Last year we took some baby steps in thinking about how the new Common Core State Standards will affect the work we do on this blog.
Two things were obvious: The standards emphasize the reading of ?informational text,? and we work for a newspaper that produces a daily geyser of it.
So, we suggested, just regularly reading Times articles and Opinion pieces, looking at Times photographs, infographics or videos, or listening to Times podcasts, can be a great start. (To further encourage reading the paper, we?re asking students ?What Interested You Most in The Times This Week?? every Friday as our Student Opinion question.)
Meanwhile, our analysis in June revealed that the three lessons we did on the Common Core last year were all in the top five most-viewed lessons of the school year, so we knew teachers were interested, too. Just last week, in fact, we were delighted by a message on Twitter sent by an English teacher:
Over the summer, we began planning how to do more. Of one thing we were certain: whatever we did, we didn?t want to send the message to educators that we have the Common Core all figured out. As former teachers ourselves, we know that matching the standards to good classroom practice will take trial and error on the ground, with actual students.
Then, via Twitter, along came a wonderful answer, in the form of Sarah Gross and Jonathan Olsen, English and social studies teachers in New Jersey who told us that teaching with The Times daily has ?revolutionized? the humanities class they team teach.
We invited them for lunch in the Times cafeteria, and within an hour we had a plan.
Last year, Mr. Olsen and Ms. Gross, who work at High Technology High School in Lincroft, N.J., a school that U.S. News ranks as the No. 1 S.T.E.M. school in the nation, created short daily reading and writing prompts for their students to use with that day?s Times. They told us they wanted to do it again this year, but wanted to tailor the tasks more closely to Common Core demands.
So we agreed. Each week, they will send us the questions they tried in class that they and their students felt were the most successful.
But because what works for Ms. Gross and Mr. Olsen?s fairly high-level students may not work for everyone, on our end we?ll take what they?ve sent and add some scaffolding or other kinds of small changes to help make the questions more accessible for a range of learners.
So, beginning Sept. 21, each Friday you?ll find three quick, classroom-tested tasks that ask students to do Common Core-focused work with that week?s Times.
Our hope is that you?ll see at least one each Friday that works for you, and that you?ll write in and help us shape the feature as we go. It?s an experiment, after all.
Below, we asked Ms. Gross and Mr. Olsen to tell you a little more about who they are and how they work.
Sarah Gross and Jon Olsen, in Their Own Words
We teach ninth-grade history and English in a humanities course using a co-teaching model. We share lessons, teach together when possible, and design projects for our students that reinforce both content areas.
For example, if the English classes are reading excerpts from the ?Rub?iy?t of Omar Khayy?m,? our history classes will focus on the rise of Islam and its spread throughout the Middle East. While studying the Middle Ages in history, the students are reading ?Romeo and Juliet? in English.
The adoption of the Common Core, with its emphasis on informational texts and its focus on horizontal integration of material among different subject areas, gave us an excuse to revisit how we teach the essential components of both English and history.
We realized that our students read a great deal, but chiefly the typical high school fiction selections like ?The Canterbury Tales,? ?Romeo and Juliet,? and ?Things Fall Apart.? Their independent reading tends to focus on young adult fiction and best sellers. While we have read a fair amount of nonfiction in history class by using primary and secondary sources, we were nowhere near the percentage suggested by the Common Core across the grade level.
So, to include more high-interest nonfiction, we successfully begged our wonderful Parent Faculty Association to finance 16 copies of The New York Times for our students to use every day during the spring semester of 2012.
By reading the newspaper daily and writing in response to the paper?s content, our students greatly improved both their critical thinking and writing ability. Using The Times to teach history and literacy this past year forever changed our approach to education.
We are now able to meet all Common Core State Standards for writing and reading informational text, while preserving the literature curriculum already studied in English class. As a result of our daily inclusion of The Times, our redesigned classroom is now filled with topical writing, lively debate and students making connections between what they are learning in their classrooms with what is happening throughout the world around them.
As Sarah, who writes a blog called The Reading Zone, put it in a post in June:
At the beginning of our great experiment, many students were lacking in general background knowledge. Today, they can speak about a variety of issues and have learned to evaluate writing for bias, opinion, facts and much more.
They follow stories over extended periods of time and can have intelligent discussions about issues that include Syria, standardized testing, Facebook?s I.P.O., ancient artifact ownership, and concussions in sports. Bringing The Times into our class has afforded us many opportunities to make connections between the past and the present and I can?t imagine teaching without the paper now.
The Nuts and Bolts: This school year we started using The Times during the first week of school. Here is what our daily morning schedule looks like:
7 a.m.: Teachers arrive at school, browse the paper, plan daily prompt.
7:35 a.m.: Papers out on desks, prompt on the board.
7:40 a.m.: Students arrive and begin to read the paper and respond to the prompt.
8 a.m.: Selected students read responses, then the class briefly debates.
Every day our students read at least one article in the paper and write in response to it. They build stamina as they read high-level informational and argumentative text in the paper.
After they complete our daily prompt in the allotted time, students can read any article in the paper they like.
Students also read the paper during downtime in class, allowing us to differentiate. They can read articles that may be at a different level than those we assign to the class as a whole since The Times is filled with pieces written at a variety of reading levels every day.
What do you think? We very much hope to develop this new feature in conversation with teachers, so post a comment this week or any Friday.
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