the first reading standard for grades 9–10 and 11–12 and the four different domains, for example, all on one page. This allows you to use the book to see at a glance what Reading Standard 1 looks like in grades 9–10 across different text types and subject areas, but also, equally important, shows you what that same informational text standard looks like across grade levels from 9–12 to be sure your curriculum honors the challenge to increase complexity as students move from grade to grade. If you are in a non–Common Core state, the indexes cross-referencing your state standards will point you to the relevant pages.
Parallel translation/what students do. Each standard opens to a two-page spread that has the original Common Core standards on the left (all gathered on that one page for each standard) and a parallel translation of each standard mirrored on the right in more accessible language (referred to on these pages as the “Gist”) so you can concentrate on how to teach the standards instead of how to understand them, for while they are admirably concise in their original form, they are, nonetheless, remarkably dense texts once you start trying to grasp exactly what they say. These Gist pages align themselves with the original Common Core, so you can move between the two without turning a page as you think about what they mean and how to teach them. Also, beneath each translation of a standard appears a brief but carefully developed list of questions you can teach your students to ask as a way for them to meet that standard. These are meant to be very practical questions students can ask themselves or which you, in the course of teaching them, can pose. Note also that the more advanced requirements added to the 11–12 grade standards are bolded for emphasis, quick reference, and ease of use. Again, if you are in a non–Common Core state, the indexes cross-referencing your state standards will direct you to the pages directly relevant to you.
Instructional techniques/what the teacher does. These methods and activities, based on current literacy research, offer teachers across subject areas specific, if concise, suggestions for how to teach that specific standard, the activities specifically linked to the demands of the standard.
Academic vocabulary: key words and phrases. Each standard comes with a unique glossary since words used in more than one standard have a unique meaning in each. Any word or phrase that seemed a source of possible confusion is defined in some detail.
Planning notes/teaching notes. Each standard offers two pages designed to give you a place to transition your curriculum over to your new standards or to make notes about what to teach and how. These pages can serve as a place to capture ideas for yourself or for grade-level teams, departments, schools, and district curriculum offices or for students, teachers, and their professors in a methods class at the university. They can also be copied for additional planning.
How to Use This Book
As each school or department has its own culture, I am reluctant to say what you should do or how you should use Your Literacy Standards Companion. Still, a few ideas suggest themselves, which you should adapt, adopt, or avoid as you see fit:
Provide all teachers in a department or school with a copy to establish a common text to work from and refer to throughout your planning and instructional design work.
Bring your Companion to all meetings for quick reference or planning with colleagues in the school or your department or grade-level team.
Use your Companion to aid in the transition from what you were doing to what you will be doing, treating the planning pages that accompany each standard as a place to note what you do.
Begin or end meetings with a brief but carefully planned sample lesson or instructional connection, asking one or more colleagues in the school or department to present and lead a discussion of how it might apply to other classes, grade levels, or subject areas.
Use the Companion in conjunction with your professional learning community (PLC) to add further cohesion and consistency between all your ideas and plans.
Begin slowly, proceed incrementally, giving it first to key instructional leaders—department chairs, instructional coaches, PLC, or other team leaders—to figure out how best to roll it out to the larger faculty or integrate into teams examining student work or creating new standards-aligned units.
Accepting the Invitation
When I began teaching in the late 1980s, I asked my new department chair what I would be teaching. He smiled and handed me a single sheet of paper with a list of titles on it and wished me luck (always making time to help me if I had questions). Years later, many districts, mine included, had thick binders, binders so heavy with so many standards that they were all ignored since they did not come with the time to read and think about how to teach them. Now we have a new set of standards, which come just as a large group of teachers will retire, leaving an equally large group of new teachers feeling a bit up the river without a paddle, as the saying goes. This book is meant to be that oar or a map you or your faculty or colleagues can use to guide you through the curriculum (which derives from the words current and course).
These new standards offer me a view of the territory I have crossed to arrive here, having been the first in my family to graduate from college. In a section titled “A Country Called School” from my book School Smarts: The Four Cs of Academic Success (Burke, 2004), I wrote of my experience of being a student:
Learning is natural; schooling is not. Schools are countries to which we send our children, expecting these places and the people who work there to help draw out and shape our children into the successful adults we want them to become. As with travel to other countries, however, people only truly benefit from the time spent there to the extent that they can and do participate. If someone doesn’t know the language, the customs, the culture—well, that person will feel like the outsider they are. As Gerald Graff, author of Clueless in Academe (2003) puts it, “schooling takes students who are perfectly street-smart and exposes them to the life of the mind in ways that make them feel dumb” (p. 2).
This is precisely how I felt when I arrived at college. I lacked any understanding of the language. The culture of academics confused me. The conventions that governed students’ behaviors and habits were invisible to me. Those who thrived in school seemed to have been born into the culture, have heard the language all their life, and knew inherently what mattered, what was worth paying attention to, how much effort was appropriate. Teachers somehow seemed to expect that we all came equipped with the same luggage, all of which contained the necessary tools and strategies that would ensure our success in their classes and, ultimately, school. It wasn’t so. (p. 1)
When I enrolled in a community college all those years ago, I was placed in a remedial writing class, highlighted whole chapters of textbooks, and had no idea what to say or how to enter class discussions. School extended an invitation to me then that I did not know at first how to accept, so disoriented was I by its demands. Across the country, new state standards extend a similar invitation—and challenge—to us all, teachers and administrators, and all others engaged in the very serious business of educating middle and high school students. It is an invitation I have already accepted on behalf of my students and myself.
Reading these standards, I am reminded of a passage from a wonderful book by Magdalene Lampert (2001) titled Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching. In that book, she has a chapter titled “Teaching Students to Be People Who Study in School,” in which she says of students not unlike the one I was and many of those I teach:
Some students show up at school as “intentional learners”—people who are already interested in doing whatever they need to do to learn academic subjects—they are the exception rather than the rule. Even if they are disposed to study, they probably need to learn how. But more fundamental than knowing how is developing a sense of oneself as a learner that makes it socially acceptable to engage in academic work. The goal of school is not to turn all students into people who see themselves as professional academics, but to enable all of them to include a disposition toward productive study of academic subjects among the personality traits they exhibit