Teaching to Exceed the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards

Book excerpt: As the new English Language Arts Common Core State Standards take hold across the United States, the need grows for pre-service and in-service teachers to be ready to develop curriculum and instruction that addresses their requirements. This timely, thoughtful, and comprehensive text directly meets this need. It delineates a literacy practices and critical engagement curriculum framework for 6-12 English language arts education that explains and illustrates how the Standards’ highest and best intentions for student success can be implemented from a critical, culturally relevant perspective that is firmly grounded in current literacy learning theory and research. The first 6-12 English language arts methods text to be aligned with the Standards, this book also addresses their limitations — formalist assumptions about literacy learning, limited attention to media/digital literacies, lack of attention to critical literacies, and questionable assumptions about linking standards and text complexity to specific grade levels. Specific examples of teachers using the literacy practices/critical engagement curriculum framework in their classrooms shows how these limitations can be surpassed. Features • Moves the CCSS framework into a view that literacy is a contextualized, social practice • Challenges simplistic models that homogenize adolescent learners • Adds the important element of critical literacy to English language arts classrooms • Provides specific examples of teachers in action implementing these practices • Interactive Companion Website with student and instructor resources. The Website is designed to foster interactivity through participation in an online teaching planning simulation with a text, video, or case on one side of the screen and a chat box for instructors and students to share their reactions and planning ideas. The Companion Website is linked to a wiki that serves as a repository for links, activities/units, and further reading.