Editors’ note: Sarah Tantillo is the author of The Literacy Cookbook and writes frequently at her blog and elsewhere about practical strategies to weave Common Core ELA standards into instruction. She also maintains a fee-based membership website offering many ELA resources she has developed. As our readers follow links in her articles here, you may eventually encounter supporting resources that are found in the members-only area of her website. We think what Sarah shares here for free is valuable and we hope you find it helpful. If you want to take full advantage of her large resource collection, you can become a TLC member for $25 a year (provided you buy her book, reviewed here.)

by Sarah Tantillo

No matter what level or subject, teachers working with the Common Core need to know the standards for more than just the grade they teach.

Here’s why: the Common Core lays out standards across a “trajectory” of learning. Each year’s knowledge and skills should build on the year before and prepare students for the year to come. As a teacher, you need to know how prepared your students are supposed to be when they enter your classroom, as well as what your responsibilities will be during the time they’ll spend with you.

Moreover, by closely examining a standard’s entire trajectory, you can determine where your students actually are in terms of their development. Here’s what one teacher said to me when we looked at the grade-by-grade path of Reading for Informational Text (RIT) Standard #1 (see below):

“I can tell you where each of my students are on this chart. They’re all in seventh grade, but looking at the descriptions, I can see that three of my students are on the fifth-grade level, about five are on the sixth-grade level, and the rest are where they should be. And now I need to think about how I’m going to get them all up to speed, not just on the seventh-grade level but to also be ready for eighth grade.”

To get a sense of what it means to analyze a standard’s trajectory, let’s consider the trajectory of RIT Standard #1.

A CCSS trajectory PD exercise

I have modeled how to analyze these standards with the first few grades (underlining key word differences and jotting notes in the right-hand column) and left the rest blank for teachers to use as a PD exercise.  You can find a FREE digital version of this chart, called “RIT Standard 1 Trajectory Analysis Chart,” at my Literacy Cookbook standards page (or you can download it here).

This analysis process works best if participants pair up to discuss their interpretations, then share out with the whole group.  Partnering generates more ideas (and useful questions) than solo independent work.

If you go to the Common Core State Standards website, you’ll find some useful PDF files (and don’t forget to read the Appendices!). But if you’re actually writing curriculum, you’ll need tools that are even more useful, which is why I’ve created a K-12 ELA Common Core Standards Tracking Spreadsheet, available to members in the TLC Download Zone. To see just how useful this kind of tracking tool can be, check out this free sample of the 4th-grade ELA Common Core Standards Tracking Spreadsheet.

In her next article for MiddleWeb, Sarah will write about using Socratic Seminars to help students develop effective habits of discussion, explain their ideas, and support them with evidence. Also see her MW article on Teaching Argument vs Evidence.

Sarah Tantillo is a literacy consultant who taught high school English and Humanities in both suburban and urban public schools for fourteen years, including seven years at the high-performing North Star Academy Charter School of Newark. She’s the author of The Literacy Cookbook.

by Michael Fisher

In a recent MiddleWeb post, I blogged about digital tools that can help teachers align their instruction to the ELA Common Core standards. Now I’d like to do the same for Math.

As before, teachers want to make sure that the task is always the focus of lessons and units, not the tools. But we also know that with the right digital tools to help us, we can further engage our students around challenging content and deepen their learning experience.

In my new book with Janet Hale, Upgrade Your Curriculum, this is a persistent theme: Tools support the learning — they aren’t the purpose of the learning. Janet and I also advocate for

• upgrading curriculum one unit or even one lesson at a time;

• being considerate of the resources available;

• building on the new Common Core standards,

• collaborating with your colleagues.

We also concentrate heavily on our Transformation Matrix, which can help sustain a balance between learning and engagement. In a nutshell, the matrix encourages teachers to visualize a transformed curriculum where much of the teaching and learning is student-centered and thus student-owned.

Digital tools that can help (or not)

The digital tools that I’m sharing here could be used on several levels in the math classroom. For one, they represent a moment-in-time assessment of student ownership. Because all of the tools are visual representations of learning, we can see a fairly clear picture of what a student can do with the knowledge/content.

These tools also offer an opportunity for engaging in specific literacy strategies around writing for new audiences and integrating domain-specific vocabulary into the literacy experience. While we may be specifically aligning to the CC Math Standards, we also need to integrate aspects of the ELA standards that help students comprehend our core content.

This integration helps students see relationships between what they are learning in multiple classes and helps contextualize learning moments, creating mental glue that holds on to that learning. This is a shift away from the traditional teaching and learning of isolated facts or processes — a much-needed shift that’s called for in the underlying Common Core principles.

A word of caution: These digital tools can also mask the learning that has occurred if we don’t stay on our teaching toes. Teachers have to be savvy about the ways in which the tools are being used. If students are just creating visualizations on the fly without (1) support for understanding the content well enough to dramatize it; (2) writing a script to go along with it, and (3) soliciting feedback from peers and their teacher before publishing it — then these tools aren’t being used in the most constructive way.

I’d like to think that any of these tools would be great as a formative assessment of learning and a student-created bank of resources for re-visiting the learning at a later time. Think of your own “Khan” style academy on your school’s website, where students share their learning with their classmates, the community, perhaps even the world!

Thanks up front to the teachers and students that shared their examples, particularly Ryan Graham, an 8th grade math teacher in Kannapolis, North Carolina. Please keep in mind that these are ALL middle school students, and all of the examples exemplify that age group. One in particular has a moment that other middle school students will find hilarious, and I suspect their teachers might laugh as well.

xTraNormal – Math movies

xTraNormal is a free web tool based on the premise that if you can type, you can make a movie. Students write out their scripts, use the web controls to manipulate characters and settings, and create a movie that talks, using the text (“script”) that they type in.

Both of the samples represented here are from 8th grade students working on Math Equations. In the videos, the characters suggest a particular way to solve an equation by isolating the variable. The students talk through it without showing the equation visually. While it seems that this is a very quick explanation for the amount of time invested in creating it, I’d like to remind you that this had to be articulated textually and the dialogue typed in before the video was made. That’s where the brain sweat appeared!

I’d also note that the student who added a humorous moment to his video did two important things. For one, he demonstrated a level of confidence and comfort with the material. Nothing says that learning happened louder than knowing the content so well you can laugh about it. The other thing this student did was create a mental “set point” for any other kid who watches it, even if the adults might roll their eyes a little. Kids will remember the funny moment as well as the content that was associated with it. Brain-based learning 101.

Math Equations
by: 16washid

Superzeroz Matho
by: chaos47

Prezi: Innovative slideshows

Prezi is a 21st Century presentation tool — something like a slideshow in the “Cloud.” It combines text and graphics in an innovative and easy-to-use interface that navigates through a presentation in a nonlinear and engaging way.

With xTraNormal, the literacy is in the background. We see the effect but not the cause. With Prezi, the literacy angle is front and center. Students write informatively to convey information about how to solve a multi-step equation. (Common Core writing standard #2) We get to see the learning that occurred and the explanation of the learning.

What better way to cement learning in a student’s brain than to have them teach it to someone? Prezi also allows embedding of YouTube videos (if that site is not blocked in your schools) which gives the students another opportunity, with a different type of media, to show what they know. Personally, I like multimedia approaches to learning and assessment.

Animoto: Quick and simple

Animoto is technically a slideshow type movie application. It uses still images, short videos, and text to convey a message in a “movie trailer” format that is visually spectacular. Students are using this tool in innovative ways to share the content they are learning as well as leveraging knowledge of other technology tools to make it work for them.

Both examples here are very quick and may potentially need to be paused so that the viewer has time to absorb what’s being shared. Additionally, both examples involved students who created images with an outside program, one being PowerPoint, saved as image files, and uploaded to the Animoto system.

The Halloween Slope Project

Untitled Project – Tabb Middle

Animoto contains embedded images and opportunities to add text, but it’s not sophisticated enough to share all of the math formulas and explanations that the students wanted to share. This could potentially be a limitation, but the students found a way around it. Because they created their images in a different software program, the students had the opportunity to both textually and numerically represent their learning. This means that there is a dual layer of articulation here and pretty solid evidence that students are owning what is going on.

Showing and sharing what we know

All of these tools allow students to both SHOW what they know and SHARE what they know. We change attention toward and engagement with the task, and the task’s associated elements, when we upgrade the potential audience. We also start to build in different types of motivation that lead to a better balance of engagement with and focus on learning.

Janet Hale

iPad Math Apps: In the interest of adding additional tools to your toolboxes, I’d also like to share a Pinterest page that I created. It features Math Apps for digital devices, some of which are awesome for fluency exercises and others for the creation of fun instructional videos and other forms of engagement with math content that go above and beyond what students might traditionally experience.

I’ll be exploring more of these ideas with posts at my ASCD Edge blog as we lead up to the launch of our book in early March. If any readers would like to join Janet Hale and me in Chicago at the ASCD conference, we’ll be exploring the Common Core math and ELA standards, and what it means to Upgrade Your Curriculum in person. You can also use the Twitter Hashtag #UpgradeYC to interact online right now!

Michael Fisher is a former middle grades teacher who is now a full-time author, educational consultant, and instructional coach. He works with schools and districts around the country, helping to sustain curriculum upgrades and integrate instructional technology. He specializes in the integration of research-based instructional strategies to facilitate transformations of curriculum design, instructional practice, and professional collaboration, currently around 21st Century Fluencies, Common Core integration, and all that modern learning entails. Michael is a member of the Curriculum 21 Faculty and is an active blogger who writes often for the Curriculum 21 Ning (curriculum21.ning.com) and ASCD’s Edge Social Network (http://edge.ascd.org). His web site is The Digigogy Collaborative (digigogy.com) and he can be found on Twitter (@fisher1000).

Sarah Tantillo is the author of THE LITERACY COOKBOOK: A Practical Guide to Effective Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening Instruction (Jossey-Bass, 2013). This MiddleWeb post is drawn from Sarah’s blog, The Literacy Cookbook, where she shares a wealth of ideas about helping students meet the ELA Common Core Standards. (Read a review here at MiddleWeb.)

by Sarah Tantillo

One of the things students struggle with the most — and it’s relevant to every grade and subject — is distinguishing between argument and evidence. This problem manifests itself in both reading and writing.

In this article, I want to briefly highlight these two key Common Core ELA-Literacy elements and point you to more in-depth discussion and resources at my Literacy Cookbook blog.

The problem

In reading, students often cannot pick topic sentences or thesis arguments out of a lineup; and when writing, they tend to construct paragraphs and essays that lack arguments. I have no doubt that many, many students have become turned off to writing after spending countless hours drafting an essay, only to be told that they would have to completely rewrite it because it lacked a thesis. (One way to prevent this disillusionment is to check students’ draft introductions before they go any further: it only takes a minute and can save hours of agony.)

Textbooks have contributed to this problem because they often fail to model good writing. Typically, they lack arguments; instead, they offer strings of facts that are occasionally indented. So we need to provide better models. But more broadly, we need to be strategic about teaching students how to distinguish between argument and evidence and how to build effective arguments with evidence.

The six steps

So, let’s consider the specific skills that students must master as a six-step continuum. Click on the “More” link at the end of each step to visit my blog and discover more ideas and information about teaching students these skills.

Step 1 – Ensure that when given a list of statements, students can distinguish the arguments from examples of evidence. It’s important to clarify that in this context, the word “argument” does not mean people yelling or throwing plates but instead refers to a claim, opinion, or debatable statement that requires proof/evidence for support. More.

Step 2 – When given a list of statements, students must identify arguments and their relevant evidence. In this step, students don’t just separate the arguments from evidence; they must match the evidence to the proper arguments. It’s a vital incremental step because students often struggle to support arguments with RELEVANT evidence. More.

Step 3 – Given arguments, students must support them with their own relevant evidence and explanation. Although students should now have some sense of what we mean by “relevant” evidence, they may not know what “good explanation” looks like or why it’s even needed. We need to take time to explain why EXPLANATION is necessary. More.

Step 4 – Given questions, students must answer them with arguments and relevant evidence and explanation.  In other words, students need to generate their OWN arguments. The questions should begin with either “Why” or “How” in order to set up argumentative as opposed to factual responses. More.

Step 5 – Students must generate questions that warrant research and debate. In other words, students need to learn how to ask their own research- and debate-worthy questions. As always, we’ll want to MODEL what we expect. The Common Core Standards, being focused on TEXTS and the ability to analyze and explain them, are not interested in asking, “How would you feel if…?” More.

Step 6 – Students must research and build arguments supported with evidence and explanation to answer the questions they have generated. This is a dramatic step further down the road and will require a lot more scaffolding. What does it mean to research? And once students FIND resources, they have to know how to pull useful, relevant information out of them. More. 

In college, professors expect students to be able to start with #4 during class discussions. Number 5 is used in seminar discussions (and online discussions, etc.), and number 6 is also known as writing a paper. The sooner we in K-12 begin giving students opportunities to practice these college readiness skills, the better, starting with 1,2,3.

Sarah Tantillo is a literacy consultant who taught high school English and Humanities in both suburban and urban public schools for fourteen years, including seven years at the high-performing North Star Academy Charter School of Newark.

by Michael Fisher

In the next few weeks, Janet Hale and I will have our newest book published by ASCD, Upgrade Your Curriculum: Practical Ways to Transform Units and Engage Students. We will very soon be launching a new ASCD Edge Group and Discussion Board around the book to discuss improvements in instructional practice and design. We also want to hear the awesome ideas of all the educators who would like to engage in a dynamic multi-media conversation!

In the book, we discuss different lenses and considerations through which you can view your current curriculum for a particular upgrade. This blog post is honing in on two upgrades: technology integration and Common Core alignment.

The Common Core alignment relates to a pair of anchor standards for reading: #1 that asks students to read closely, and #10, that asks that students read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts. For the technology lens, I’ve been playing with a few new web tools and wanted to share some ideas for task-focused instruction.

Additionally, when I refer to “upgrades,” I’m speaking of a two-pronged approach, looking both for learning AND engagement. Effective instruction comes from a balance of these two considerations and while I know they can be somewhat subjective, I am, in general, looking for more student-centered opportunities than teacher-led “to-do” lists.

It’s always worth reminding ourselves that it’s the task that matters, not the tool. However, I think it’s important to build a repertoire of tools so that you and your students can choose the right one for the task.

So, in the context of adding tools to your toolboxes and doing so with specific Common Core ideas, I’d like to share three new tools that I’ve come across recently that can help with curriculum upgrades.

Smore

Smore allows a user to create flyers with embedded color schemes, fonts, and templates. I used it initially to create handouts for a workshop I was doing and quickly figured out that I needed to prioritize my information so that the message I was sending would fit on one printed page. I created a Smore flyer for this blog post around Text Complexity, specifically considering Reader and Task, from the Common Core document. Here’s the example:

I liked Smore for several reasons and see several opportunities for specific tasks/upgrades using this tool. For one, if students are visualizing their learning using something like this, it promotes eye-catching design. Brain based instructional strategies work because they are different, creating “mental glue” to help the brain retain information. Visuals stick better than text and using a tool like Smore will help students own their learning.

Also, if students are writing about text, specifically after “close reading,” this might be a good tool to use for emphasizing important comprehension points or prioritizing the information they may potentially share. In fact, how awesome would it be for students, perhaps in pairs, to prioritize different pieces of the puzzle, with some focusing on text structure, some on vocabulary, some on connections to other texts, some on text based conclusions, etc. This could help establish new audiences, purposes, and tasks as students make their own choices and ultimately help teach each other! (With sideline coaching from the teacher, rather than direct instruction.)

Piktochart

Like Smore, Piktochart is a visualization tool. However, its specific purpose is to help the user create an infographic. Infographics are visualizations of information or data — you’ve probably seen some…they’ve gone viral in the last several years. There’s a really cool Flickr Group that collects educational infographics that you should check out! Piktochart lets your students create these awesome visualizations without first acquiring high-end graphic design skills.

I think infographics are where it’s at right now in education. It’s vital for students to be able to think critically about data and draw conclusions. Infographics also offer an opportunity for us to explore integrating subjects such as math into other content areas. The Piktochart I created is about Close Reading and Text Dependent Questions, both of which are represented in the instructional shifts related to the Common Core in ELA. The one I’ve created here is text heavy, as I was just trying out the tool, but it excites me to think what kids could do with this. I found the interface and dashboard easy to use and navigate, and I went from complete novice to finished product in about 45 minutes. Next time, it won’t take half so long. Ease of use is high up on my list when it comes to web tools, and this one is as easy as they come! Here’s the example I created:

Yapp

The last tool I want to add to your toolboxes today is Yapp. I’ve been using Yapp for several months now, and it became the basis for one of the technology upgrades that Janet and I advocate in our new book. Yapp is a tool that lets you easily create your own App for a digital device. Here’s a short video tour:

I’ve used it to create Apps for events such as conferences, to collect information for a local library, and most recently, to create an App that lets me share all of my resources for Text Complexity based on a LiveBinder I created back in November. You can access the App by navigating, through your internet browser, to the following address on your digital device:

http://my.yapp.us/KML9N2

Note that you may need to install YappBox onto your device if you have any trouble with the link itself.

In the book, Janet and I talk about Learning and Engagement around students creating apps. There are certainly a number of ways to go about this, but Yapp is a good starting point. Right now in classrooms, teachers are clamoring to find apps for the various digital devices they use. This translates, a lot of times, into teacher-selected, tool-based learning scenarios rather than student-centered, task-based scenarios. Now that teachers have had some “play time” in the first decade of the 21st Century, we’re ready to shift the focus to thinking, and the ownership of the learning back to the students. If students are CREATING, and making authentic choices about what to include in an app and how to share and amplify it, then they are working at the highest levels of Bloom’s and absolutely owning the learning.

Put your toolbox to work

So, to recap, adding tools to your toolbox is valuable and necessary, even though the goal is to work toward task-based opportunities. Learning and engagement are important and must be considered together for effective learning. Also, there are several lenses through which we can explore potential upgrades to the work we are currently doing.

I’ll be exploring more of these lenses with posts at my ASCD Edge blog as we lead up to the launch of the book in early March. If any readers would like to join Janet and me in Chicago at the ASCD conference, we’ll be exploring what it means to Upgrade Your Curriculum in person. You can also use the Twitter Hashtag #UpgradeYC to interact online right now!

Michael Fisher is a former middle grades teacher who is now a full-time author, educational consultant, and instructional coach. He works with schools and districts around the country, helping to sustain curriculum upgrades and integrate instructional technology. He specializes in the integration of research-based instructional strategies to facilitate transformations of curriculum design, instructional practice, and professional collaboration, currently around 21st Century Fluencies, Common Core integration, and all that modern learning entails. Michael is a member of the Curriculum 21 Faculty and is an active blogger who writes often for the Curriculum 21 Ning (curriculum21.ning.com) and ASCD’s Edge Social Network (http://edge.ascd.org). His web site is The Digigogy Collaborative (digigogy.com) and he can be found on Twitter (@fisher1000).