Unpacking ELAR Assessed Curriculum for Ease of Use

     My friends and I have been working on solutions for unpacking standards and writing curriculum documents. As Sherella and I talked, be bemoaned the spaghetti reality that is ELAR. We asked these questions: 

• How do we put all of this together in a way that is easy to look at and understand what we are supposed to teach? 
• How do we show that comprehension involves author's purpose and craft + text structures + text characteristics + uses of language + metacognitive skills all at the same time? 
• How do we cluster the standards in such a way that teacher realize that a lesson about point of view (7.9E) that gives the definitions of subjective and objective point of view isn't really what we are teaching nor how it will be used in life or assessment? 
• How do we help new teachers or untrained folks with the content and the pedagogy? 
• How do we unpack this stuff that results in something we can use to plan better lessons? 
• How do we unpack this stuff that we can use with kids? 
  How can we unpack this stuff in a way that doesn't take 40 million years to complete and hundreds of pages to print? 

     Being the geek I am, I used constant comparative analysis and axial coding to reveal themes and connections. Coding with color font and highlighted cells revealed how each Standard (Knowledge and Skills + Student Expectation) houses overlapping Strands and Assessment Reporting Categories. 

    Here's an example: Most teachers look at what they are supposed to teach and see: 

7.9E: identify the use of literary devices, including subjective and objective point of view.

     Teachers then plan a lesson where students look at texts and explain which ones are written with a subjective point of view and which are written with an objective point of view. Pardon the pun, but that's not the point. 

     Here's the "formula": [Author's Purpose and Craft (Strand) + "influence meaning" (purpose) + "communicate meaning" (comprehension) + literary devices: point of view (language)] * "applies" author's craft "to develop his or her own products and performances"

     Here's the color coding key I used for the research:

Genre Characteristics

Literary Elements

Literary Genres

Nonfiction

Argument

Comprehension

Text Structure

Characteristics/Language

Metacognitive Skills

     In other words, the "point" is to help learners with two tasks (as opposed to two pieces of knowledge) and multiple strands (as opposed to one TEK). Here's what we unpacked to craft guiding questions that address content + skills + genre + rigor + assessed curriculum. 

With literary texts, how does the author influence and communicate meaning through choices of point of view, including subjective and objective point of view? What does the point of view reveal or hide? (Example: Because the story is told by the friends, we see how their reactions are different than the main character. Antaeus English I 2019 STAAR). 

As a writer of literary texts, how do I influence and communicate meaning through choices of point of view including, subjective and objective point of view? What does the point of view reveal or hide? (Example: What point of view is best to show an unreliable narrator in the story I am writing? In what ways do I used language and character development to make that happen?) 

     We started with Author's Purpose and Craft because that's where all reading and writing begins. And that's how readers first experience texts (Rosenblatt). We loaded all the standards afterward as if they are connected to the heart of Author's Purpose and Craft. 

     Cheryl, Sherella, and I are going to be talking about this more. Would you like to join the conversation? Here's the mock-up drafts of our thinking: 

7th Grade Assessed Curriculum Unpacked (Literary)

7th Grade Assessed Curriculum Unpacked (Nonfiction)

7th Grade Curriculum Unpacked (Writing) Note: Assessed Curriculum for writing has not yet been released.

Writing Like an Insider: Identifying as a Scholar

This morning, Dr. Lesley addressed the Llano Estacado Writing Alliance about Joining a Discourse Community as a Scholarly Writer. While that floats my boat personally, her ideas made me think about the writers I will encounter in the fall. Here are some ideas that I want to preserve and communicate. 

• Teachers of writing should write. I will be finding my voice as a writer. This will feed my instruction and support for students and teachers. 
• Writing Fluency is more complex than reading fluency. (Lesley, 2021 presentation)

 Hmmm. Here's the definition that Dr. Lesley shared with us:

Writing Fluency: The ability to produce written language rapidly, appropriately, cognitively, and coherently (Latif, 2013)

Students need to become aware of the components of their writing fluency. Our instructional activities should be explicit about the goals and the ways in which we achieve writing fluency. We want our students to begin writing after diffusing the prompt or assignment, not from a disjointed stream of consciousness, but from a capacity that considers deep meaning and the genre characteristics and conventions that will accurately and effectively deliver the message to their audience. They need to know how to get that kind of writing fluency going automatically. 

• Each writing even it a unique rhetorical event (Lesley, 2021 presentation).  

That's why it feels like you are starting over each time. That's why there is no formula. The rhetorical situation will always be different. Do we let kids know that this is true for everyone and every writing task? Do they know the struggle is normal and they are not alone? 

• Writing is inquiry (Lesley, 2021 presentation).  

YAAAAS. It is always new. We are always rethinking and rewriting - learning all the while. Writing is thinking made visible in ink, graphite, or binary code. 

• We learn to write and investigate our thinking through writing (Lesley, 2021 presentation).

How do you learn to do something? You get in there and do it. You learn about the something and a lot more about yourself. 

•  Scholarly Voice: scholarly voice is about contextualizing the research, situating the study and the researcher personally (Lesley, 2021 presentation). 

We write so they can see our face and hear our voice and know our personality. The way we write exposes our thinking and our personality. Do the kids know it doesn't have to be stilted or boring? 

• Introspective writing helps students move into a creative space where they are free to play with language, capture descriptive details, elaborate on the seemingly insignificant and juxtapose disparate ideas against each other. Introspection allows the writer's self to be present in all facets of the writing act (Lesley, in press). 

Wow. That's writing like an insider. So here's my questions to guide instruction in the fall. 

1. How do we help kids write like an insider for particular genres if we don't teach them how to read a text for how it is structured and the techniques the writer is using? How do we teach them to dissect a text not just for comprehension, but for CREATION for their own purposes? I need to create lessons and opportunities for this work...to go beyond comprehension to CRAFT. Our Texas ELAR standards have two Knowledge and Skills statements for craft. One is to analyze craft. The other is to USE craft for their own meaningful products and performances. 

2. How do we help kids write like an insider if they never read the kind of stuff we are asking them to write? We need more mentor texts that kids have written. 

Progression of Success Criteria for (STAAR) Informative Writing

Kendall Wright, Jamie Brigman, and I were working on assessment capable learners (Fisher, Hattie, Frey, ) . After a baseline writing prompt and a comparison of sample essays, Kendall wanted students to be able to determine where their essay fit in the progression of papers and to evaluate where they were in their own progression of learning. After doing so, she wanted students to be able to set goals. 

Yet, she felt that leaving them open to crafting their own goals might be too vague and might drift from the unit goals and expectations. We brainstormed some statements, organized them into a progression, and then created this document as a resource. (Kendall will be using the blog post referenced here as her lesson progression and approach to the writing assessment.) 

The draft of the document we created is below: 

Progression of Success Criteria for Informative Writing

 

Rules or Tools of Grammar

I just found the most wonderful example of how Jeff Anderson's Patterns of Power can illuminate how we apply Author's Purpose and Craft to Grammar. Tara Salmon, from Highland Park, and I have composed this lesson exemplar for you as an exemplar for the Region 16 Grammar Geeks course.

I know Jeff...and he would always agree that grammar is about how we craft language to impact the reader. Our standards require us to go beyond the grammatical structures and rules to explore how they help us as readers and writers. 

If you are skimming the article - look for when I change the font.

The lesson below is an exemplar of how grammar is connected to how we read and write with craft and purpose. 

Standard: Complex sentences with subject-verb agreement and avoidance of splices, run-ons, and fragments. (Composition, Editing: Grades 6-12, Di)

Focus Phrase: I will write complex sentences using correct punctuation and subject-verb agreement. 

Invitation to Notice: Because he was small, Stuart was often hard to find around the house. Stuart Little, E. B. White

To Consider:   

• Rule: When the AAAWWUBBIS comes at the beginning of a sentence, a comma follows. If the AAAWWUBBIS comes in the middle of a sentence, there is no comma needed. 
• Craft: What is the impact on meaning and prosody when those structures are used? How is the author using those structures to develop the character, advance the plot, or express theme?

Invitation to Compare and Contrast:  

• Because he was so small, Stuart was often hard to find around the house.
• Stuart was often hard to find around the house because he was so small.
• Note the grammatical differences between the two sentences. Note when a comma is needed and when it is not.
• Note the impact each has on you as a reader. What changes in terms of the writer's emphasis? What changes in your visualizations and comprehension?

Invitation to Edit:  Compose the sentence in both ways and analyze the effect on character, theme, and meaning.

• When his best friend disappears from her nest Stuart is determined to track her down.
• Stuart is a lover of adventure although he's shy.
• Since he lives in New York Stuart is used to city life. 

Reflection: What did we learn about writing from this author? What changed? Name the effect of the change you wish students to consider.

What is the IMPACT of using the dependent clause first? What is the IMPACT if the independent clause is used first? For the example here, I would say that the author's purpose is to emphasize how SMALL Stuart is. The main point is not that he is hard to find - that's just an example. The main point - and emphasized throughout the book is that he is SMALL. This is important to establish his character traits when he is introduced because it is a huge contrast to the optimism he marshals despite the huge deck stacked against him. I guess what I'm saying is that we have to go beyond grammatical structures and rules to express how they give us vehicles for power and beauty in discerning the author's message and the ability to craft our own contributions.

Teacher's Application to Writing: Here's how I'm using it today: "Because I was already irritated before entering the building, I continued to find it difficult to focus throughout the rest of the day." I'm liking this better than the other way around: I continued to find it difficult to focus throughout the rest of the day because I was already irritated before entering the building. The second version makes it seem like the point was the difficulty in focusing instead of the CAUSE. It also delays the emotion until the ending of the sentence. I want my reader to feel my irritation way before the end of that sentence.

New TEKS Overview: Interconnected Strands

Monday and Tuesday, I worked with a dedicated group of teachers and leaders at Childress ISD. Yes. These teachers came for staff development on the last week of school. Why? Because they want time to think about and plan their curriculum and textbook selection processes. Brilliant.

As we worked through the documents, I came away with a deeper understanding of the design and interconnectedness of the standards - even though I have been working with variations of the document for several years now. 

Here are two videos that describe my new learning. Thank you to Victoria Young and Jennifer Wilkerson who led CREST (Coalition of Reading and English Supervisors of Texas) in understanding the structure of the TEKS and how we can go about reading them to begin our curriculum planning.

Video One: TEKS Strands and Substrands

Video Two: Interconnectedness Across Strands within a grade level. 

HOW we READ matters. And it should change how we WRITE

Well, I got past page 22 of Disrupting Thinking, but had to stop and reflect after reading page 29. I've been thinking about how to blend reading and writing, especially with our new TEKS on the way. We've forgotten somehow that reading is supposed to "CHANGE who we are" (p. 23). But let's not stop there. Let's remember the power of what we read and how it can help us say what we need to say.

Let's ask kids comprehension questions. But for goodness sake, let's let those be a result of the questions we ask because what we are reading causes us to respond emotionally and intellectually. Let us connect first to humanity, and relevance, and meaning.

But for goodness sake, let's not stop there. Let us look at how authors crafted their messages to have those intellectual and emotional reactions in us. Let's stop telling kids what to write and say and think and show them that reading and thinking and discussing can inspire them to create something they know and care about. Let's help them understand the variety of choices and vehicles that are available to carry their thoughts.

While I was reading, I pulled up a word document and created sets of questions from the text. I think you can use these as prompts to help your students with both reading and writing.

Important Questions for Reading and Writing

Beers, K. & Probst, B. (2018). Disrupting thinking: Why how we read matters. New York, NY: Scholastic.