Standards to Instruction: Foundational Skills Resource

January 21, 2015January 21, 2015Leave a comment

Always looking for a way to make the standards “real” for classroom teachers, I came across a resource which is helpful in de-coding the foundational reading skills. From the Center on Instruction, the BUILDING THE FOUNDATION: A Suggested Progression of Sub-skills to Achieve the Reading Standards: Foundational Skills in the Common Core State Standards document essentially gives teachers a roadmap to implement the CCSS Foundational Skills.

Listed under each standard is a set of sub-skills along with…wait for it…instructional examples! And that, my friends, is the mothership of tackling these standards from a busy teachers’ perspective.

Enjoy.

Text Analysis Lesson {Teaching Channel}

January 13, 2015January 13, 2015Leave a comment

The Teaching Channel contains a wealth of common core aligned lessons with video of teachers implementation, often a missing piece of content in professional development.

The following lesson, for example, focuses on analyzing literature (ELA.RL.11-12.1, ELA.RL.11-12.4) through questions, discussion, and symbols in a 12th grade English class. All Teaching Channel lessons are supported with the resources necessary to conduct the lesson in a classroom.

Aligning Assessments to Common Core Standards {Resources}

January 9, 2015Leave a comment

Smarter Balanced Sample Items & Performance Tasks

Engage NY Sample Questions (Gr. 3-8)

PARCC Sample Items

Keystone – Literature Sample Items

Additional Resources:

PARCC Model Frameworks

EQuIP- ELArubric

The Nuts & Bolts of Text Dependent Analysis

January 8, 2015September 8, 20153 Comments

Reading Anchor Standard 1 of the Common Core State Standards states:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.1
Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

With an increased focus in the CCSS (PA Core Standards here in PA) on students’ ability to tackle complex text comes “text dependent analysis.” A new reporting category on the PSSA (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment) in Spring 2015 for grades 4-8, TDA represents a shift in reading, speaking and writing with questioning moving well beyond basic recall and even further than “find evidence from the text” which we’ve been training students to do for some time. Text dependent questions ask students to think about and analyze the evidence they find, orienting it in the larger text.

My thoughts…good writers are typically good readers. The process of examining a well written (remember not all text is worthy of an analysis) literature and non-fiction to understand how an author crafts an argument, creates a particular mood or tone, conveys a message through syntax or carefully crafted vocabulary to convey meaning seems like a worthy endeavor.

To that end I’ve included below “Writing TDA Questions with with Examples [sample question starters] from M. Burke from North Penn School District as well as other resources I’ve found helpful in crating TDA trainings. I also recommend reading Tackling the Misconceptions of Text Dependent Questions by Ryan McCarty and exploring TDA resources on Achieve the Core.

Enjoy!