools, as teachers guide students through them before and during the writing process. Appendix C of the Common Core State Standards provides Sample Student Writing Tasks and several student exemplars annotated to illustrate the scoring criteria of the Common Core. These exemplars serve as a starting point in establishing grade level criteria. Click the link below to access Appendix C: http://dc.doe.in.gov/Standards/AcademicStandards/PrintLibrary/commonCoreEnglish/AppendixC_Student_Writing_Grades6-8.pdf
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Writing Curriculum Guidance **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Text Types and Purposes
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Production and Distribution of Writing
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Research to Build and Present Knowledge

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> A common scoring guide with adaptations for specific writing assignments should be used across the school. Students should be asked to write several of their papers in at least two drafts, as the second draft is where they learn the craft of writing. Much of the writing they do should be argumentative writing. The following recommendations should be considered by curriculum developers. Students should write one formal, expository/argumentative paper per month, about nine per year, written in at least two drafts, based on close reading, analysis, and discussion of one or more fiction or nonfiction books, poems, or articles read that month; some of these should also should be short research papers with a requirement for a certain number of outside sources. Students should also write one long research paper.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> These monthly papers should be one-and-a-half to three handwritten pages in length in the early grades; they should be three to five typewritten pages in middle and high school. These monthly papers could constitute the primary common assessment a team could use to monitor and improve performance in language arts. An essay is the best possible assessment of students’ abilities to both read and write effectively. At the end of the month, the team could compare percentages of students who succeeded on common assignments with respect to the criteria in their common rubric (Schmoker, 2011, pp. 118-119).

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> There are highly effective ways to dramatically increase the amount of writing and writing instruction called for in the Common Core State Standards while reducing the amount of time teachers spend grading student papers. When we teach students to use rubric-based checklists before they hand in their work, have them do conscientious peer editing, and when we use exemplars and carefully teach the elements of our rubrics, we ensure higher-quality writing, which is immeasurably easier to score. Teachers don’t have to collect most of the writing students do—only some of it, after our teaching ensures that most of the work will be of quality. Much of the “grading” teachers do can be done by walking around the room and scanning or checking off good-faith efforts to use evidence to support arguments and interpretations or from writing conferences. The simple fact is, students don’t learn about the craft of writing primarily from our comments on their papers; the great majority of what they learn comes from carefully crafted lessons built around exemplars and rubrics (which clarify good writing and criteria which should be posted in the classroom). For more information and practical tips on reducing the paper load, go to www.mikeschmoker.com. You’ll find a document there called “Write More, Grade Less.”

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Recommended resource: Graff and Birkenstein’s //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">“They Say, I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Persuasive Writing //<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;"> (2007). This book contains a set of simple templates for setting up argumentative papers and discussions, with exceedingly helpful frames for the essential moves so critical to these activities: how to introduce an argument, how to integrate and explain quotations and supporting materials, how to disagree with an author, and how to both agree and disagree with qualifications.