College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

By Cherry Boyles, Instructional Supervisor, Washington County Schools

Throughout the country, there is much debate regarding implementation of the Common Core. Supporters believe this new set of standards will require educators to teach to a higher cognitive level enabling students to become better prepared for the global challenges they will face. Those opposed to the Common Core share concerns that not all students will be encouraged to reach their full potential because the Standards will become the “ceiling” of instruction.

IRA guidlines for implementing critical issues in literacy education...

There is a growing number of resources for this foundational high school course including more traditional sets of resources that are comprised of an organized set of files as well as completely online courses.

A 21st century model is State Supt. Of Education Dr. June Atkinson's goal for education in the North Carolina Public Schools (NCPS).

Close reading is not a reading strategy, but an approach to reading.

"In the instructional context, the idea of close reading has been to shift the attention during the reading lesson off of strategies and skills and onto the texts and ideas. The notion is that if students are engaged in close reading throughout their education, they will develop a rich body of knowledge about the world and these reading practices will become habits of mind."

Close reading is an old, widely known and specific concept that indicates where meaning resides (in the text) and what readers must do to gain access to this meaning (read the text closely, weighing the author’s words and ideas, and relying heavily on the evidence in the text).

Getting Smart by Susan Oxnevad - @soxnevad

Why do so many students choose Wikipedia when asked to find information on the Internet? I believe the answer is that Wikipedia is like the McDonalds of the Internet, you can always find it and you know what you’re going to get.

Everyone hopes new standards will get students out of a reading slump. But the demand for more nonfiction reading is being resisted by English teachers.

Bauerlein and Stotsky report

...doesn’t see why English classes have to carry the nonfiction weight. Social studies and science courses can do that. The real battle, he says, will be in the elementary schools, where lesson plans have failed to provide the vocabulary, background knowledge and context that make good readers."

Organization: ordering ideas to make them both clear and interesting. We’ll define the trait, link it to the CCSS for writing, and suggest favorite books to use as mentor texts in teaching important elements of Organization—including leads, endings, and transitions.

"We're not in the 19th Century anymore, where you live your life in your own community and everything you need to learn and know, your local school board can determine. We're in a global economy," said John Austin, president of the Michigan State Board of Education.

"Our new standards are very similar -- in content, in coherence and in rigor -- to what the top-achieving countries are doing," Schmidt said.