The Common Core Companion: Booster Lessons, Grades 3-5. Leslie Blauman

Kelly Gallagher (2015) points out in his book In the Best Interests of Students, “Remember that good teaching is not about ‘covering’ a new list of standards; good teaching is grounded in practices proven to sharpen our students’ literacy skills” (p. 3). The spirit of this book is just that: I want to help you center your instruction on what we know works in developing learners’ capacity to read, write, listen, and speak. To that end, the Big Ticket practice at work is connecting reading and writing. A reading lesson is followed by a companion writing lesson, or vice versa, so that students benefit from seeing the yin and yang of these two processes. A mountain of research supports instruction that helps students see both reading and writing as reciprocal processes. When we teach students to read like writers and write like readers, each endeavor makes much more sense to kids.

      In addition, the lessons and learning integrate select core practices. These are the research-based practices that have proven to be worthwhile. So for each lesson sequence, I’ve handpicked the core literacy practices most relevant to the lessons and learning. What follows is the master list of them (go to www.corwin.com/thecommoncorecompanion to find definitions of each one).

      Sequence 1 includes

       Gradual release model

       Co-construct

       Turn and talk

       Graphic organizers

       Reflection

       Explicit teaching

       Responsive teaching

       Student ownership

       Anchor charts

       Metacognition

       Tying content to real-world examples

      Sequence 2 introduces

       Modeling

       Scaffolding

       Annotating texts

       Using text evidence

       Process writing

       Highlighting

       Annotating texts

       Using text evidence

       Rubrics

       Feedback

      Sequence 3 includes

       Turn and talk

       Mentor texts

       Mini-lessons

       Independent reading

       Reading journals

       Conferring

       Feedback

       Coaching

       Process writing

       Independent writing

       Book clubs

       Anchor texts

       Student ownership

       Independent reading

       Revisiting texts

       Connecting across the curriculum

      Sequence 4 introduces

       Mentor texts

       Mini-lessons

       Modeling

       Peer work

       Anchor charts

       Annotating texts

       Graphic organizers

       Scaffolding

       Rubrics

      Sequence 5 includes

       Guided practice

       Co-construct

       Mentor texts

       Modeling

       Graphic organizers

       Using text evidence

       Revisiting texts

       Peer work

      I decided not to take the time in this book to call on the carpet practices that don’t have much evidence to support them, but I encourage you to do a makeover of your reading and writing block and consider retiring practices that seem, well, tired. By tired, I mean they don’t really move the needle on students’ skills or engagement or carry weight in terms of helping you to know your readers and writers. Rewards-driven reading routines, for example, are a no-no. Worksheets and word searches are two other common time zappers. See Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss’s No More Independent Reading without Support for more insights on ineffective and effective reading practices. For writing, some common ways in which writing is shortchanged in schools include not allowing for student choice or only writing to prompts, jumping from activity to activity without a focus or focusing instruction only on the mechanics, or writing classes that don’t address the workshop model, which allows for a focus lesson, independent work, and a closure (Fletcher and Portalupi 2001; Gallagher 2011; Graves 1994; Ray 2001; Routman 2005). These are writing routines that have no research support.

      Students need to be writing across the curricula, and often. Reading is often described as the invisible process that therefore needs lots of think alouds and teacher demonstrations to make it “visible,” but I would argue that a writer’s process needs an equal amount of modeling.

      What’s the through line of the core practices that do work? I’d say it’s authenticity. Yep, that’s another term used so often it loses meaning, so I’ll define it for myself and for this book as meaning being respectful of students’ maturity. Children don’t need or want cutesy, and their nose for busywork is sharper than a hound dog’s. Be authentic with them instead. They want to feel they are in the same reading club and the same writing club as you are. So as you will see in these lessons, share the books and other texts that you truly adore. Share the op-eds, reviews, sports stories, news that irritated you, or inspired you—and they will follow suit. Share pieces of writing you’ve received or done that have something to teach them. Tell them about what’s hard or easy for you as a writer. Ask them for permission when you want to share what they have written with others. This last point leads into the third facet of integration that drives this book: peer models.

      Think Peer Models and Peer Collaboration

      Toward the end of each sequence, you’ll see I included writing samples from students and also have a page called “Peer Power: How to Use Student Work as Mentor Texts.” Integrating students’ writing into the weave of your reading and writing instruction is as important as integrating standards. Let me repeat that: it’s as important as integrating standards. Student writing as mentor texts functions like the Panama Canal, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. When kids read and discuss each other’s work, suddenly the “continents” of reading and writing connect, the passageway is clear! The purpose of reading and the purpose of writing suddenly matter because the writer is right there to embody the ideas, answer questions, clarify. And in the push for authentically student-driven dialogue, it makes such sense to use student pieces because students can more naturally pose and pursue the questions when they or peers “own” the texts at the heart of the discourse.

      So as you embark on teaching with these sequences, I encourage you to begin to build a bank of student work and use it. Often. Used in combination with the work of published writers, it’s powerful.

      Students’ written work is also, of course, the data to look at in order to figure out what you might want to teach