Register now for the second Young Adult Literature and the Common Core Symposium

May 23
Eldorado High School

$30

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Nine Things You Should Know About the Common Core Standards

1.  The "exemplars" in the Common Core Standards for English language arts are not a required book list.  They are simply there to show you the level of "text complexity" the standards recommend.  Districts, schools, and teachers are free to use whatever books they think are most appropriate for helping their students meet the standards. 

2.  The proportion of "informational text" recommended by the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts (see page 5) is for the entire school day, not just for language arts classes.  Given that students read informational texts in social studies, science, and elsewhere, any increases in informational text in language arts may not need to be dramatic.

3.  Because the model of "text complexity" in the Standards is based not just on the text itself, but on "Reader and Task" considerations, only the classroom teacher, who knows his or her students and what the class is going to be doing with the text, can make a final determination of how "complex" a text is. 

4.  Most of the standards pertaining to grammar say that students should be able to "demonstrate command of" or "correctly use" particular forms.  That suggests that the tests won't be asking students to identify a past participle or a gerund--they'll be assessing how well students can use those forms in their writing.  That's a significant distinction.

5.  For high school, grades 9-10 and grades 11-12 are combined. Therefore, departments, schools, and districts will have to decide how the standards at those grade levels are divided and how the standards progress from grade to grade. 

6.  The Common Core Writing Standards state that students will be expected to assess the "credibility and accuracy" of various sources of information, including online sources.  That means students will benefit from being involved in the process of selecting texts, rather than just reading whatever the teacher gives them (especially in the case of informational texts).

7.  It is especially important to understand that the Common Core Standards are not intended to be a curriculum. Their purpose is to provide year-end goals rather than specific ideas for today's lesson.  Consider this Reading Standard for grade six students:  "Determine a theme or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments."  One could create a single lesson in which this standard is "covered," but a better way to think about it is to ask, "How can a get my students from where they are now to the point where they can do what the standard requires?"

Some of the other Common Core Standards are more clearly year-end goals.  The following grade 9-10 Writing Standard is a good example: "Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience."

The Common Core Standards are also more integrated and overlapping than the current New Mexico Standards.  A single writing assignment might address a large number of the Common Core Standards at once.

The shift away from viewing standards as a curriculum may be especially difficult for administrators who are accustomed to asking teachers which standards they are "covering" or "meeting" today.  The accurate answer may well be "We're working toward these eight." 

8.  There is no substitute for reading the standards yourself.  Only by reading them from cover-to-cover can you know how what they recommend is similar to or different from your current practices. Not only that, but only by reading the standards can you know if something someone claims is in the standards is actually there.  Already we've heard of cases where administrators, professional developers, and policy-makers have said, “The standards say teachers must to do X,” when in fact they don’t say that at all.  Don’t let someone else interpret the standards for you.    

9. In addition to reading the CCSS, the other way you can take to take charge of your own teaching is to explore the materials on the PARCC website.   PARCC (the Partnership for Assessment for Readiness for College and Careers) is the federally-funded testing consortium that will be creating and administering the tests that will be taken by New Mexico students (in some other states, the Smarter Balanced consortium will be creating the tests).  One thing we’ve learned during the past several years is that ultimately, academic standards mean what the test-makers say they mean.  As with the standards themselves, don’t take what others say for granted.  Find out for yourself. 

News

March 6, 2013
This week PARCC released additional information about the Common Core Standards tests. Included in the "PARCC Administration and Guidance" document is a description of what the tests will consist of, as well as how long they'll take.  You can find it here. 

December 5, 2012
Confusion around the role of "informational text" (what we used to call nonfiction) is causing much discussion among teachers of English language arts.  Here's summary of the current debate, from The Washington Post:

Common Core sparks war over words

As states across the country implement broad changes in curriculum from kindergarten through high school, English teachers worry that they will have to replace the dog-eared novels they love with historical documents and nonfiction texts.

The Common Core State Standards in English, which have been adopted in 46 states and the District, call for public schools to ramp up nonfiction so that by 12th grade students will be reading mostly “informational text” instead of fictional literature. But as teachers excise poetry and classic works of fiction from their classrooms, those who designed the guidelines say it appears that educators have misunderstood them.

Read the rest here.

October 16, 2012
Over the past few weeks there has been a lively debate about the teaching of writing in The Atlantic Monthly.  Here’s the article by Peg Tyre that started it (about a turn-around in writing instruction at one school), as well as Cindy O’Donnell-Allen’s response.  And if that’s not enough, Josh Boldt asks “Should We Teach the Five-Paragraph Essay?” at Education Week.  Read all three and come to your own conclusions.

September 10, 2012
We're often told that education was better in the good old days.  Jamie Volmer effectively refutes the idea that there were ever any good old days in his essay "Notesia" (which deserves to be shared with parents, politicians, and anyone else you can think of). 

June 7, 2012
The Library of Congress is to announce Thursday that the next poet laureate is Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of three collections and a professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Ms. Trethewey, 46, was born in Gulfport, Miss., and is the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993.
Read more here, or see one of her poems here. 

May 29, 2012
The trailer for the upcoming Great Gatsby movie, directed by Baz Luhrmann, was released this week.  You can watch it here. (It's set to open on Christmas day.)
 
May 22, 2012
The U.S. Department of Education has unveiled a new grant competition focusing on districts that have ideas about how to personalize education.  You can read about it here.  (Even if you're not interested in the grant competition, read the second half of the article.  Are such changes smart or are they doomed to fail?)

May 2, 2012
The New Mexico PED announced yesterday that they are accepting applications for the New Mexico Teacher Evaluation Advisory Council.  There's more information here.

April 27, 2012
The has been lots of talk among writing teachers this week about a new study that purports to show that some software programs can evaluate student essays as well as a human grader. However, Les Perelman, director of Writing Across the Curriculum at MIT, remains skeptical.  You can read about it here.

April 18, 2012
PBS NewsHour host Ray Suarez will be in New Mexico this evening to host an education town hall focusing on the high school graduation rate.  Over 200 New Mexico teachers will attend.  The town hall will air on a special edition of New Mexico In Focus on April 27. 

More here.

April 9, 2012
As part of the American Library Association's annual State of America's Libraries Report, their Office for Intellectual Freedom has released their list of the ten most frequently challenged books and authors in 2011:

* ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
* The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
* The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
* My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
* The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
* Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
* Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
* What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
* Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
* To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
More here. 

Speaking of To Kill a Mockingbird, if you missed the recent excellent PBS American Masters documentary, "Harper Lee: Hey Boo," you can watch it here. 

March 28, 2012
The great American poet Adrienne Rich died today at the age of 82.  You can read about her at poets.org. 

In addition to being a poet, Rich was also a gifted essayist. The brief but powerful "Claiming an Education" is among her best. 

March 14, 2012
The Public Education Department has launched a new Common Core web site.  There's a great deal of information on it, including links to resources and information about the timeline for implementation.  You can find it here.

NMCTE is a professional organization for New Mexico teachers of language arts at all grade levels, K-College, and an affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English.

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From the President

Welcome to the online home of the New Mexico Council of Teachers of English.  If you teach language arts in New Mexico, you’ve come to the right place.  Although our members teach different grade levels, at different kinds of schools, and in different communities, we have in common a respect for our students and a belief in their potential, an appreciation of how valuable our colleagues are to us, and a commitment to thoughtful teaching. 

Since we’re language arts teachers, we love reading and writing, but we also recognize that language arts includes more than print literacy, especially in the 21st century.  If you’re new to NMCTE, please look around the site and see what we have to offer.  And if you’re a member, welcome back.

Sincerely yours,

Lisa Harris, President
Moriarty High School