Common Core for the Not-So-Common Learner, Grades K-5

English Language Arts Strategies

Maria G. Dove, Andrea M. Honigsfeld

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781483304274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

The strategies you need to teach common standards to diverse learners

Realistic and thorough, this teacher-friendly book shows how to help every student, including English Learners, students with disabilities, speakers of nonstandard English, and other struggling learners, meet the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts (ELA). This resource:

• Familiarizes readers with each of the Common Core's 32 anchor standards for ELA
• Outlines the specific skills students need to fulfill each standard
• Presents a wealth of flexible teaching strategies and tools that build those skills
• Includes guidance on professional collaboration and co-teaching

1 Introduction

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

—Maya Angelou

Over the past decade, linguistic diversity has increased dramatically across the United States, a concern for many school districts that struggle to develop policies, curricula, program models, and instruction for pupils who speak languages other than English. Not only is there great language diversity in large urban areas such as New York City and Los Angeles, but also pockets of both immigrant and first-generation, US–born students are arriving in classrooms in Des Moines, Iowa; Knoxville, Tennessee; St. Louis, Missouri; and Cheyenne, Wyoming. In addition, our heterogeneous classrooms are filled with students ranging from students with disabilities, struggling learners, average achievers, and gifted and talented pupils. Furthermore, some of our English learners (ELs) may have a combination of language and learning issues; some may be highly educated and literate in their native language, while others come from areas of the world where they have not had the opportunity for consistent, formal schooling.

Never before have school districts across the nation been so challenged by an increase in educational initiatives coupled with the lack of financial resources. Schools are being asked to do so much more with so much less. Enter into the mix the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), a substantial challenge for preparing schools to meet these rigorous benchmarks with their students, and an even greater one for those schools who have large populations of academically and linguistically diverse students.

The challenges of instruction for academically and linguistically diverse pupils are multifaceted and, therefore, require multistep solutions that involve all stakeholders—administrators, teachers, parents, students, and community members—in their development. In our view, efforts to achieve successful solutions require the following:

1. A shared vision and mission for all students reached through consensus along with the determination of measurable, achievable goals with an understanding of how to accomplish them

2. Curriculum mapping and alignment to ensure that instructional content and practices for academically and linguistically diverse pupils are consistent with the Standards and the learning outcomes for all students

3. Collaborative planning, instruction, and assessment among teams of teachers—content-area, ESL, special education, and literacy specialists, among others—to foster the use of teaching and learning strategies to make academic material comprehensible for all learners

4. Strategies to integrate language and content instruction to foster literacy and language development while acquiring content information

5. A direct focus on teaching academic language needed to access rigorous content and opportunities for students to apply newly learned language through various methods of discourse

6. The explicit teaching of literacy and language-learning strategies to develop students’ understanding of their own thinking and learning processes

All too often, only partial efforts are initiated to spearhead change, and the results are neither rewarding nor permanent. Fullan (2007) identified clarity as one of the variables of successful change; in short, “the more complex the reform the greater the problem of clarity” (p. 89). Teachers, left to their own devices, often are not clear about which strategies are appropriate for diverse student populations or how to implement them. Teacher interpretation or beliefs in the use of particular teaching and learning strategies play a significant role in effective change (Fullan, 2007). However, powerful instructional practices do not alone fall on the shoulders of teachers. Both school and district leaders need to take an active role in reform efforts to effect school improvement (Fullan, 2011) and the teaching and learning of academically and linguistically diverse youngsters.

Complex change requires that school administrators do their part to foster a shared understanding of the needs of diverse learners, to develop an inclusive curriculum, and to provide the time and necessary resources for collaborative teacher practices. In turn, to respond to the essential changes in instructional practices due to the CCSS, teachers are challenged to develop proactive methods and strategies to deal with the various levels of student need in their classes.

WHO ARE OUR NOT-SO-COMMON LEARNERS?

Walk inside most public school classrooms today and you will find students from different cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds with different assessed levels of cognitive and academic ability. Diversity is a part of our society at large; yet schools often segregate various populations of students with the best intentions—to offer more tailored educational instruction to those who have been deemed not ready or able to learn all or part of the grade-level curriculum within a mainstream classroom. More often than not, the individual needs of these youngsters are overlooked and diverse learners are placed in available programs such as reading remediation, ESL, and Special Education Resource Rooms. Although these programs may meet state and local mandated requirements of remediation and instruction, they often serve to fragment students’ schedules and contribute to the discontinuity of curricular instruction (Scanlan, Frattura, Schneider, & Capper, 2012) further impeding an already academically disadvantaged population. Furthermore, when diverse students are labeled and segregated from the mainstream classroom, their abilities, language, and culture are subject to “subtle forms of unintentional rejection” (Cummins, 2001, p. 2) often coupled with teachers’ low expectations for them.

Our intention in identifying the Not-So-Common Learner is not to fuel the marginalization and segregation of these youngsters. In our portrayal of these students, we hope that teachers and administrators will embrace the education of these pupils in every classroom and provide the appropriate resources to support the use of meaningful strategies and techniques, many of which are outlined in this volume, to assist their learning.

Common characteristics and labels associated with Not-So-Common Learner include the following:

• English Learners (ELs). These are students who are either foreign-born immigrants or US–born citizens of immigrant parents, speak a language other than English, and have yet to develop proficient skills (listening, speaking, reading, or writing) in English.

• Students with Interrupted or Limited Formal Education (SIFE). A subgroup of English learners, these school-age youngsters often have significant gaps in their education and, on the average, two years or less schooling than their same age peers.

• Students with Disabilities. Pupils with special learning needs due to physical and/or mental impairments who require special assistance to meet with academic success.

• Nonstandard-English-Speaking Children. Often racially or ethnically diverse, these US–born students speak a dialect of English in their communities and have yet to acquire standard American English skills.

• Children of Poverty. Youngsters under the age of eighteen whose families have incomes below the US poverty threshold; approximately sixteen million of America’s poor are children who are often malnourished, live in substandard housing, and have unequal access to education opportunities.

• Struggling Learners. Students who are not performing at grade level in the core subject matters.

THE STANDARDS MOVEMENT

A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) is frequently cited as the beginning of the educational standards movement in the United States. Yet here we are 30 years later, with a reaffirmation and commitment to a common set of academic standards that have been adopted to date by 45 states, and there still remains some debate about the value and effectiveness of learning standards. Inasmuch as multiple variables account for student success, it can be easily concluded that standards alone will not reform public education. However, a set of learning standards, grounded in research and aligned to essential criteria for college and career success, might be a powerful anchor to initiate school reform. According to Reeves (2000),

Although standards alone are clearly an insufficient instrument for the improvement of student achievement, the essence of standards—the clear articulation of what students should know and be able to do—forms the basis for the essential transformations necessary for school success. (p. 5)

However, standards cannot be viewed as a panacea to cure all educational ills or the silver bullet that will dispel the monster crisis facing US schools.

More than a decade has passed since higher academic standards, additional test accountability, and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements have been in place due to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. As AYP specifications have increased, the number of failing schools has increased as well. In 2007, 28 percent of schools failed to make AYP, and by 2011, that number had risen to 38 percent (McNeil, 2011).

Some educators suggest that policies and schools practices that rely on standards and accountability are not sufficient to increase academic success (Rowan, Correnti, Miller, & Camburn, 2009), and that despite administrative, faculty, and community commitment to planned change, reluctance to establish reforms is often fueled by cultural, traditional, political, and economic obstacles, as well as the means to efficiently support and promote educational improvements (Thomas, 2002).

Many researchers agree there is no straightforward way to institute reforms, or the Common Core Standards for that matter, without directly connecting educational policies with classroom practices (Fullan, 2007; Supovitz, 2006)—examining and changing school policies and classroom practices as well as fostering a culture of inclusion where all children feel they belong can improve student learning. In order to create inclusive schools, policymakers, administrators, and teachers need to become aware of how to make educational reforms a reality, which is most often due to the investment of training (Elmore, 2008) and capacity building through collaborative practices (Honigsfeld & Dove, 2010) regarding essential skills for teachers and school-level administrators to understand and meet the academic challenges of diverse learners.

COMMON CORE ADVANCES

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects—the Standards—offer a number of advances or shifts in instruction for the teaching of English language arts. First and foremost, they were developed to ensure that all students are college and career ready by the end of twelfth grade. With this in mind, they contain sets of anchor standards in reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language that are consistent across all grade levels and promote an integrated model of literacy.

The Standards identify students’ literacy development as a shared responsibility. All teachers will be expected to foster students’ reading and writing skills across the disciplines. Another advancement incorporated into the Standards is the promotion of student research and communication skills. To be college and career ready, students must be able to gather, critically examine, and report information as well as analyze and synthesize a range of available text and nontext materials through the integrated use of media and technology.

In Grades K–5, the CCSS prescribe an increased emphasis on the reading of nonfiction text. The Standards call for a 50–50 balance between the reading of literary and informational texts. Reading expository texts is viewed as an essential skill to be college and career ready in as much as the required reading in post-high school training and college programs depends upon students being able to comprehend informational texts proficiently.

The Standards require students to read grade-appropriate texts to increase their exposure to what is often called “the staircase of complexity” (www.engageNY.org), text that becomes increasingly more challenging throughout each grade. To develop these reading skills, teachers must shift their practices from delivering information through direct instruction to helping students obtain information through thoughtful reading, learning how to gather information from ever-increasing, complex text, and participating in meaningful interactions and sustained collaborations. In order to meet this challenge, teachers will need to engage students i...