Core Reading Curriculum Alignment with Pacing Guide

Last year our county spent millions of dollars adopting a new Core Reading Curriculum. In trying to honor our earlier intensive professional development with the America's Choice School design, the county asked that the publisher rewrite the Teacher Edition so that it would reflect our training with Readers' and Writers' Workshop. Understand that the anthology was not rewritten. The stories and resources were the same, although the county had discretion about which pieces they purchased for teachers. The rewriting simply meant that the resources and lessons were rearranged and rewritten in the Workshop format to meet the county's requirement.

We now have a huge amount of new "stuff" - so much in fact, that it has often been difficult to figure out just what we have in this multi-year adoption and how to best use each piece. The county has spent significantly on these resources, so we certainly have a fiscal responsibility to try to use them and use them well! We also want to make sure that we understand the scope and sequence expectations for each grade level so that as children transfer within our county, there is some standard of consistency.

One of the problems with the Core and its desire to be all things to all people, and especially with the Duval County Teacher Edition, is that the strategies are presented in what Lucy Calkins calls "popcorn" lessons that spiral throughout the curriculum. This means that strategies in reading are presented throughout the year and revisited often. This presentation differs from our earlier professional development where we adopted Ellin Keene, Susan Zimmermann and Debbie Miller's ideas of teaching the strategies with depth over an extended length of time. So... in order to best use the Core as a resource to teach the strategies, it made sense to align the lessons in the Teacher Edition with the seven "Mosaic" comprehension strategies (Monitoring for Meaning, Sensory Images, Making Connections, Questioning, Drawing Inferences, Determining Importance, Synthesizing). In coming to terms with how to do that, it was important to understand that the Core presented both strategies (the same that we were familiar with above), but also skills. The skills, e.g., cause and effect, noting details, compare and contrast, could be taught under different strategies depending on the intent of the instruction. That meant that each Core skill had to be aligned with the strategy that encompassed that skill. We have now completed this alignment for first grade.

This, of course, is not a perfect document and will need to be personalized by each teacher that chooses to use it. This is the way it is designed to be used. As a teacher works through the lessons that she is going to teach for a specific strategy - for instance, Making Connections - she would use ideas from resources such as Mosaic of Thought, Reading with Meaning, 7 Keys to Comprehension, but she would also look through the Houghton Mifflin alignment to review the scope of skills expected to be taught for the grade level and also the sequence in which those skills are intended to be taught. She would review the recommended resources to see how they might be used in mini-lessons, guided reading and centers. She might choose the Houghton Mifflin read aloud story or big book for her mini-lesson demonstration because the Core identified it as having strong connections for first graders. She might choose a set of little books to use with a guided reading group because the Core identified that set of books as below, on or above grade level or because it identified the books with strong connections and she wanted to reinforce the mini-lesson or she might choose resources from the Core that could be used for a center activity. She might also use the cold assessments in the Houghton Mifflin Core to make sure that students have mastered the grade level expectations for that strategy. These are powerful resources to have in her toolbox for teaching.

The idea is to start with the students and their needs and then to design lessons that teach to those needs. This alignment is one way to take what we have and to find a way to use it to make a difference in student achievement - after all, isn't that our goal?

It's Not Yo Momma's Basal!

I have spent the last few days listening to publishers as they try to convince the Reading Adoption Committee that their basal series (or should I say Comprehensive Core Reading Program) should be the main event in Duval County for the 2008-09 school year. You might wonder what a basal basher like me is doing on a Committee like this? Good question! I'm here because as political winds shift, the battle cry becomes louder that all schools in this large, diverse county should be on the same page - should have the same opportunities. A huge undertaking!

I come from a school that placed the Teacher Editions in the book room after the last reading adoption and left them there. We shook our heads sadly at the huge waste of trees and money. From the adoption we only used the level texts for our classrooms libraries. We spent the next six years of the adoption immersed in the Workshop model offering our own intensive, embedded Professional Development based on the work we were doing with America's Choice (we offered our teachers over 400 opportunities for professional development on the clock at our school site last year!) We sent our teachers all over the country to learn from the best and brightest (Lucy Calkins, Ellin Keene, Sharon Taberski, Ralph Fletcher, Debbie Miller, Kylene Beers, Fountas and Pinnell...) We studied professional books together; we did demo lessons for each other and then debriefed to raise the level of our work; we brought student work to the table to discuss and debate; we wrote common assessments and rubrics... We became a collegial, first class learning community of lifelong learners. We worked hard. As a result we really taught teachers to teach, and we did it well. We did all this without a core reading series.

So now, why would we want anything to do with a Core Reading Program? Well...because the Core has changed. Each publisher that presented, of course, put their own spin on what they could offer, but basically there were some intriguing possibilities - an incredible amount of differentiated instruction is being offered. There are integrated strategies for second language learners and separate programs for our Tier III students (which will become even more important as our county moves into fuller inclusion). Technology is everywhere, making so many of the things we are now doing faster and simpler. Lesson plans are easy to complete and yet complex in their content with just a few clicks of the mouse. There is the possibility that assessments and homework assignments can be individualized within minutes. Professional development is being offered when it's needed, even at home, with short video clips of teachers actually teaching the lessons! Professionals to do the training are being offered like... Vocabulary Instruction from Isabell Beck, Assessment from Roger Farr, Guided Reading Lessons from Irene Fountas... WOW! We have learned in these past six years that doing Readers' and Writers' Workshop RIGHT is incredibly time consuming, and we often find that we are working 24/7. What I see in the Core are endless resources that can make life simpler and more manageable. We have taught our teachers now to be discerning enough that they will be able to make the sophisticated decisions that it will take to individualize for each of their students, taking advantage of Core pieces as they are appropriate. Less seasoned teachers will have the full support of a day-by-day planner but when a seasoned teacher sees that she can teach a lesson much better than the Core, she will. She will hold on to what has been good about what has been learned these last six years. We will hold fiercely to our commitment to a deep Readers' and Writers' Workshop while ALL teachers commit to the Scope and Sequence and adhere to it with fidelity. That will become the backbone and common piece that will rally us around the flagpole as the Core Reading Program is implemented across the county. It is the piece that will put us ALL on the same page and give us ALL equal access.

The other thing that I realize anew is that no program will ever take the place of a passionate teacher. Motivation cannot be packaged. Relationships between teachers and students will always be the cornerstone of successful teaching. So I say... bring on the Core! It simply adds tools to our toolbox. The Scope and Sequence will become our rally cry - something that we can all agree to implement with fidelity. We will hang on to what has been good as we stand on the shoulders of our history to actively pursue our future.

Update: As I look at how promising this blog post was, the reality was that the Core was really not very different than it had always been.  Instruction from real professionals was never offered.  Technology was so cumbersome that it was never realized. Chets Creek, like it had for the previous adoption, stored the manuals in the supply closet with a sigh of regret, wishing the money could have been spent on something useful!