Quality Reading Instruction in the Age of Common Core Standards

In this chapter, Neuman and Gambrell highlight a number of challenges in the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and provide suggestions for how we can turn these challenges into opportunities for promoting greater achievement for students. These new standards support the development of content knowledge and learning through text. They recognize that students need to read increasingly complex text and be able to read closely, looking for evidence to support their contentions and understandings. The Standards emphasize the importance of developing academic language. Together, it will require new teacher preparation and professional development as well as quality materials to support these new instructional practices. Still, this is an exciting time for the field of reading, one that that may ultimately lead us to a richer and more thorough understanding of the reading process and higher quality instruction in reading.

Strickland connects the key considerations for curriculum offered by the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts with an emergent and integrated view of early language and literacy learning and teaching. Links are also made to several current and ongoing early learning initiatives, such as the efforts to implement a more cohesive learning continuum from preschool through grade 3 and the increased use of more formal assessments during the early learning years. High-quality professional development for all involved in the education of young students is stressed. Implications for policy, practice, and research are offered throughout.

Intentional teaching of speaking and language development are crucial to the development of literacy. Morrow and Kramer address language development and speaking using the Common Core State Standards as the guide. In the chapter, standards are listed, and actual classroom vignettes are presented in which the different skills are taught. Given that students will need greater focus on academic talk and Standard English, intentional teaching of the Common Core Standards in language and speaking has been neglected. The Standards do an excellent job of emphasizing these crucial skills.

The Common Core State Standards call for some significant shifts in the texts used in K–12 classrooms. In particular, with their emphasis on the range and complexity of classroom texts, the Standards require a shift in the distribution of literary and informational texts and an increase in text complexity across grade levels. This chapter provides an overview of the Standards related to reading and writing informational texts. Halladay and Duke outline the Standards, describe research related to teaching with informational texts, and offer concrete suggestions for teaching with and about informational texts in K–12 classrooms.

The classroom teacher will be the linchpin of success or failure for implementation of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. From inadequate professional development, to an expectation that teachers have the time and knowledge necessary to create de novo an effective Standards-compliant curriculum, to the intractable and well-documented problems around teachers' knowledge and use of evidence-based practices and issues of practitioner compliance, Reutzel discusses pitfalls and possibilities around the capacity of and support for current educational practitioners to successfully rise to the 21st-century challenge of preparing students to be college and career ready in literacy.

In this chapter, Tatum discusses the promise and potential shortcomings of the Common Core State Standards for African American males in grades K–12. Six recommendations are offered for implementing the new standards in K–12 classrooms to protect African American males' rights to excellent reading and writing instruction, namely, the ones attending schools in high-poverty communities. The author also offers a seven-step multidimensional reading model and a sample lesson that focus on teaching text to nurture reading, writing, and human development.

Opportunities and oversights of the Common Core Standards for influencing the language arts achievement of English learners are discussed in this chapter. The emphasis on language production, the study of language structure, and vocabulary learning are suggested as potential supports for language arts achievement. Two significant oversights of the Standards identified by Roberts include the omission of affirming the benefits of first-language resources and addressing the challenges associated with aligning grade-level objectives with understanding that English learners may need more time to achieve them. The value of positive motivation, research on effective teaching, and the importance of preschool for language arts achievement are discussed.

McGill-Franzen and Smith assert that the Common Core State Standards will support the effectiveness of RTI if certain contingencies hold: (a) that the intent of RTI is honored, that is, to prevent reading failure by providing differentiated classroom instruction to all students and appropriate, focused early intervention to those at risk; and (b) that teachers' professional expertise is both developed and honored, enabling them to gain diagnostic insight into students' thinking and the autonomy to act on this knowledge by teaching in responsive and highly personal ways. RTI requires collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, as do the Standards, and has as its end point the same outcome as the Common Core: literacy proficiency that follows a clearly defined trajectory of increasing competence and complexity across the grades.

The Common Core State Standards highlight the importance of vocabulary and comprehension for college and career readiness. Many ELs in U.S. schools experience difficulty in learning content across the curriculum because of limited English vocabulary knowledge and comprehension skills. In this chapter, Silverman and Doyle provide background information on the vocabulary and comprehension development of ELs, general principles of research-based vocabulary and comprehension instruction for these students, and specific recommendations for instructional practices to support ELs in meeting vocabulary and comprehension standards as outlined in the Common Core.

Cunningham addresses the three most significant reading instructional changes called for by the Common Core State Standards and their associated documents: more difficult texts, replacing comprehension instruction with learning-from-text instruction, and reliance on text-dependent questions and tasks. The chapter also briefly describes the research, especially on text complexity, that the author expects and hopes each of the changes will serve as a catalyst to bring about. Additionally, he suggests for each change a prudent strategy for teachers and schools to pursue in the interim until the needed research is conducted, if it ever is.

Standard 10, devoted to students' proficiency with complex text, is the feature that most distinguishes the Common Core State Standards from previous standards documents. Many educators have questions about how to support this standard. Hiebert provides answers to these questions about text complexity, especially those pertaining to how struggling readers' capacity with complex texts can be increased. These answers are developed through three topics: the distribution of vocabulary in texts, students' performances with core vocabulary, and scaffolding that supports students' reading of texts.

Literacy engagement is the missing link for teachers and educators seeking to help students attain the Common Core State Standards. Because complex texts are so challenging, students have to be exceptionally motivated. Teachers who are moving students forward toward proficiency in the Standards are providing relevance, choices, values, and collaboration. Those contexts boost students' confidence, interest, and beliefs about complex texts. Motivations power students' deep engagement so they learn the skills to comprehend complex texts better. Guthrie and McPeake provide examples of engagement-fostering units and lessons and give research evidence for the teaching practices.

The large body of electronic picture storybooks that is available for young children shows much variety in design features, with elements such as video, sounds/music, games, and other interactive elements (e.g., hotspots). In the age of the Common Core Standards, it is important for teachers to know which electronic books to select for preschool and kindergarten classrooms. Smeets and Bus review which e-books are appropriate to familiarize 4–6-year-olds with children's literature and may contribute to their basic reading skills and interest in books. What is the potential of independent e-book reading compared with traditional shared book reading, where parents/teachers comment to the story and provide explanations of events and difficult words?

E-books are rapidly spreading into the classroom as a reading resource in the reading program. Roskos discusses the emerging role of e-books in the teaching of reading. Current research on e-books in the early childhood classroom is reviewed in four areas: e-book quality, physical space for e-book browsing/reading, student engagement with e-books (e.g., touch screens, mobiles), and shared reading with e-books to develop essential skills. Implications of these early findings for reading instruction are discussed. The authors provide a before–during–after framework for shared e-book reading and highlight differences between shared reading with e-books and traditional print books.

The basis of this paper is that significantly increasing the number of students who meet or exceed the requirements of the Common Core State Standards is possible only by significantly increasing the productivity of the classroom. Classroom productivity problems and the potential of technology for solving them are examined across each of four core language and literacy domains: understanding complex informational texts, developing reading fluency, conquering phonics, and preschool read-alouds.

Literacy educators live in new times with new literacies. How we adapt in the classroom will define our students' future. Leu and colleagues explore two elements of the Common Core State Standards likely to impact classroom literacy instruction in profound ways: digital literacies and higher level thinking during reading. First, the authors explain why the Standards have appeared and why the digital literacies of online research and comprehension as well as higher level thinking are emphasized. They then share innovative assessments that evaluate students' ability to conduct research online and write a short report. Finally, they explore how we might think about evaluating students' abilities with online research and comprehension in ways to inform instruction.

This chapter begins by unearthing five assumptions underlying the Common Core State Standards. For each assumption, Pearson evaluates the strength of the research base underlying it and the degree to which that research base is reflected in the Standards themselves and in the documents prepared to guide their implementation. Using a content and thematic analysis of key documents, he concludes that the strength of the research base is highly variable across these five assumptions and that there is often a disconnect between the portrayal of the research base in the Standards and the implementation guides prepared to transform them into curriculum and pedagogy.