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Celebrating a Milestone!

March 18, 2013 By 5 Comments

Today is a special day. Exactly fifty-two weeks ago on this very day, we launched Burkins and Yaris, Think Tank for 21st Century Literacy. Our first post, simply titled Welcome to Burkins and Yaris, shared that “with six shifts and thirty-two national standards in literacy, schools are in the uncomfortable position of figuring out where to begin implementing the Common Core.” We charged ourselves with the responsibility “of closely examining the educational landscape” and poised ourselves “to be your guide through the Common Core and the next generation of literacy learning.” Ironically, in addition to being the anniversary of our first post, this is also our 300th post, which seems a fitting way to commemorate such an important milestone.


This year has been an adventure for us. Over the course of the past year, we have wrestled with issues, struggled to make deadlines, connected with incredible people, and forged what we trust will be a lifelong friendship with each other.  We have kept a meticulous record of this journey which we’ve archived in this big green binder that Kim keeps in her home.  As you can see, it is filled with post-its and dog ears tracking our thinking about where we’ve been and our thoughts about where we might go next.




…and we have plenty of thoughts of where we will go next.  But first, we need to indulge ourselves in a nostalgic trip down memory lane so this week, our plan is to share some thoughts about our writing process and highlight some of the things that we’ve learned through this adventure.

Our hope is to end the week with “favorite” posts, both ours and yours, and ask you to remind us of the post that resonated most with you so we can include it in Friday’s compilation.

We end today by saying a heartfelt thank you to all of our readers.  Your comments and feedback serve as the fuel for this journey.  We appreciate you and look forward to another great year!

Filed Under: Common Core State Standards, Implementation, Informational Text, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Weekend Round Up February 16

February 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Monday

Text Complexity

This post compiles the posts we have written pertaining to text complexity and the Common Core standards.

Tuesday

Close Reading

This post compiles our many posts on the topic of close reading.

Wednesday

Writing (Blog Digest)

This post compiles our many posts on the topic of teaching writing in the Common Core era.

Thursday

Food for Thought (Blog Digest)

This post compiles a potpourri of posts that reflect our musings about the Common Core Standards and thoughts about teaching literacy in general.

Friday

Practical Stuff (Blog Digest)

This posts collects the practical ideas we have entertained for implementing the Common Core Standards.

Filed Under: balance, Common Core State Standards, Complete Literacy, complex text, Comprehension Strategies, Gradual Release of Responsibility, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Musings, Planning for Instruction, Reading, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

5 Tips for Planning Excellent Common Core Lessons

November 27, 2012 By 14 Comments
Screen shot 2012-11-26 at 8.10.11 PM

Regardless of which standards you are teaching, there are certain lesson design elements that fit the spirit of the Common Core. Using the following five tips to frame your instruction can help your students meet the challenges of the standards. Thinking and planning in the following ways requires changing habits of thoughts that are pretty routine for most of us.

1. Connect instruction across instructional contexts.  For many of us, one type of literacy instruction dominates our instructional time. For example, guided reading may take up an hour of each day’s 90 minute literacy block, or whole-group instruction may fill most of your literacy time. For whatever standard(s) you are addressing in a lesson, capitalizing on the gradual release of responsibility as it connects across read aloud, shared reading, small-group instruction, and independent reading will make your instruction more efficient. Because our ultimate goal is for students to achieve a level of proficiency that allows them to problem-solve and read without our support, once we identify a teaching direction we can then provide children multiple opportunities to practice the agentive thinking that allows them to habituate their learning.  Linking a standard across several instructional contexts allows for multiple opportunities to practice and increases the likelihood of transference.

2. Make room for collaboration. Every lesson should have some element of student collaboration or conversation. This may range from “turn-and-talk” opportunities with partners to shared reading in groups of 2-4 (implemented after teaching students specific, agentive ways of coaching each other) to simply discussing the big ideas in a text and and finding textual support to back up their opinions. Teaching students how to solve problems together not only increases their instructional time, but also makes the learning experience much more engaging. Few things increase student engagement and agency like working with friends. Engaging in conversations about text addresses multiple standards across the Common Core for Speaking & Listening and those for Reading. Furthermore, teaching students to engage in conversation, to truly listen and contribute connected ideas, teaches them a lifelong skill that will support them whether they are navigating personal relationships or college/career challenges.

3. Address multiple standards in each lesson. Don’t get locked into the idea that there is a single standard for each lesson. While your instruction across a day or week may focus more closely on one standard than another, teaching the Common Core is different than teaching state standards, as we have for the past eight years or so. A single lesson about problem solving may address Reading Standards 2 and 9, and Speaking & Listening Standards 1 and 3. For a more comprehensive exploration of the difference in aligning instruction to the CCSS vs. aligning to state standards, see our post entitled “The Third Generation Standards Alignment.”

4. Develop student leadership. Even the lesson focus or direction can serve as a tool for helping students become more independent. Many of our current practices rob students of the opportunity to learn how disequilibrium feels, turning reading into a passive activity. By prompting students to read the headings or captions, by priming any challenging vocabulary, by explaining the way a text is organized, we take problem-solving opportunities from students.  We are not saying that we should never scaffold students in the aforementioned ways; we are simply saying that we should give students an opportunity figure some things out. This can be messy, and we have to be slower to rescue or confirm. Rather than saying, “Try this” we can say, “What will you try next?” Rather than saying, “You figured it out” we can say “Is that right? How do you know?”  Thinking in these ways can empower students.

5. Select great texts. Even though text selection is at the end of today’s list, it may be the single most important element for effective Common Core instruction. The key to supporting student independence as described above is selecting texts students find irresistible. Many of the challenges that we hear about from teachers, i.e. students managing themselves, student stamina, student persistence in complex text, etc., can be addressed by simply selecting better texts. Pick a better text and students will instantly comprehend better because they pay closer attention. They will instantly focus on the task with less teacher redirection. They will instantly engage in more of the strategies we want them to use, such as predicting, questioning, inferring, and clarifying. If you want to make the biggest impact on your students’ progress towards Common Core goals, get serious about finding great children’s books.

Filed Under: Alignment, Common Core State Standards, Complete Literacy, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Leadership, Literacy Block, Planning for Instruction, Reading, Speaking and Listening, Text Complexity, text selection, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Weekend Round-Up August 11

August 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Monday

What is the Opposite of Complex? (Part 1)

This blog post presents a four-quadrant grid for considering text complexity and simplicity, and the ways text level is related to student engagement and interest.

Tuesday

What is the Opposite of Complex? (Part 2)

In this post, we look more closely at the students’ view of complex text and begin to envision how to employ various teaching structures to bridge the gap and make seemingly irrelevant or complex text more accessible to students.

Wednesday

What is the Opposite of Complex? (Part 3)

In this post, we look again at making complex text more accessible to readers by working with text sets and re-purposing text for use in a variety of teaching structures.

Thursday

Our Top Ten Tips for Writing Partners

This post is for anybody in any field that collaborates on the writing process. It offers our top ten tips for making a writing partnership efficient and successful.

Friday

Friday Favorites: Top Ten Picture Books that Develop Agency

Because we’ve been thinking about text sets, we refer you today back to our post about picture books that develop agency.

Filed Under: Common Core State Standards, Complete Literacy, Implementation, Literacy Block, Text Complexity, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Our Top Ten Tips for Writing Partners

August 9, 2012 By 1 Comment

For some time we have thought about writing a post that gives you a glimpse into our collaborative writing process. We often have comments from people about the volume of writing we do, and queries about how we do it. For both of us, having a writing partner is the secret to pushing ourselves as writers. We are both idea people, and having a partner lifts the level of accountability. Writing projects we have always thought about begin to take shape when a writing partner helps you clarify your ideas and holds you accountable for production.

Yesterday, we inadvertently left open the window on our writing process when a note from Jan to Kim was left in our post. Here’s what the post looked like before we corrected it:

“After engaging students in a number of different reading contexts, you may find that students need even more background knowledge support. You may need a simpler text to serve as a bridge to the ideas in other texts. For example, What Makes Day and Night Kim, can you insert the image for this book. I am on my husband’s computer and can’t seem to grab it off the internet. is written for beginning readers (Quadrant 3). It doesn’t have the intriguing aspects of the other texts, but it is more manageable as a transitional text. Note this does not mean that this book is presented to certain students instead of the more engaging and sophisticated texts. It just means the students who need more practice get more to read.”

The relentlessness with which we write, coupled with the fact that we are only a team of two (no staff writers, editors, etc.) means that errors get past us. We assume that the message of the content gets through and that we are better off writing a lot than editing perfectly. So far, our readership has been gracious. Although we cringe with any error, everyone seems to assume that homophonial (we made that word up) slip ups are an indication of the time pressures under which we work, rather than an indication that we don’t know the difference between “there” and “their”.

Thank you for your graciousness and your support. Today we offer you our top ten tips for working with a writing partner.

10. Take risks.
We met on Twitter and launched this ambitious effort after only a couple of phone conversations. If we had dragged our feet, we wouldn’t have learned as much. Just connect and go for it!

9. Be the Yin to your partner’s Yang.
Kim is a morning person. Jan tends to work late. Jan will run with a million new ideas. Kim is steady and focused. We each offer a bit of what the other needs more of, which stabilizes and stretches us both.

8. Tap all of your communication resources.
Become friends on facebook, twitter, linkedin, share phone numbers, text one another. We have begun to write together with a window open on Skype. We chat in Google documents. We have only worked together in person once, but we are virtually connected at the hip (or is it the head?).

7. Have fun.
If you find a partner that really complements you and pushes you, fun in the collaboration is inevitable. With our various projects, one of us is often nudging the other. For example, when we wrote the reading standards in haiku, Kim had little experience with haiku. That project was immensely fun and gratifying for both of us. When we developed the comprehension video, Jan was skeptical. In the end, we were both pleased with the results. Sometimes writing is worse than mopping floors or folding laundry, so a sense of humor is imperative.

6. Be flexible.
You get to make the rules and you get to break them. You can reinvent your mission, your norms, your collaborative processes. At this point, all of our writing is in Google documents. We make a new document each week and name it according to a standardized convention (B&Y_blogs_week of August 6, 2012). It took us many weeks of trial and error to figure out how to manage all the posts in this way. We just reinvented until something stuck. Now we are much more efficient.

5. Set up norms.
Once we decided to write together, everything moved very fast. One of our earliest conversations was dedicated to talking through and establishing norms. At that point we didn’t know each other well at all. We just talked through what we needed from each other. Here are the norms we wrote. Notice that all of them are about keeping the lines of communication open, and 3 out of 5 are about honesty.

Norms:

  • Don’t ignore a nudge. If something bothers you say something.
  • Be up front and honest.
  • Don’t get too far into something without letting the other one know.
  • Talk through before if possible; if not, the one doing the work alone takes the risk.
  • We have to make it as safe as possible for the other person to disagree.

4. Assume goodwill.
We have grown to trust each other absolutely. There is absolutely no defensiveness between us. If one of us drafts a piece and the other goes in and revises and edits, we are not territorial at all. Occasionally, one of us will explain why we did something a certain way and then we will talk through which is the better option and why. If you are writing a lot, there is no time to be defensive. So assume that your partner is there to help you write better and let him/her have the freedom to do that.

3. Decide on your collaborative voice.
We decided immediately that we would write in one voice. So our posts are written as “we” rather than “I.” We don’t have “Kim’s posts” and “Jan’s posts.” All the posts are jointly written, published, and even jointly owned (if you want to get technical.) Neither of us is stingy with our ideas. Every now and then one of us wants to write a reflective piece or a piece that connects to a personal experience that just doesn’t make sense as a shared post. In those few cases, we write in first person. This shared voice can get tricky sometimes. We once wrote a post where we used a movie as a metaphor. We talked about how we were on the couch watching it, which made it sound as though we live in the same town, or perhaps even the same house.

2. Contribute more than your share to the collaboration.
There is an element of service within our partnership. Even after four months, we really appreciate each other and neither of us wants to take the other for granted. We don’t keep score on our contributions to the collaboration. In fact, we are often raising the bar on ourselves. Because we are honest when something doesn’t work for us, we know that the added contribution of a partner won’t result in latent resentment. This helps us take care of each other.

1. Be honest with each other.
This is the litmus test for a writing partner, and perhaps any kind of partner: When does the partner let you know that something isn’t working for him/her? For a collaboration to work, it needs to be sooner than later and the partner needs to respond with appreciation. We are so happy when the other person is honest about something difficult. It lets us know that we are still able to truly collaborate and that the other person is still really invested.

Have you worked with a writing partner? What advice would you offer?

 

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: , ,

Pay It Forward (Part 2): Writing Essentials

July 23, 2012 By 5 Comments

Today we offer you a checklist of instructional strategies for teaching writing in preK-2. Obviously, these will vary based on grade-level, but as core writing instruction (no pun intended) they should form a consistent thread throughout elementary writing instruction. THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST, but rather a place to start. We have not addressed student choice, writing across days, writing on demand, revision, editing, conferencing, etc. Let these six essentials offer you a place to start, especially in preK and kindergarten, grades which are often left out of conversations about standards.

1. How much are you letting students write?

Students need to write every day. Even in preschool and kindergarten, students need daily time to put something on paper. This builds stamina and fluency and encourages students to think about their writing outside of formal instruction. Writing daily is the single-most important aspect of writing instruction. We are not referring to answering comprehension questions, but rather to composing and crafting.

2. How are you developing student independence as writers?

Beginning writers need to write by themselves as much as possible, even if their writing is mostly approximations in letter formation and spelling. We find that anchor charts and familiar, co-authored messages posted around a classroom are a better scaffold for students than teachers taking dictation. Students dictating while teachers write is a practice that builds dependence and communicates that we should only write when we know how to do it the “right” way. Any writing for students as they dictate should be interactive, sharing the pencil with the students as much as possible nudging them to take risks and responsibility. Basically, “dictation” should be an individualized interactive writing session.

3. How are you showing students how to write?

Students need to participate in interactive writing for 10-20 minutes 3-5 times per week. There is no more efficient and authentic way to teach children the letter names and sounds. It is critical that all the products of these interactive writing sessions hang in the classroom so that students can refer to them when they write independently.

4. How are you helping students develop voice and a sense of audience?

Young writers need regular opportunities to share their writing with an audience, whether reading it to a partner, sharing with a group, or recording on a webcam to send home. Audience response is one of the best ways to encourage students to write more.

5. How are you teaching young writers how to form the letters?

While there is dissent in the field about handwriting and its relevance in the technological age, for us handwriting is a vehicle for writing fluency. While obvious developmental limitations apply to four-year-olds, even they can engage in large motor practice of the shape of the letters, such as drawing them in shaving cream or running their fingers over sand letters. Children who learn how to make the letters without thinking about their formation will have more attention to give to what they are writing. Children who write fluently tend to write more words more often. Of course, we are not espousing reams of handwriting worksheets. We are suggesting, however, small doses of practicing handwriting for its own sake can lead to better writing products during writing workshop and make such authentic writing practice more meaningful.

6. How are you exposing students to quality writing models?

Students need to hear great writing read aloud daily. Whether in read aloud, writer’s workshop, or shared reading, you can explicitly point out the author’s craft as you share great books. The more you show students options for their writing, the more you will see these tools organically translate into the pieces they develop.

These are our six, “pay-it-forward” essentials for writing, but they are not all you need to teach writing in preK-2. Most importantly, for third-graders to meet the demands of the Common Core writing standards, we must begin early, even though the standards don’t explicitly include the youngest writers in some of their most important expectations.

Tomorrow, we will share our “pay-it-forward” essentials for reading instruction.

Filed Under: Common Core State Standards, Implementation, Instruction, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Weekend Round Up July 21

July 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Monday

A Close Look at The Common Core Expectations for Primary Writers

In looking across the grade levels of the Common Core Writing Standards, standards 4, 9, and 10 are seen as “not applicable” to students in grades K-2.  This post launches an investigation of whether or not the Common Core has high expectations for primary writers.

Tuesday

Writing Clearly and Coherently: Primary Writers CAN and SHOULD

This post looks at writing anchor standard four as it applies (or doesn’t apply, as the case may be) to kindergarten through second grade writers.  Did the authors of the Common Core set the bar too low?

Wednesday

Using Evidence from Literary and Informational Text: Once Again, Primary Writers CAN and SHOULD

In this post, we examine writing anchor standard nine and the Common Core’s expectation that children should not start doing this until fourth grade.  Once again, we find that the authors of the Common Core set the bar a bit too low.

Thursday

Paying It Forward: Six PreK-2 Writing Essentials for Meeting the Common Core Expectations in 3-12

Good teachers know that the foundation for good writing begin long before third grade.  In this post, we discuss the “pay it forward” philosophy that applies to starting intentional teaching of reading and writing as early as preschool.

Friday

Friday Favorites

Buried in our archives are a wealth of topics that are still timely and relevant.  Starting today, on Fridays, we will direct our readers back to old posts that speak to ideas and important thinking about the Common Core and literacy.

Filed Under: Common Core State Standards, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

Paying it Forward: Six PreK-2 Writing Essentials for Meeting the Common Core Expectations in 3-12

July 19, 2012 By 2 Comments

Current accountability measures focus on the immediacy of results, typically holding each year’s teacher responsible for the outcomes of the current year. We assert, however, that much of what is important for students to learn as readers and writers happens in the years that are typically not considered heavily (or at all) in accountability measures. Educational accountability needs to function as a pay-it-forward system. That is, some of the work that teachers on a particular grade-level do is on behalf of the teachers who will be accountable for our students in upcoming years. This is equally true in reading and writing.

Even though the standardized testing associated with the Common Core is likely to begin in third-grade, which continues the NCLB trend established in many states, we encourage schools to resist the urge to throw all their energies into third-grade. While third-grade and beyond warrant considerable attention, meeting the lofty expectations of the Common Core is an impossibility if we don’t offer our youngest readers and writers at least as much support.

This means we start intentionally teaching literacy in preschool.  We need to engage four-year-olds in age appropriate practices that teach them letter names and letter sounds, that develop their vocabulary, and that establish efficient reading and writing habits from the onset. This early action is the only way we can ensure that the majority of children graduating from second grade are ready to meet the Common Core challenges they will encounter in third-grade and beyond. Don’t be fooled! It is possible to teach four- and five-year-olds to read and write while holding inviolate critical principles of developmental appropriateness.

On Monday and Tuesday of next week we will share a checklist of our essentials for teaching preK-2 students reading and writing. We hope you will let the list of questions help you consider the ways your instruction in preK-2 is preparing students for the Common Core demands of upper elementary, middle, and high school.

Filed Under: Common Core State Standards, Implementation, Instruction, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Writing Clearly and Coherently: Primary Students Can and Should

July 17, 2012 By 3 Comments
Sample writing exemplar from Appendix C of Common Core

CCSS writing anchor standard four states that students need to, “Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.”

This standard does not apply to children in kindergarten, first-, or second-grades. The authors of the Common Core decided that this was an expectation for which establishing clear guidelines for was not necessary until third grade.

Writing anchor standard 4 Common Core K-2

In third grade, the Common Core recommends that students, “With guidance and support from adults, produce writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task and purpose.” In fourth and fifth grade, the expectation changes only in that children should “produce writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task and purpose” without “guidance and support from adults.”

Why the exclusion on K-2 in the writing expectations for clarity and cohesion? With “guidance and support from adults” is it not possible for children in grades kindergarten, first, and second to write clearly and coherently?

In order to answer this question, we turn to Appendix C which offers writing samples from every grade level, providing educators a context for thinking about the implications of teaching writing in the Common Core era. Let’s begin by looking at an informative report produced by a first grade writer.

Sample writing exemplar from Appendix C of Common Core

Part of clear and coherent writing is topic focus and development.  In this example, this writer chose a topic (Spain) and proceeded to report a series of facts and informative tidbits about the country as alluded to in the title “My Big Book About Spain.” This writer’s inclusion of details such as “Spain has a lot of fiestas” and “Spain has bull fights” and “Spain’s neighbors are France, Andorra, Algeria, Portugal, and Morocco” seem quite “appropriate to the task” which appears to be to write an all about book about a country.

Clear and coherent writing could be further defined by the way in which a writer organizes information in an effort to communicate with readers.  In this example, this writer begins with the sentence, “Spain is in Europe.” Given that this is an “all about” book, this sentence introduces the reader to the topic and then proceeds to round out the topic development with a multitude of relevant facts and figures to feed a curious reader wanting to know more about Spain. The writer clearly indicates that (s)he is done writing by including the sentence “One day when I am a researcher, I am going to Spain and write about it.” In this example, there is a clear beginning, middle, and end to the text, even though the format is decidedly non-narrative.

We began this post by asking the question: With “guidance and support from adults” is it not possible for children in grades kindergarten, first, and second to write clearly and coherently?

This example and most of the examplars for kindergarten through second grade in Appendix C reflect the qualities of clarity and coherence. These exemplars communicate the high expectations which primary writers CAN and SHOULD meet, but yet, these expectations are not communicated by the Common Core itself.  While there is no way of knowing how much support this writer received in composing this text, it is most definitely clear and coherent, making us wonder why the authors of the Common Core postponed this expectation until third grade. As far as we can see, this is one place where they set the bar too low.

Filed Under: Common Core State Standards, Implementation, Instruction, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

A Close Look at the Common Core Expectations for Primary Writers (Part 1)

July 16, 2012 By 4 Comments
Writing anchor standard 4 Common Core K-2

One of the lenses that we recommend for looking at the standards, no matter what arm of Language Arts you are analyzing, is looking across grade levels to see how the standards change and evolve as children’s reading and writing becomes more sophisticated.  As we have been examining the writing standards, we have attempted to follow our own advice and looked across the grade levels. We stumbled upon an important discovery.

Writing anchor standard 4 Common Core K-2

writing anchor standard 9-10 Common Core K-2

Here is the breakdown of anchor standards 4, 9, and 10 in grades K-2.  At first glance, it surprised us to see that three out of ten anchor standards don’t apply to children in grades kindergarten through second (and one doesn’t even apply to third graders).  We immediately became curious about which of the Common Core writing standards had no place in primary classrooms and discovered the following:

Writing Anchor Standard 4
Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

Writing Anchor Standard 9
Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

Writing Anchor Standard 10
Write routinely over extended times (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes and audiences.

For us, these recommendations raise important questions. We wonder about the origins of these guidelines.  Were these recommendations a casualty of the top-down design of the standards?  Do they reflect the lack of educational experience of the authors? Most importantly, do the writing standards for K-2 set high enough expectations for our youngest writers to develop the proficiency they need, both for the CCSS in 3-12 and for life in general?

This week we will explore our response to these questions. In the meantime, we encourage you to do the same!

 

Filed Under: Common Core State Standards, Implementation, Instruction, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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