An elementary perspective on the Common Core

"I can't imagine what the graduate of 2025 is going to need to do after 13 years of formal education, but I do know that every one of those kindergarteners who come into our schools this year needs to know how to evaluate information, how to work with others, how to find answers, how to express their own beliefs, and how to develop their own wisdom. That is the core of the Common Core, as it has always been of education and learning." (Killeen, 2012)

I really like the way that Erlene Bishop Killeen focuses on the key aspects of teaching and learning in her column, Primary Voices, in the most recent edition of Teacher Librarian. Killeen asks us to think about how we can work with our elementary students to help them deepen their thinking, engage in research, and express their own ideas.

This fall, I have done many of the things Killeen suggested. Here is her checklist - let's see how my activities have matched up:

1. Read the national document. Common Core State Standards Initiative, http://www.corestandards.org/; Yes. Our staff began our year by investigating the CCSS at our fall retreat.
2. Worked with a group of teachers on understanding what the standards mean, examining same test questions, text samples, and grade level competencies. No. Our staff is focusing mainly on the math standards this year. 
3. Compared CCSS with current curriculum and projects that I am involved with, lead, or would like to be included in as a co-teacher. Informally. I am trying to do advanced work observing our existing (newly adopted) literacy program and noticing where it aligns. I believe that the literacy coaches will take the district lead with this, but I think the library can play an important leadership role.
4. Reviewed the Library Media Center book collection related to some recommended lists of exemplar texts, fiction titles, and non-fiction topics. This is my next item to do. An important goal for the winter.
5. Expanded my annual book order to include needed topics, titles, and texts. My book order will focus on nonfiction. I am in the process of analyzing the books I have been collecting on my wish list and seeing the areas of nonfiction that need expanding.
6. Developed a section in our district website for links to CCSS! Yes!

Killeen, E. (2012). Ready to Learn?. Teacher Librarian, 39(6), 54. Retrieved from http://www.teacherlibrarian.com/

Thinking about reading and writing - shifts under the Common Core

I've been very interested in learning more about the Common Core and how it will affect teaching and learning. As I learn, I keep thinking about how school librarians can be effective teaching partners as educators try to shift their instructional strategies to meet these new standards.

Tonight I listened to a webinar presented by Robert Rosenfeld and Liz Jameyson called "An Introduction to Reading and Writing, Common Core Style!" presented through WestEd's Schools Moving Up program.

I found this slide very interesting, because it helps me summarize how I am trying to shift my teaching in day to day sharing of resources with teachers and children. For more of the slides and presentations, I highly recommend watching the whole webinar.

As an elementary school librarian, I am consciously bringing nonfiction reading to the forefront, sharing engaging nonfiction that students might be interested in reading for their pleasure reading. I feel we need to both teach specific strategies for reading nonfiction AND encourage pleasure reading of nonfiction for our elementary students. They need more experience reading a wide range of nonfiction before they are thrust into the "read to learn" environment of middle school history/science academic (textbook) reading.

I also strongly believe that elementary school librarians have a vital role in helping students discover reading materials that help them advance up this "staircase of complexity." We need to give students wide range to choose materials that are interesting to them, but we also need to help them discover materials that are just that little bit harder for themselves. It's a tricky balance - you want to encourage kids to read lots of books that are at their comfort level, but you also want to challenge them to grow and develop. Should a library be "leveled"? Absolutely not, in my opinion. But I do think we have a role in supporting our teachers and students in discovering books at different levels.

Finally, I have paid special attention to prompting text-based discussion during library time. As I read picture books, I point out ways children are noticing specific details in the text or illustrations to draw conclusions, make inferences and make connections. Kids love sharing about their own lives and this is important. But I think we need to give them practice in making specific text-based answers to prepare them for the more analytical reading and writing they will be asked to do in middle school.

Rosenfeld and Jameyson specifically focus on Shift 4 and Shift 5, focusing on this challenge to have students focus on using evidence to draw conclusions from their reading and develop their writing. They apply this technique to start diving into the details of the standards.

Source:
Rosenfeld, R. and Jameyson, L. (2012). PDF of presentation, "An Introduction to Reading and Writing, Common Core Style!" Retrieved from http://www.schoolsmovingup.net/cs/smu/view/rs/28428

SLJ Summit 2012 - resources to follow

This past weekend the School Library Journal held its 5th annual SLJ Summit. This year's theme was Advocacy and the e-volution: Creating stronger schools through stronger libraries. I followed the conversation through Twitter posts and was very happy that SLJ has already started posting resources to share with the broader world.

I am particularly interested in how librarians can be at the forefront of the Common Core conversation. My own elementary school is very interested in how the CCSS will be adopted locally, particularly in math. Our district recently adopted the TCRWP curriculum for reading at the elementary schools, and so there is a general feeling that the CCSS does not add much new. But I think that it will ask elementary students to continue focusing specifically on the text as they draw conclusions about their reading. There will certainly be continued focus on increasing our students' nonfiction reading at the elementary level, preparing them for moving into strong nonfiction reading at the upper levels.

The SLJ Summit had a special focus on Saturday, the "summit within the summit" on librarians at the center of the Common Core. On the resource page, SLJ includes an interesting handout from Dr. Mary Ann Capiello on Nonfiction at the Fore of the Common Core. Dr. Capiello is a professor at the Graduate School of Education, Lesley University and she is one of the authors of the Classroom Bookshelf Blog. She is also part of the blogging team at The Uncommon Core, another blog I am adding to my blog reader. This resource is an excellent snapshot of ways we can get the word out to teachers and our learning communities about using high-quality nonfiction trade books to support Common Core State Standards.

Two other resources I want to mark to follow up at a further point in time are:

SLJ's Webinar series on the Common Core

SLJ's resource page on the Common Core

Toontastic: a pilot study examining creative play with an iPad app

My kids have loved playing with Toontastic, an iPad app that kids use to create their own animated stories. We only played with it in the early days of the app, and it's grown by leaps and bounds. I was very interested to read a new pilot study by Launchpad Learning, the company behind Toontastic. Andy Russell, one of the co-founders of Launchpad, and Alicia Chang, a Cognitive and Developmental Psychologist working with Launchpad Toys to research how kids are learning through cartoon creation, wrote about their study on the Joan Gantz Cooney Center Blog.

It's interesting to see the nonprofit Cooney Research Center is writing about a company's research, but I think it shows how seriously Launchpad Learning takes its focus on educational creative play in the digital age. Launchpad Learning developed a two-pronged study, both examining over two million cartoon created on Toontastic by over 600,000 kids, and examining semi-structured play sessions in a fourth grade classroom.

In the semi-structured play session, the fourth graders were divided into small groups of two or three students and asked to create a story about peer relationships over the course of one week. The study resulted in several observations, notably:

• Students used recurring characters more as the week progressed, suggesting that they developed a sense of cohesive story arcs and character development over time.
• As the students spent more time on their stories, they explored more emotional highs and lows, adding more depth and color to their stories.
• Students used more descriptive language and distinct character voices as time progressed.

All of these results reflect what I've observed with this app. It is not a quick and dirty app, but one that works best if kids have more time to develop their stories. If kids just have 30 or 40 minutes to work with it, they'll certainly have fun manipulating the puppets and recording their voices. But it's hard work making a cohesive story! It takes time, experimenting, and creative thinking.

Russell and Chang conclude by connecting the key components they've studied to the standards set out in the Common Core State Standards Initiative. I completely agree with that. I'd love to figure out a way to have our students be able to use this app. But a huge barrier in my experience is having the time for students to plan their stories, experiment with the app, and then craft their final products. Time is precious in a classroom, and there is never enough of it.

Russell, A. and Chang, A. (October 4, 2012). "Pilot study: Creative play with Toontastic." The Joan Gantz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, Blog. Retrieved from http://joanganzcooneycenter.org/Cooney-Center-Blog-272.html

For more information, see:

http://launchpadtoys.com/blog/2012/09/creative-learning-with-toontastic-at-home-and-in-the-classroom/
http://launchpadtoys.com/content/launchpad-leaders/

Common Core State Standards - video introduction series

The message is out in California: get ready for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). They're coming our way. At our staff development meeting this August, our literacy coach (the amazing Jamie Carlson) shared with us a video series from EngageNY introducing the CCSS and it was a very helpful.

New York Education Commissioner John King, David Coleman (one of the authors and vocal proponents of the CCSS) and Kate Gerson (a Senior Fellow with the Regents Research Fund) explain the key aspects of the Common Core standards in depth. Here's the introduction to the Language Arts series:

THE COMMON CORE IN LITERACY: Overview from EngageNY on Vimeo.

I am particularly interested in how our school library programs can support teachers as they engage in shifting their curriculum to meet these new standards and our administrators as they think about steering the whole school in these shifts. Here's a summary of the six main shifts that Coleman outlines:

1. Reading more informational texts, of increasing complexity K-5
2. Building subject-specific knowledge through reading and writing 6-12
3. Staircase of complexity - increasing the level of text difficulty grade-to-grade
4. Focus on text-based answers - carefully reading the text and drawing on it to support answers
5. Writing from sources - increasing informational and persuasive writing
6. Academic vocabulary - not necessarily domain-specific terms, but academic words like subsequent or hypothesis

Coleman sums them up as "reading like a detective, writing like an investigative reporter." I found his description of the balance and transitions between narrative and informational writing very interesting. He did not dismiss the importance of narrative writing for young children - it's crucial that they write about their own experiences. This teaches them to be able to write clearly, develop a strong voice, and understand sequencing of events. But we need to create opportunities for our elementary students to write more informational texts that are persuasive and based on their investigations.

Our library plays a key role in supporting teachers as they help create curriculum to address these new shifts. We are in a position to recommend and find compelling, accessible nonfiction text. One of my biggest concerns is how we help our students move from "browsing" nonfiction to reading longer, more complex narrative or descriptive nonfiction. How can we support our teachers as they explicitly focus on the text features of nonfiction? But more than that, how can we support students wanting to find engaging nonfiction.

I strongly believe that we need to encourage students to choose their own nonfiction to read. We will get more "buy in" if they are able to choose nonfiction on topics they've already developed an interest in. By reading in a comfort area, I hope that students will be able to develop more stamina for reading longer, more complex nonfiction.