Teaching the Common Core Speaking and Listening Standards

Strategies and Digital Tools

Kristen Swanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317801344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Discover how to integrate the Common Core speaking and listening standards into any grade level or content area with the specific instructional frameworks in this user-friendly guide. Learn how to give your students the skills and experiences they need to become successful communicators in the 21st Century!

The frameworks are enhanced with

• a thorough, easy-to-understand explanation of the Common Core State Standards
• authentic classroom examples from multiple grade levels and subjects
• rubrics and assessment options

Speaking and listening in the digital age requires proficient use of digital tools—this must-have resource gives you practical ideas and directions to integrate powerful technology tools seamlessly into your instruction.

1
Introduction

Speaking and listening. We do it every day for countless reasons. Routine interactions, brief exchanges, or thoughtful diatribes propel us through everything from the most mundane tasks to critical life events. Therefore, it’s not surprising that speaking and listening have earned a prominent place in our K–12 standard documents, including the widely endorsed Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

The CCSS represent a national model for teaching and learning. Forty-five states and three territories have formally adopted the CCSS. Given the propensity in this country to disagree on all things surrounding public education, the popularity of these standards is amazing. After educators have spent years focusing on countless content standards, the CCSS offer a breath of fresh air. Less content is required, more emphasis is placed on process, and contrived texts are banished.

However, the speaking and listening standards endorsed by the CCSS are often neglected in K–12 schools. Many students I’ve informally interviewed report having to give a speech only “a few times.” Coincidentally, most report being “really nervous” and “hating it.” Further, observation in lots of different classrooms has led me to note that many classrooms still have more teacher talk than student talk. Teachers must revise instructional practices by adding more occasions for students to become empathetic listeners and engaging speakers.

Erik Palmer, in a recent video post about the importance of speaking well, stated, “People are realizing, when you look very closely, you’ll see that you’ve accepted pretty mediocre speaking. And you will definitely realize that no one really teaches speaking” (Palmer, 2012). By this, Palmer means that we simply assess students on their speaking skills without giving them many opportunities to practice, observe models, or synthesize generalities.

Specifically, the Speaking and Listening Anchor Standards offer an enormous opportunity to rethink and revise current practices. They seek to deepen students’ abilities to become competent, confident people. The CCSS demand explicit teaching, modeling, and practice of speaking and listening. They demand excellence. Further, the Speaking and Listening Anchor Standards explicitly state that speaking and listening should be practiced not only in language courses but in every discipline. Regardless of what you teach, you are only a few thoughtful tweaks away from emphasizing these standards without sacrificing necessary content. In fact, speaking and listening about engaging content is one of the best ways to facilitate deep, conceptual understanding. The best classrooms have significant amounts of student talk, student discussion, and student presentation. When all this is interwoven with critical reading and critical writing, it’s a recipe for success.

John Hattie’s research reminds teachers that feedback is one of the most powerful instructional strategies they can use in their classrooms. Emphasizing the speaking and listening standards allows teachers to leverage conversation to increase the amount of feedback provided in the classroom by teachers and peers (Hattie, 2009).

However, this book is about more than just speaking and listening in the traditional sense. It’s about speaking and listening in the digital age, complete with video chats and robust networks. Clearly, today’s graduates are expected to collaborate with national and international partners for both work and play. Kids need practice speaking and listening, not just face-to-face, but in digital environments.

Consider my week at work:

Monday: Videoconference with my colleague two states away

Tuesday: In-person presentation with audio, video, and a backchannel

Wednesday: Web conference with my boss to review new instructional materials

Thursday: Google+ Hangout over lunch with my sister (who lives in Greece and runs a study-abroad program)

Friday: In-person book club about instructional strategies with some teachers and principals

The integration of digital tools, conversation, and video has changed the way we behave in both social and work-related situations. Teachers need to prepare students to be competent speakers and listeners in a digital age, and the CCSS can help.

The Goal of This Text: Offering Creative Instructional Design Frameworks

This book begins with general overview information on the CCSS and the intention of a well-designed instructional framework in an effort to provide you with context and background. However, the intention of this book is to provide you with much more than context. Chapters 4 through 9 provide you with flexible instructional frameworks and digital tools aligned to every standard in the Common Core Speaking and Listening Standards. When you combine these frameworks with powerful reading and writing content from your subject area, you will see greater student engagement, comprehension, and understanding. You will also be actively preparing your students for the demands of the modern, networked world. Each design is presented with options for students at different developmental levels throughout the K–12 continuum. However, the designs recorded in this text are a starting point, not an ending point. Use your creativity to adapt and customize each learning experience for your particular group of students. There is no “wrong way” to use the resources provided in each chapter. You don’t even have to read the chapters in order. Get creative and be innovative!

Various teacher perspectives will be provided at the end of each chapter. These perspectives offer practical tips and ideas based on the teachers’ experiences with the frameworks. These perspectives intend to help you visualize how the frameworks could be adapted to your specific situation.

A Final Note About the Role of Transfer

To use the words of Grant Wiggins, “educational transfer is the point of education” (Wiggins, 2012). Transfer occurs when students can use information and skills you’ve taught them independently in novel situations. All the final assessments listed in each instructional design framework will provide students with opportunities to transfer their learning to a new situation. Although these tasks may seem different from the assessment tasks that fill most textbooks, they were designed specifically to foster high levels of rigor, engagement, and achievement. Scaffolding your lessons to promote transfer helps honor the ultimate goal of education.

If students are not transferring their learning, they are either acquiring knowledge or making meaning of it. Acquisition is the learning stage where students practice rote procedures, isolated facts, or learning recipes. Meaning making is where students generalize, synthesize, and generate insight. Both of these stages complement the role of transfer (Bransford, Brown, Cocking, Donovan, & Pellegrino, 2000).

Look Back and Step Forward

By the end of this introductory chapter you should feel confident with the following concepts:

• The CCSS emphasize the need for students to speak and listen in all subject areas.
• Today’s digital world means that “speaking and listening” will be an integration of face-to-face and digital formats that are both synchronous (at the same time) and asynchronous (at different times).
• This book will provide you with flexible instructional design frameworks that can be used to digitally infuse the Common Core Speaking and Listening Standards in any content area.

A Question to Consider as You Reflect

How does speaking and listening help students become competent adults?

With that, you’re off! You will begin your journey by exploring the general shifts within the CCSS and the competencies implied within the standards. From there, you will consider some basic principles about curriculum to help you get the most out of the instructional design frameworks in this book. Then, enjoy each instructional design framework, and be sure to share your experiences, adaptations, and successes on my blog at www.kristenswanson.org.

2
About the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts

Although the focus of this text is the Common Core Standards for Speaking and Listening, a general overview of the broader Common Core Standards for English Language Arts will serve as a helpful frame of reference for you. In short, this chapter will give you the deep background knowledge required to understand the new complexities of the Common Core Speaking and Listening Standards and the instructional frameworks that follow in Chapters 4 through 10.

Common Core State Standards: What’s New?

The creation of the CCSS was a state-led effort that included input from teachers, administrators, and experts. The effort was coordinated by the National Governors Association for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The standards were designed based upon the strongest components of existing state standards as well as cutting-edge research. They are also informed by the practices of other top-performing countries to intentionally reflect the needs of the existing global economy (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010).

Honestly, this is an incredibly exciting time in education. After years of diluting the standards at the state level in an effort to comply with the regulations of No Child Left Behind, the stakes are finally rising again. To use the words of Marzano, “All kids deserve a guaranteed and viable curriculum” (2003). The CCSS seek to provide just that.

Though you might be worried that the CCSS will rob you of creativity and joy in the classroom, that is not the intention of the document. The designers of the CCSS directly state that the standards are not a curriculum. Conversely, the standards are a framework to guide teachers and schools as they construct local curricula. In their book Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) compare standards and curriculum to the relationship between a building code and a blueprint in construction. All architectural designs must adhere to building codes, but the plans to build the structure are incredibly flexible. Similarly, all teachers are accountable to the CCSS, but there are innumerable ways to teach while still adhering to the standards. In short, the craft of teaching, adjusting, and designing is still intact. Phew!

Also, the authors of the CCSS have shown a strong movement away from basic acquisition. Instead of focusing on the facts and discrete qualities of literature (Really, how many syllables does a haiku have?), the CCSS focus on analysis and the derivation of meaning. For example, instead of requiring students to identify different types of figurative language (as is common in most state standard documents), the CCSS require students to “Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.” In many cases, the demands of the CCSS hearken back to deep comprehension or expression (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010).

In many ways, this is a huge relief as well as a call to action. Because the new standards are concise yet complex, they make it more difficult to dice learning into itty-bitty pieces. In his book Making Learning Whole, David Perkins referred to this syndrome as “elementitus.” He states, “So troubling is this trend of approaching things through elements without the whole game in sight or a minimal presence that I like to name it as a disease: elementitus” (Perkins, 2010). Instead, a competent performance that integrates many different standards at once must be demanded; it is mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 About the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts
• 3 Bringing Curriculum to Life: Implementing Instructional Frameworks
• 4 Courageous Conversations
• 5 Bias Detectives
• 6 Do-It-Yourself TED Talks
• 7 Commanding the Boardroom
• 8 Going Viral
• 9 Language as Currency
• 10 Other Great Tech Tools and Instructional Strategies That Didn’t Make the Frameworks
• 11 What’s Next? Realistic Ways to Get Started
• References