“The authors take their reader step-by-step through critical academic strategies that build student achievement and success. Close reading, learning about argumentation, and writing develop great readers, writers and, more importantly, thinkers. When students possess these strong academic skills they are college ready. More importantly, they are poised to be active and engaged members of our democratic society. Packed with easy-to-implement original ideas, this book should be on every educator's bookshelf.”
—KATHERINE S. MCKNIGHT, Ph.D., literacy consultant; author, Common Core Literacy for ELA, History/Social Studies, and the Humanities: Strategies to Deepen Content Knowledge
“Transformational Literacy is an essential resource for administrators, instructional leaders, and teachers looking to bring the Common Core literacy shifts to life in their schools and classrooms. The authors have crafted a flawless instructional guide that can be used to support educators in designing Common Core literacy-aligned lessons in any discipline.”
—LAUREN J. ORMSBY, Ph.D., superintendent, Ripley Central School District, Ripley, New York
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Cover photograph: © Ron Berger
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first edition
On the DVD in the back of this book you'll find our Core Practices in Action video series. These videos—which we will direct you to at various points throughout the book—show key practices in action with students and teachers in schools throughout the United States.
To teachers everywhere who are committed to
bringing literacy to life with work that matters
For more than twenty years, EL Education has been engaged in transforming lives through supporting students and teachers to do more than they think possible. Because of our organization’s heritage with Outward Bound USA, sometimes this has literally meant hiking in the wilderness and working together to get everyone to the top of the mountain. We bring this same ethic of working together to overcome challenges into the daily work of schools, inspiring and guiding all students toward academic excellence. In many of our urban secondary schools this has resulted in getting every single graduate into college.
For our students, the process of transformation is rarely a single event. Just as wilderness journeys are built of daily courage and perseverance—small steps—the academic journeys of students are built on taking on daily challenges in the classroom. For many students, literacy skills represent the greatest challenge and the most important step toward a successful future in college, career, and citizenship.
Transformational Literacy is about taking on those daily challenges in the classroom. The Common Core instructional shifts described here will require a willingness to embrace the challenge of new learning, for both students and teachers. Transformational Literacy is also about the power of purposeful literacy to help students engage in work that matters—to see the connections between their hard work as readers and writers and their futures as contributors to stronger communities and a better world.
This book combines the best of what we know works for kids—purposeful, inquiry-based learning—and the new imperative of the Common Core State Standards—higher and deeper expectations for all students. Since the release of the new standards we have worked tirelessly to become experts in them, to support the four thousand plus teachers and leaders in our network schools to build the standards into their instruction and curriculum, and also to help EL Education contribute significantly to the national conversation about what good Common Core instruction can look like. We have created an open source grades 3–8 English language arts curriculum that has been recognized as among “the highest-quality Common Core–aligned curriculum materials currently available.” As of April 1, 2014, the curriculum had been downloaded more than 1.6 million times in twenty-five states. We are especially proud that the literacy standards in our curriculum are taught through content that gives students the opportunity to dig deeply into academic topics that matter—human rights, natural resources, social justice—bringing vitality to their work as young scholars.
Although our curriculum ensures that students have the opportunity to master each and every grade-level standard, this book is different: it is a high-level instructional guide. It can be used as a companion to those detailed daily lessons and also as a guide for teachers of every grade level. It is not a book about how to comply with Common Core literacy standards; it is a book about how to leverage the Common Core literacy shifts to elevate student scholarship and citizenship across all academic disciplines.
We believe the Common Core standards are not a solution but rather an opportunity, a unique moment in US education. They describe student outcomes that are more complex and ambitious than is the norm in most schools, and they prioritize critical thinking and deep understanding. A higher bar for all students is a goal that we embrace.
We believe that we as a nation can take advantage of that opportunity only if those standards are joined with creative, effective instruction that engages and inspires all students and challenges them with worthy texts and problems. Rather than allowing fear of new assessments to narrow our vision of teaching and learning, we can use the moment of new standards to embrace innovative teaching with work that matters.
New York, NY
May 2014
Scott Hartl
President and CEO
EL Education
The greatest strength of all of our publications is the strength of our team. That team includes one hundred EL Education staff members and more than four thousand teachers and school leaders in our network of schools. Without them this book would not have been possible. The expertise of our staff and the teachers and leaders around the country who have welcomed us into their schools and classrooms have enabled us to write a truly useful book—by practitioners and for practitioners. Our heartfelt thanks go out to all of them.
We want to draw attention to a few people in particular, who were on the leading edge of our Common Core literacy work. First, thank you to the more than eighty EL Education staff, teachers, coaches, leaders, and consultants who helped design and write our Common Core curriculum, catalyzing many of the lessons learned that you see articulated in this book—there are too many to name here, but we wish to offer special recognition to Gwyneth Hagan and Christina Riley for their leadership and contributions to this body of work. And thank you to Andrew Hossack who was the first brave teacher to allow our cameras into his classroom to capture his emergent skills teaching close reading to his fifth-graders at Tapestry Charter School in Buffalo, New York, and was part of our curriculum design team. Last, thank you to the three EL Education school designers—Kippy Smith, Jill Mirman, and Enid Dodson—who produced the early outlines that evolved into Transformational Literacy. Each of these brave souls was asked to step out onto the early edges of our understanding of the Common Core and to set the vision for our work. They did so with humility and extraordinary conviction in bringing the standards to life for students and teachers in a way that resonated with our mission and vision. Each of these pioneers ensured that we kept our guiding questions at the forefront of the work:
Deep thanks to Joey Hawkins, Marty Gephart, and Diana Leddy of the Vermont Writing Collaborative, who served as EL Education internal reviewers of our curriculum. Your wisdom about students, knowledge of the standards and shifts, and passion for EL Education integrated approach sustained us, and your kind, specific feedback elevated the work.
Thank you to our colleagues on the strategic program team who read early drafts and contributed their deep wisdom to the work: Cyndi Gueswel, Sharon Newman, Colleen Broderick, Tom Van Winkle, and Sue Schwartz.
Thank you to our amazing videographers, David Grant and Alejandro Duran. Without them our work would be diminished. They have brought these practices to life, they have drawn out the students and teachers with insightful questions, and they have told the story of great literacy practices that we can all learn from.
Last, but certainly not least, our most heartfelt thanks goes to the teachers and students who welcomed us into their classrooms to document their inspirational approach to Common Core literacy practices. Particular thanks go to teachers Julia St. Martin, Jenna Gampel, and Kerry Meehan for welcoming our videographers into their classrooms on multiple occasions. All of these teachers made an invaluable contribution to our ability to describe the Common Core instructional shifts in a way that is resonant with the mission and vision of EL Education.
Ron Berger is chief academic officer for EL Education, overseeing resources and professional learning for schools nationally. Berger works closely with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he did his graduate work, and currently teaches a course that uses exemplary student work to illuminate Common Core State Standards. Prior to his work with EL Education and Harvard, Berger was a public school teacher and master carpenter in rural Massachusetts for more than twenty-five years.
Berger is an Annenberg Foundation Teacher Scholar and received the Autodesk Foundation National Teacher of the Year award. His previous books include An Ethic of Excellence, A Culture of Quality, and Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools through Student-Engaged Assessment. Berger’s writing and speaking center on inspiring quality and character in students, specifically through project-based learning, original scientific and historical research, service learning, and the infusion of arts. He works with the national character education movement to embed character values into the core of academic work.
Libby Woodfin is the director of publications for EL Education. Woodfin started her career as a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at the original lab school for the Responsive Classroom in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and went on to become a counselor at a large comprehensive high school. Woodfin started with EL Education in 2007 while completing graduate work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Throughout her career, Woodfin has written articles, chapters, and books about important issues in education. Her previous books include Familiar Ground: Traditions That Build School Community and Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools through Student-Engaged Assessment.
Suzanne Nathan Plaut is the director of curriculum design for EL Education. Before joining EL Education, she served as the vice president of education at the Public Education & Business Coalition in Denver, Colorado, overseeing professional development, evaluation, and publications. Plaut holds a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she served on the editorial board for the Harvard Educational Review. She edited The Right to Literacy in Secondary Schools and has also been published in EdWeek. Plaut worked as a literacy coach and director of literacy in several Boston public schools and taught high school English in Colorado and New Zealand. She lives with her family in Denver, where her two daughters gleefully attend an EL Education Learning school.
Cheryl Becker Dobbertin is the program director for EL Education Unlocking Teacher Potential through the Common Core project. She also codirects EL Education work in New York state to develop and provide implementation support for Common Core–aligned ELA curriculum in grades 3–8. Prior to her current position, Dobbertin was an associate regional director and school designer for EL Education, supporting the implementation of the model in schools throughout the Northeast. Dobbertin was a middle school building administrator, literacy coach, and high school English teacher before joining EL Education. Her first book was Common Core Unit by Unit: 5 Critical Moves for Implementing the Reading Standards across the Curriculum. Dobbertin’s work has also been published in ASCD’s Differentiation in Practice: 9–12, Rachel Billmeyer’s Strategic Reading in the Content Areas, ASCD’s Education Leadership, and EdWeek.
Anne Vilen is a staff writer and school designer for EL Education. Following brief stints in academic publishing and freelance writing, she earned a master’s degree in teaching and taught language arts for many years at grade levels ranging from sixth grade to college. Vilen served as director of program and professional development for seven years at an EL Education school before joining EL Education as a school designer in 2011. In her twenty years as an editor, writer, and teacher, she has published dozens of poems, essays, and articles, and coauthored the book Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages.
Leah Rugen has worked as an educator and writer for more than twenty years. Beginning her career as a high school English teacher, she went on to be part of the founding staff at EL Education. Rugen previously worked at the Center for Collaborative Education for twelve years as writer and editor, school coach, and program director of the national Turning Points network. She is an author of several books including Understanding Learning: Assessment in the Turning Points School, Creating Small Schools: A Handbook for Raising Equity and Achievement, and Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools through Student-Engaged Assessment.
EL Education is one of the nation’s leading K–12 education organizations committed to creating classrooms where teachers can fulfill their highest aspirations and where students can achieve more than they think possible. For more than twenty years, EL Education has helped new and veteran teachers—in all types of school settings—strive for a vision of student success that joins academic achievement, character, and high-quality work. With an approach that is grounded in respect for teachers and school leaders as creative agents in their classrooms, EL Education builds their capacity to ignite each student’s motivation, persistence, and compassion so that they become active contributors to building a better world and succeed in school, college, career, and life.
The EL Education model is characterized by the following:
EL Education offers a comprehensive suite of professional development, coaching, Common Core curriculum, publications, and online tools to support schools to be engaging environments where kids love to learn and teachers love to teach. For more information, visit www.ELeducation.org.
At a number of EL Education high schools across the United States, students begin their freshman year in an unusual way. They spend a week in the wilderness with their peers on an Outward Bound journey, climbing mountains together with heavy packs. They are overwhelmed, scared, sweaty, muddy, and sometimes miserable. But, with the help of their guides and teachers, they push themselves and each other, and every year they get their team to the summit and celebrate together. There is a clear message: school is not going to be easy—for anyone. We will be struggling through difficult terrain together for the next four years. But we will all make it, with perseverance and help from one another.
Back at school, the summit is no longer a rocky peak. It is college readiness and college acceptance for every student—much more daunting for many students than a physical mountain. Every year, they succeed in this realm as well. One hundred percent college acceptance for graduates is the norm in these schools. The students come from typical urban settings—they are mostly from low-income families and many will be the first in their families to attend college or, in many cases, to graduate from high school. Their achievement is remarkable.
Why are these students so successful? There is no simple answer, but one thing is clear: their success is built on embracing challenge, together. In the woods, the primary challenges are rough weather, daunting trails, and steep climbs in mud, rock, and bramble. In school, their primary challenge is academic. Reading and writing independently and proficiently is often the greatest challenge of all.
When students at these schools feel overwhelmed and discouraged by text that seems too dense, they can remind themselves that they have all been there before—in the wilderness. There is no way to get around it, just as there had been no way around getting through dense brush and up the mountain. They can complain, but it won’t help. They can try to hide from it, but there is no avoiding it. Just as in facing the challenges in the wilderness, no one can do it alone, so they learn to ask for help when they need it and draw on the different resources each person contributes to the group. Rather than seeing their daily academic struggles as a sign of weakness, they view them as a worthy challenge and come to see that with great effort and support they will build success. Just as they did on the trail, the students and teachers learn to celebrate their small successes, every day.
Overcoming the physical challenges of an Outward Bound trip is a metaphor for the academic challenges students overcome on their path to college.
At the other end of the K–12 spectrum, working with much younger students, principal Laurie Godwin and her staff at Tollgate Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado, see the transformational power of building strong literacy skills in their students in the same way. For Godwin, giving students the opportunity and tools to develop these skills is an equity issue:
We have to believe that students can be successful with academic challenges the same way they are with character and physical challenges. . . . We can’t wait until they are “ready,” because what happens is that students in poverty and students at risk never even get to attempt that kind of work. All students need the same access to academics that will prepare them for college and beyond.
Notwithstanding our political and philosophical differences, most Americans embrace a common goal for our students: college, career, and civic readiness. Preparing Americans for citizenship has always been at the core of the mission of public schooling in the United States. Thomas Jefferson wrote that public schools should “enable every American ‘to understand his duties to his neighbors and country’ and to scrutinize the actions of public officials ‘with diligence, candor and judgment’ ” (Wiener, 2014).
In contrast to civic readiness, the goal of college readiness for all students is a relatively new goal for our country. For most of our history, the goal of college readiness applied to a small elite group of students; all others were prepared for basic skills in life and work. Schools were designed to sort students and prepare them for their different roles. Although college may not be the path that every student takes, every student deserves to be prepared to make that choice and to be privileged with challenging academic preparation. The world of work, and even military service, has changed—strong literacy skills are prioritized in all sectors. A high score on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery can make the difference between a job filling vending machines on an aircraft carrier and a career as an aircraft electrician. Our new goal of universally preparing students for high academic standards is a wise investment in America’s future and the future of our world.
Preparing all students for success in college, careers, and civic life is no easy task. It will require that all students are privileged with more challenging and worthy tasks and texts. It will require that they build strong academic habits of scholarship that empower them to work independently, creatively, and collaboratively. It will require that teachers and students develop a new mindset about learning—one that emphasizes growth and effort over a notion of intelligence as “fixed.”
The Common Core State Standards provide us with a unique opportunity to reimagine what students can do. We believe the standards, and what they represent, will help all students rise to this challenge. For the first time in generations, schools across the United States are fundamentally reconsidering what they teach and how they teach. The standards themselves do not prescribe specific content or teaching practices, but they offer something critically important: the expected outcomes for students are more challenging than current standards in almost every state. They require much more high-level thinking—deep understanding, transfer, synthesis, critical analysis—than most schools currently expect of students. And they prioritize skills and dispositions that we believe are vital to citizenship in our democracy—skills to analyze, critique, communicate; to present arguments with evidence; to challenge ideas and understand and promote divergent perspectives; and build “classrooms and workplaces . . . in which people from widely divergent cultures, who represent diverse experiences and perspectives, must learn and work together” (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010).
Our interpretation of the standards may be more expansive than most. We believe that they represent an opportunity for students that is far deeper than simply math and literacy outcomes. We believe the standards invite us to build in our students critical skills for life—for career success and civic contribution. What is important is not just what the standards say, but how they are used. The standards can be used to build classrooms where students are active, reflective critical thinkers, not passive recipients of content. The standards can be used to build in students the dispositions and skills to do work that matters to them and their communities.
If we are going to prepare our students for the world that awaits them, we have no choice but to raise our expectations for academics and give students the tools they need to meet them. This does not mean that all fourth-grade students should understand trigonometry, but it does mean that, beyond adding fractions on a worksheet, students must understand how fractions work and be able to apply that understanding to new contexts and to real life. It does not mean that all students will feel at ease reading challenging text, but it does mean that all students should be given the opportunity and strategies to successfully tackle challenging text and learn from it so that they can build their knowledge of the world.
The Common Core instructional shifts are important for building stronger skills in literacy and math, and even more important, we believe, in compelling and supporting students to work together to tackle challenging material and solve difficult problems that will prepare them to contribute as active citizens who contribute to building a better world.
The authors of the Common Core State Standards describe three primary shifts in the focus of English language arts (ELA) and literacy instruction:
They are called shifts because the standards intend to correct an imbalance in existing literacy instruction. In schools, the majority of reading instruction currently involves fictional text; in life, the majority of reading involves nonfiction. In schools, personal narratives and personal opinions comprise a great deal of writing assignments; in life, informative and argumentative writing, based in evidence, represents the majority of what is required. In all subjects in school, too many students are allowed to avoid challenging text, leaving them unprepared for the text complexity in college, careers, and civic life.
Implementing these shifts will be no easy task. Simply giving students more difficult nonfiction to read and assigning them more evidence-based essays is a recipe for failure unless those students are motivated and prepared to succeed. The schools we work with that have achieved significant success implementing the shifts have chosen texts for students that are compelling and purposeful, worthy of spending time reading deeply and rereading for meaning. They have provided students with a range of strategies for successfully grappling with more challenging material. They have reimagined how time is used in the classroom and the role of the teacher in instruction. Perhaps most important, they have raised their vision of the capacity of students for high-level work.
In addition to the three instructional shifts, the standards also describe a second set of shifts: shifts in the dispositions of students for college and career readiness. These seven dispositions present a vision of the “capacities of a literate individual” and a responsible and effective citizen:
In the standards, each of these seven dispositions headlines a descriptive paragraph that fleshes out specifics. For example, the standard They demonstrate independence requires that “students can, without significant scaffolding, comprehend and evaluate complex texts across a range of types and disciplines, and they can construct effective arguments and convey intricate and multifaceted information. . . . They build on each other’s ideas, articulate their own ideas, and confirm they have been understood. . . . More broadly, they become self-directed learners, effectively seeking out and using resources to assist them, including teachers, peers, and print and digital resource materials” (Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010).
In addition to literacy skills, the standards also focus us on the dispositions or “habits of scholarship” required for college and career readiness.
To imagine a classroom that supports these capacities well requires a fresh vision. It is not just that the traditional instructional model—students passively taking in information as a teacher lectures in the front of the room—is insufficient. Even a modern, lively classroom, in which the teacher dazzles in front of the room, using technology, humor, quick transitions, and engaging call-and-response routines, is insufficient. Both of these classrooms can be entirely, or almost entirely, teacher directed.
Key to Common Core success is students’ ownership of their learning. We need to elevate original student thinking, student voice, and student work. Students must independently and collectively grapple with intriguing, challenging material, and publicly discuss and debate meaning. Students must invest themselves deeply in written work, engage in critique, and make use of feedback from teachers and peers to create work of quality. They must present their ideas and work to peers and broader audiences for consideration. Students must become creative thinkers and resilient problem solvers—leaders of their own learning instead of simply obedient task completers. These capacities have always been the hallmark of elite student scholars. The Common Core shifts can and must be leveraged to make this possible for all students, not just some. To do so will require that teachers be given the support necessary to develop a new repertoire of skills and knowledge and to pursue with their colleagues a significant rethinking of teaching practice.
This book offers guidance and resources to help teachers leverage the Common Core instructional shifts in literacy to create more empowered and literate students. It focuses on three instructional shifts for schools and teachers—each of which has a dedicated part—and also the seven shifts in student capacity to create “college- and career-ready literate individuals.” It is a book by practitioners and for practitioners, providing conceptual background and also concrete strategies and resources for schools and classrooms.
Most of the ideas, examples, and resources in this book as well as the accompanying videos, are lifted out of our network of more than 150 EL Education schools around the country, where we work to provide teachers with frameworks and tools to select, supplement, customize, and create curriculum, and to improve instruction. The book also references and draws from our more recent work creating open source Common Core literacy curriculum, which is often cited as one of the finest in the country, and on the professional development we provide for thousands of teachers to implement that curriculum effectively. Our curriculum is unique in that we have engaged classroom teachers to help us write it, and unusual in its respect for the professionalism of teachers and the capacity of students. It uses no textbooks, instead relying on powerful and worthy books, articles, and primary source documents. It respects and challenges students by providing complex and interesting tasks, and it asks teachers to use their professional judgment in its implementation. This book, with its focus on the broader instructional shifts of the Common Core literacy standards, is appropriate for K–12 educators and can also be a companion for the daily lessons of our grades 3–8 curriculum. The curriculum is available at http://commoncoresuccess.eleducation.org/
One of the things we have learned from our work in creating curriculum is the need to be keenly descriptive without being prescriptive. Teachers want the details—the tiny steps, the timing, the tools, even suggested language to use—but they don’t necessarily want to use those exact steps, timing, or language in practice if their professional judgment suggests otherwise. We aim for that same quality in this book: we provide broad frameworks and also very specific instructional strategies, steps, and tools, with the understanding that these are not rigid recipes for practice.
This book does not need to be read in a linear fashion. There are three main parts, aligned to each Common Core literacy shift:
Although the explanations and stories build throughout the book, each part can stand alone, in or out of order.
We provide frequent case studies and snapshots from classrooms, and we include videos of instruction that show what the practices look like in K–12 classrooms. Our case studies, examples, and videos are drawn from a range of schools across the country. All are public schools and most are sited in low-income urban and rural communities. They are a mix of district schools and charters and collectively represent all grade levels. Each part opens with a vignette that offers a deeper look at three particular teachers and their classrooms. Those classrooms are featured in text and in video.
In part 1—“Unlocking the Power of Informational and Literary Texts”—we visit Julia St. Martin’s tenth-grade English classroom at the Springfield Renaissance School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Renaissance is a public district school serving about seven hundred students in grades 6–12. The student body is composed of approximately 75 percent students of color with approximately 65 percent qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. The school is known for project-based learning, service learning, and exemplary test scores. In a district with only a 52 percent graduation rate, Renaissance’s five consecutive years of 100 percent college acceptance for graduates has earned the school citywide, statewide, and national acclaim.
In part 2—“Reading for and Writing with Evidence”—we visit Jenna Gampel’s second-grade classroom at Conservatory Lab Charter School in Boston, Massachusetts, a K–5 school (expanding to K–8) with about three hundred students. The student body is composed of approximately 75 percent students of color with approximately 65 percent qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. The school is known for its El Sistema music program, visual arts, project-based learning, and exemplary test scores.
Finally, in part 3—“Supporting All Students to Succeed with Complex Texts”—we visit Kerry Meehan’s third-grade classroom at World of Inquiry School in Rochester, New York. World of Inquiry is a K–12 public district school with approximately seven hundred students. The student body is composed of approximately 85 percent students of color with approximately 60 percent qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. The school is known for project-based learning, service learning, and exemplary test scores.
Keeping the voices and experiences of real teachers and students at the forefront of these chapters we believe will inspire others to make the necessary effort. It is no small undertaking but well worth it. To prepare all students for college, career, and civic readiness will require that all of us embrace the challenge. Students will need to embrace the challenge of more difficult text and tasks and persevering individually and collaboratively to take on more than they thought possible. Teachers and educational leaders will need to embrace the challenge of learning the standards deeply and working together, in the difficult climate that always accompanies new expectations and assessments, to focus on the work that matters most—using the standards to build more thoughtful and capable scholars and citizens.
