Last spring, a number of pieces appeared about David Coleman (Common Core’s co-author), telling us to stop teaching pre-reading strategies. When I asked folks attending Common Core trainings at my district, they had no idea what I was talking about. Clearly, the message has gotten out to the consultant/trainer class over the summer. Here were a couple slide from a recent meeting:
Text-based Questions and Answers:
- Questions that can only be answered with evidence from the text.
- Can be literal, but should also include analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
- Focus on making meaning at the word, sentence, and paragraph level as well as larger ideas, themes, or events.
- Focus on difficult portions of text in order to enhance reading proficiency.
Why Text-Based Questions and Answers:
- More time is spent inside the text than outside.
- Equity — conversations outside the text privilege students who have had certain experiences.
- Analyzing text is more challenging than talking about experiences.
- Forces multiple reading, making pre-reading and “front-loading” activities less necessary.
- Allows students to glean important information from the text rather than the teacher (often done as a summary prior to reading).
Now that equity argument is a new one. Rather than front-load for kids without the experience, or having kids make connections to their own lives, just have them keep re-reading the same bit of text, over and over, and eventually it’ll sink in. This is so counter to experience as to be infuriating. While they never say students cannot bring in outside information from outside the text, the implication is they shouldn’t. This presents a problem as there is no way that students can do synthesis of the ideas from a single text without bringing in ideas from other sources. But, as we’ve seen, much more energy is spent on telling us to stick to the text, which only lets you get up to inference level analysis. You get what you ask for. While the standards say they want students to analyze and synthesise, if you spend more type telling students that they need to cite the text, and telling teachers to teach students to cite the text, then they will focus not on the ideas but on the citation.
Okay, deep breath. Here is a piece from Burkins and Yaris blog, Connections Under Fire | Burkins & Yaris. They are writer/speakers, and write blog posts on Common Core. I recommend them to anyone frustrated with what they are being told to do on Common Core, and are looking a more reasonable approach. Of course, you might not have any choice about how you do your Common Core implementation, but I always find alternatives to be helpful. To sum up, what you want to avoid with connections is:
- The connection overtaking the current text for content;
- The connection not allowing students to really read or understand the current text;
- The connection getting the student off-track and wasting time;
This makes a lot of sense, and we’ve all had situations where this has happened. I’ve also seen kids get off-track with connections because I didn’t do pre-reading, and they brought their “connection” to the table whether I asked them to make them or not. Without a discussion, we weren’t able to put it in context. Example, there is a story of Russian pogroms in the fifth grade ELA text. Students read about Anne Frank in the fourth grade. Many mix up the pogroms with the Holocaust, so you have to point out the timeline, etc. to show them this is before that, and more importantly is part of a long trail of anti-Semitism in Europe.
To sum up, it’s all about figuring out when a given strategy is needed, and when to leave well-enough alone. I’m not going to pretend I have that all figured out, but a new list of standards is not the answer to that particular problem, listening to students and adjusting my practice is.