What Kind of Student Writing Do We Want? And Where?

| By Susan Perkins Weston | 

 Some writing makes an argument to support a claim.  Other pieces inform or explain, and still others provide narratives or real or imagined experience.  Our Kentucky Academic Standards call for students to become skilled in all three, but that still leaves room to puzzle about how much teaching and learning time should be invested in each kind. 

In EdWeek's new coverage of Changing Practice in Writing Instruction, that balancing pops up in multiple places.  In one interview, Lucy Calkins says "the common core says that a third of kids’ writing should be narrative."  Another article reports that "By the time students are in 12th grade, literary writing to convey experiences is expected to take up 20 percent of the time allotted to composition, compared with 40 percent each for informative writing and argumentative writing."

Both statements share a part of story. The 2010 Common Core State Standards aimed to align with an earlier Writing Framework for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.  The original CCSS document show that framework using this table:

It's clear that Dr. Calkins' comment is about the grade 4 expectations, and the other article was explicitly looking at grade 12.

Both leave something big to be said.  This isn't all about English and the study of composition. Much of the high school writing for argumentation and explanation can be, should be, and must be part of mastering scientific communication and civic participation. That work belongs in science classes and social studies classes. That version of literacy needs teachers who are expert in the work of those disciplines.  Still more, those disciplines need literate students: they need students who are equipped to make sense of texts about science and social studies and equipped to organize and share thinking in those fields. 

For example, a high school's writing plans might be spread out like this, with plenty of room for narrative in English because major slices of argument and explanation happen in other classes.

The elementary and middle years can prepare students for that high school range, with argument and explanation becoming increasingly important as students mature.

Seeing the role of disciplines beyond English is essential to understanding how richly English classes can engage narrative writing, literary texts, and other classic undertaking.

Prichard Committee Statement on 2015 ACT Results

Here's the full text of the Prichard Committee statement released today:

The ACT results released today by Kentucky Department of Education show positive trends for the 2015 graduating class overall, but raise concerns about whether African American, Hispanic, and American Indian students are receiving the full support they need and deserve.

The good news is that members of the 2015 class as a whole looked stronger than their 2014 peers. In English, mathematics and reading, more of them met Kentucky’s benchmarks for college readiness. Progress in mathematics was especially strong, with an increase of more than 4% in students who are ready for credit-bearing college work.

For some student groups, however, the results were clearly not strong enough. Students from different racial backgrounds still have quite different results. Looking at ACT composite scores, 2015 African American graduates did no better than their 2014 peers, and Hispanic graduates did slightly worse. American Indian students improved just slightly faster than white students and not at a pace to close the big gap between the two groups. All three groups have results showing them less ready for college success than their white and Asian classmates.

The Kentucky Board of Education has already added important new efforts to reduce novice performance in all subgroups, signaling that it is time for deeper, more sustained work to end these gaps. To support renewed and expanding work on increasing achievement and closing gaps, a Prichard Committee study group will be working through the fall to analyze data, policy and practice, with the aim to share recommendations at the beginning of 2016.

For Kentucky to flourish, we need for Kentucky students of every background to reach their potential and join in building a strong, shared future. While progress is evident overall, important student subgroups still lag behind, demonstrating the need for more concerted efforts to close these gaps rapidly. Our goal must be for all Kentucky students to graduate from high school truly ready for adult success.

ACT Readiness Moves Forward, But With Important Gaps

The Kentucky Department of Education released ACT results for 2015 public school graduates this afternoon, showing a sturdy trend for students overall but raising concerns about how well we're serving our African-American, Hispanic, and American Indian students.

First, here's the overall good news, with upward movement on the percent of students reaching all three of the college readiness benchmarks set by the Council on Postsecondary Education.

Second, here's a look at the trends for subgroups, this time showing composite scores (combining English, math, reading, and science) rather than percent meeting benchmarks. Highlighted, you can see that:

• African American students made no gains compared to last year
• Hispanic students lost one-tenth of a point
• American Indian students gained three-tenths of a point, growing a bit faster than students overall, with results still far behind their white classmates

Results for students with disabilities and students who receive free or reduced-price meals were not included in the press release but will be included in the 2014-15 school report cards now scheduled for release in early October.
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Finding Solutions (New Prichard Report On Implementing Standards in Kentucky Classrooms)

Important news fresh from Tuesday's Prichard Committee press release:

A first-hand look at how Kentucky’s academic standards are spurring innovative teaching and learning in classrooms is the focus of a special report from the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.

“Finding Solutions: Standards Push Students Toward Real-Life Problems” features eighth-grade math teacher Christa Lemily’s approach to introducing her South Warren Middle School students to mathematical formulas by determining the value of investing in a classic car. Such connections between challenging math and real-world situations have grown as a result of Kentucky’s academic standards.

“The standards focus not just on repetition, but on understanding and applying mathematic reasoning,” Lemily said. “These standards help teachers focus on how students are taught to reason and think through math as much as they focus on the skills that students are taught. The goal is math thinkers, not just math do-ers.”

Teachers at Pembroke Elementary and Millbrooke Elementary, both in Christian County, also share their experiences with the standards. Pembroke teacher Jettie Payne said the standards are prompting her fifth-grade math students to gain a solid understanding of fractions and decimals.

She also said her classroom represents a change from the way she learned to teach. “I remember sitting in class thinking, ‘When will I ever use this?,’” she said, adding that her lessons now draw clear connections between math and everyday application.

Millbrooke’s Cindy Wyatt said the standards have prompted her to select more challenging books for her second graders, leading to more interesting reflections and conversations in reading groups and stronger vocabulary development.

Kentucky's academic standards are also the focus of a second Prichard Committee report released today on “Progress in Kentucky Education: Higher Standards, Assessments and Teaching." Together, the reports provide an overview of progress in Kentucky education and how that is reflected in both policy developments and classroom practices.  Both are available at www.prichardcommittee.org.

Kindergartners Reading Closely

EdWeek is sharing a lively example of students (very small students) figuring out story details:

The book recounts how the author's grandmother taught her to manage her fear of thunderstorms by learning to tell how far away they were and hurrying to bake a cake before the rain began.

The teacher asked a cluster of questions aimed at helping the children understand that the author is also the narrator. "I wonder who's telling this story? Turn and talk to your buddy," she said.

And then: "Oh, so the character is also the author?"

When the narrator described the "sharp crackling light" that frightened her, Ms. Landahl said: "What is she scared of?"

Hands shot up. "Thunder!" some children called out.

"Well, that's the sound," Ms. Landahl replied. "She can see the light, right?"

There was a momentary pause, and then a girl said: "It's lightning."

The article on "New Read-Aloud Strategies" offers a great look at ways to take students deeper into reading.  For this kindergarten class, it's done through reading out loud to enjoy the story, then reading again to enjoy more deeply, with attention to how the parts fit together.  A video portion of the story shows students talking in pairs to figure out some of the answers and identify the specific part of the story that is the evidence for the answers they choose.

At this age, the goal is to ensure that the young learners can"with prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text."

That's laying a foundation so that in two years they'll be ready to "ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text," and in four years they'll be able to "refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text."

Those three italicized standards are  kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade versions of Reading Standard 1 from Kentucky's academic standards, and they are also expectations for those three levels in Nevada, where the EdWeek article found Ms. Landahl and her students studying the book Thundercake.

Parts of Ms. Landahl's teaching plan came from designs shared by teachers across the country and shared through the Read-Aloud Project, jointly sponsored by  Student Achievement Partners (based in New York) and the Council of Great City Schools (serving students and schools in urban areas all across the country).  In turn, Kentucky teachers from Pikeville to the Jackson Purchase can draw from those resources and contribute their own teaching plans.

It's a great example of how sharing standards can contribute to excellence for individual children in local schools all over the country.

Program Reviews as the Newest Accountabilty Element

Program reviews are a new indicator of the quality of student learning opportunities in subjects that Kentucky no longer tests.  For accountability, there are three reviews, focused respectively on writing, arts & humanities, and practical living & career studies.  And, as you can see,when the school scores submitted by all districts are combined into statewide numbers, they average out very high.

It's worth unpacking those results from the statewide briefing packet on the new results a little more.  Individual program review rubrics use a 0 to 12 scale, with 8 being the score for a proficient program.  To get numbers like the ones shown above, the scores on all three reviews are added together and divided by 24 (equivalent to three proficient scores).  Scores above the 100 level are rounded down to the 100 maximum allowed by the state scoring system.

So, the graph above shows that statewide, districts on average are rating their schools proficient or higher on their program reviews.  Individual schools had higher and lower scores, but the averages came out at or above 100 on all three levels.

Below, you can see the results for each subject for the two available years, all using the 0 to 12 scale that applies for individual reviews.  There, too, it's clear that the averages are now at or slightly above the proficient level for all three programs at all three levels.

In 2008, the discussion about program reviews included clarity that the Kentucky Department of Education would need to play a major role in ensuring consistent scoring, along with consistent refusal to estimate the costs.  In 2009, Senate Bill 1 specified "Each local district shall do an annual program review and the Department of Education shall conduct a program review of every school's program within a two (2) year period," again without frank engagement about the price tag.    Since that point, the Department has had no resources to carry out that scale of review, and many discussions have fallen into saying that schools score themselves, even though state law makes the reviews a district obligation. 

Whoever has been leading the process and whoever has been monitoring, I think these results will move us quickly to a serious discussion about what it will really take to ensure that program reviews reflect consistent scoring against high expectations.  That discussion is at least six years overdue.

--Posted by Susan Perkins Weston

Three quick notes for a busy morning...

1.  Student voices, teacher explanations, and learning success, are all part of this great CN2 report on Boyle County strategies!


2. "Exercise is ADHD Medication" at The Atlantic website starts from multiple studies on the brain benefits of physical activity and builds up to justified frustration with schools and communities that still aren't rebuilding students' opportunities to move and become ready to learn.

3. Current federal law mandates reading and math testing every year from grade 3 to grade 8, but recently filed legislation could give states more flexibility, requiring them to test either reading or math in each of those grades.  Representative Stephen Israel (NY) filed the bill with support from the American Federation of Teachers, and details are included in this EdWeek blogpost.

School results coming soon: now with program review data

Friday, October 3rd, is now the scheduled date for 2014 accountability results to be released to the public, and the 2014 school report cards will include program reviews as an additional source of evidence about how students are being served.

Kentucky uses program reviews to check on the quality of students' learning opportunities in subjects that we no longer test, including arts and humanities, practical living and career studies, and writing of the sustained kind that is not easily measured by brief standardized assessments.

The Kentucky EdGuide on "Quality of Learning Programs" explains that:

[A] program review is defined as “a systematic method of analyzing components of an instructional program, including instructional practices, aligned and enacted curriculum, student work samples, formative and summative assessments, professional development and support services, and administrative support and monitoring.” 

Each program review looks at multiple aspects of a school’s program, using a rubric organized around standards for the program and “demonstrators” of strong quality on that standard. For each demonstrator, a school’s program can be scored 0 (no implementation), 1 (needs improvement), 2 (proficient), or 3 (distinguished), based on more detailed characteristics found in the rubric.

You can learn more about program reviews by downloading the EdGuide or by taking a look at the program review rubrics schools use to score themselves.

Many schools' 2014 overall scores may look better now that program reviews are included. 

I say that because we already know how 2013 overall scores would have looked with program reviews factored in, and most scores definitely would have been higher.  In the chart below, you can see examples of the impact.   The lighter bars show the statewide overall scores for each level from the 2013 state report card (without program review data), and the darker ones show the Department of Education's calculation of the same overall scores with program review data included.  The revised versions look stronger because, in general, schools' program review scores are stronger than their state test scores and graduation rates.

However, it is important to know that 2014 accountability will be an apples-to-apples comparison.  Program reviews were included when schools' 2014 annual measurable objectives were set, and they were included in defining the 2014 scores that will qualify a school for a particular percentile rank and accountability classification. 

Source note: the 2013 overall scores that include program review data can be found in the Accountability section of KDE's Open House portal, in a file that also shows the 2013-14 annual measurable objectives for improving on the 2012-13 results.

--Posted by Susan Perkins Weston

Will better math tests be good enough?

PARCC and Smarter Balanced are the two multistate consortia working on new assessments for the Common Core State Standards. After four years of design and pilot testing and field testing, they're nearly ready for prime-time use--meaning administration to large groups of students for use in statewide accountability systems.  Since Kentucky hasn't chosen to use either assessment yet, I've been noticing news about both, including a rising debate about the ways they approach mathematics.

The consortia argue that their new versions are definitely better than existing multiple choice math tests because of new on-line options.  As an EdWeek report recently summarized:

Unlike previous state assessments, those being developed by the two federally funded consortia will include complex, multipart word problems that students will answer on screen. While some of those questions will provide built-in tools that allow students to put points on a graph or draw lines on a ready-made picture, other questions will ask them to write their answers in narrative form, using a keyboard.

But others argue that the computer tools still aren't close enough to the real work of using math to solve problems.  In the same EdWeek account, David Foster of the Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative shared his concerns:

"I'm a mathematician, and I never solve problems by merely sitting at the keyboard. I have to take out paper and pencil and sketch and doodle and tinker around and draw charts," he said. "Of course, I use spreadsheets all the time, but I don't even start a spreadsheet until I know what I want to put in the cells.

"All Smarter Balanced and PARCC are going to look at is the final explanation that is written down," he said, "and if there's a flaw in the logic, there's no way to award kids for the work they really did and thought about."

Mr. Foster added: "I've played with the platform, and it makes me sick. And I've done it with problems I've written."

I'm suspect they're both right.  PARCC and Smarter Balanced are offering some big steps forward in how students answer math prompts, and yet they are also far from inviting students to use math in ways that are close to real life applications on the job, in the home, or in civic life.

For the long-term education discussion, this debate turns yet another spotlight on an enduring puzzle: how can schools develop a balanced commitment to the skills that are easy to measure and the skills that matter at least as much but don't fit easily into standardized assessments?

Do note that Kentucky is not signed up to use either PARCC or Smarter Balanced.  Our current K-PREP assessments use methods that were in use years before we adopted Common Core, and any changes from that will occur when the Department of Education seeks new bids for our testing contracts.  The consortia will be eligible to submit proposals, in open competition with other companies that think they can provide the data we need.

--Posted by Susan Perkins Weston

International Benchmarks for Kentucky Scoring

If Kentucky 2011 students had taken the international TIMSS and PIRLS assessments, the American Institutes of Research estimates that:

• 46% of Kentucky fourth graders would have reached the high benchmark in mathematics (in a system that gives scores of low, intermediate, high, and advanced)

• 60% of Kentucky fourth graders would have reached the high benchmark in reading

• 27% of Kentucky eighth graders would have reached the high benchmark in mathematics

AIR used a "chain linking" method to develop those estimates, reported in a new report on International Benchmarking: State and National Education Performance Standards.

The report also shares analysis of how Kentucky defined proficient work on the old KCCT assessment and the new K-PREP tests.  On the old test, Kentucky's proficient lined up with TIMSS and PIRLS scores of at the intermediate level.  In our new system, launched in 2012, AIR concludes that Kentucky proficient lines up with the high score level on the international assessments.  That's an excellent step up for helping us understand how our students' learning compares to success rates around the globe!

--Posted by Susan Perkins Weston

Which AP tests do Kentucky students take and pass?

On Advanced Placement tests, scores of 3, 4, or 5 can qualify a student for college credit, placement in advanced courses, or both.  Monday, while posting on the Leaders and Laggards report,  I realized that the subjects where students earn those credits deserve closer attention.

So, below, two additional thoughts on AP test success in Kentucky.

First, a look at the major areas where 2013 public school students received successful scores, combining multiple tests in disciplinary clusters. The green shades identify science, math, and world languages, the subjects that Leaders and Laggards included in their economic competitiveness ratings.  The very small slice for world languages stands out as a weak result in the overall picture.

Second, a look at the top 12 tests where Kentucky students succeed, showing the number of students passing each test.  It isn't really a surprise to see the English tests at the top of this list, but it would definitely be good to see the science, math, and language numbers move up.

Source note: These numbers come from the page for "AP Program Participation and Performance Data 2013" at the College Board website.

--Posted by Susan Perkins Weston

Reaching Top 20 Will Require Hard Push for Kentucky Improvement

LEXINGTON, Ky. – Moving Kentucky into the top tier of states in key areas of education by 2020 will require a hard push for improvement in the next six years, according to a new report from the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.

The 2014 update of the Committee’s “Top 20 by 2020” found Kentucky’s performance in six categories to be on track to reach the goal. These include reading scores, Advanced Placement credits and teacher salaries.

But other indicators show reason for concern. The report noted that Kentucky lost ground in the math achievement of eighth-grade students and the share of higher education costs that families must pay. The state’s performance also showed no net improvement in total higher education funding or bachelor’s degrees earned in science, technology, engineering and math.

The state’s ranking in other areas showed some improvement, but not at a rate sufficient to reach the Top 20 by 2020. These include the number of adults with a high school diploma, preschool enrollment, per-pupil funding and adults with a bachelor’s degree.

The Prichard Committee began its Top 20 measurements in 2008, when it issued a challenge to the state to accelerate the improvement of its education system. The latest report is the third update of the initial measurement. The update is available here.

Education Commissioner Terry Holliday applauded the report for highlighting Kentucky’s progress in areas like reading, Advanced Placement and teacher salaries, and for also providing a clear roadmap of the areas that need further attention going forward.

“We are proud of the progress Kentucky students and educators have made the past several years as they have embraced more rigorous standards and become more focused on college- and career-readiness,” Holliday said. “At the same time, the report confirms what we already know:  there is still much work to be done. We need to be making faster gains in key content areas like mathematics and science while also continuing to close achievement gaps so that all students have the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in life. We are committed to making continuous progress, and are grateful for partners like the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence for joining us in this critical work.”

Bob King, president of the Council on Postsecondary Education, noted the state’s increase in bachelor’s degrees, from 44th to 39th in the last six years, and expressed the importance of partnerships to work toward the Prichard Committee’s 2020 goal. 

“The steady improvement in bachelor degrees or higher and adults with a high school diploma is welcome news to Kentucky’s economic future. We look forward to working alongside Prichard and our other partners to make even greater gains in the future.”

The update also noted the Committee’s three overarching priorities for Kentucky education:
·         A strong accountability system that measures the performance of students, teachers, principals and postsecondary graduates;
·         Adequate funding;
·         Sustained and expanded engagement of parents, community members and businesses in support of schools.

“It is great to see the areas where we are making good progress but we still have a lot of work to do. We will continue to monitor these areas and look forward to evidence of more forward progress in the 2016 report,” said Stu Silberman, executive director of the Prichard Committee.

--Prichard Commitee Press Release

for September 3, 2014 publication

Learning at higher levels: Content knowledge to strengthen students' reading

How can students learn at significantly higher levels?  To build substantially stronger reading skills, one key step may be to equip students with powerful academic content knowledge.

Karin Chenoweth explains the connection:

If schools aren’t teaching kids an awful lot of content — that is, history, science, literature, and the arts — the same kids who do well on third-grade tests can fail later tests — not because they can’t decode the words on the tests, but because they cannot understand the words once they’ve decoded them. And they can’t understand them because the words haven’t been taught.

Some kids do arrive at school with a lot of background knowledge and rich vocabularies, usually acquired from discussions at home and a set of experiences ranging from being read to from an early age to being taken to museums. The kids with those kinds of experiences tend to be kids from educated and well-off families, which is one of the reasons that reading scores are so highly correlated with family income and mother’s education.

If we are to break that correlation and ensure that all children can read and comprehend well, schools need to have coherent, content-rich curricula that systematically teach history, science, literature, and the arts. This isn’t so that children will do well on fifth-grade reading tests, by the way; it’s so that they can understand the world around them. Fifth-grade reading tests are just proxies for what comes next.

Chenoweth is writer-in-residence at the Education Trust, so it's no surprise to find her pursuing and articulating strategies that can have the biggest benefits for students who may lack many of life's other privilege.  Her article originally appeared at the Huffington Post, and it is now also available at the Core Knowledge blog, which has long argued that rich content and strong reading can grow best when learned together.

-- Posted by Susan Perkins Weston

Fantastic LDC task from Simpson County

Ashley Gore of Simpson County has created one of my favorite Literacy Design Collaborative modules ever, now recognized as meeting the "exemplary" standard under LDC's national jurying standards.  She asked her students to address this teaching task:

Is Hester Prynne a virtuous woman? After reading The Scarlet Letter, write an essay in which you discuss Hester's Prynne's character attributes and evaluate her virtues in connection with Proverbs 31. Support your position with evidence from the text(s).

In keeping with the LDC design process, the plain black text comes from an LDC template, but the part I've underlined in blue reflects wording Ms. Gore added to create a distinctive task for her own discipline and students.  Then she supported her students by identifying the reading and writing skills essential to the task and designing "mini-tasks" where students learn and apply each of those skills on the way to completing their essays. (Past Prichblog posts on LDC are here.)

The whole design is excellent, but my special excitement comes from seeing one of my very favorite Bible texts deployed in a way that requires respectful, critical analysis and comparison with a powerful novel.  It's a truly great teacher-created approach to implementing the Kentucky Core Academic Standards in a deep literary study.  

The complete module is available in LDC's CoreTools Library: you'll need to set up a free account to log in to the site, which also offers a complete set of LDC design tools for anyone who wants to try them out.

 (Illustration by By Mary Hallock Foote [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

KCAS Core Academic Challenge: How can our standards be improved?

Everyone in Kentucky is invited to provide specific feedback on the Kentucky Core Academic Standards for English language arts and mathematics.  This statewide challenge was announced this morning by Commissioner Terry Holiday and will last through April 30, 2015.

I took a first look at the comment site this evening and was pleased to see that users can sign in, start comments, and return later to complete comments on the full set of standards.  I also found it easy to zoom in on the standards that interest me most: those for "literacy in history/social studies."  Below, you can see a quick sample of the options, including space to recommend replacement language and share reasons for the recommendation.

This is a huge opportunity for public participation: please take up the Challenge!

Common Core: Sinking Ship or Rescue Vessel?

Lea Ann Atherton, a 2013-2014 Hope Street Group Fellow who teaches writing at Lone Oak Middle School in Paducah's McCracken County discusses the implementation of the common core in her classroom.

http://bit.ly/1h9YKQW

Common Core and Kentucky: Fordham says we made a big step up!

In a single year, Kentucky mathematics standards moved from a D to an A-.  We did it by adopting Common Core.

For years, the Fordham Institute has provided the most consistent ratings of state standards, issuing letter grades for each subject accompanied by often biting reviews. In their early reports, before KDE's website became a complete source for key materials they sometimes relied out-of-date Kentucky documents, but in recent years, they've checked the right materials and given blunt assessments to what they read.  

In 2006, Fordham explained our D for mathematics this way:

The organization of Kentucky's standards is difficult to understand and often incoherent. In addition, the standards are often vaguely stated. Arithmetic is not identified as an elementary school priority and is developed poorly. The coverage of high school content is variable.

Have I mentioned that Fordham is famed for its blunt wording?

Now, however, the Fordham rating for Kentucky reflects the strength we have gained from working with other states:

The final version of the Common Core State Standards for math is exemplary in many ways. The expectations are generally well written and presented, and cover much mathematical content with both depth and rigor. But, though the content is generally sound, the standards are not particularly easy to read, and require careful attention on the part of the reader.  

The development of arithmetic in elementary school is a primary focus of these standards and that content is thoroughly covered. The often-difficult subject of fractions is developed rigorously, with clear and careful guidance. The high school content is often excellent, though the presentation is disjointed and mathematical coherence suffers. In addition, the geometry standards represent a significant departure from traditional axiomatic Euclidean geometry and no replacement foundation is established.  

Despite some weaknesses, the Common Core standards provide a solid framework for learning rigorous mathematics.

It's worth noting that Fordham did not think the Common Core is better than the prior standards in every state.  Using the same criteria for all ratings, the Institute found that:

Eleven states plus the District of Columbia have math standards in the "too close to call" category, meaning that, overall, they are at least as clear and rigorous as the Common Core standards.

Kentucky was not one of those states.  Here's Fordham's map showing those states and making a clear point: Kentucky made a substantial step up when we adopted Common Core:

Speaking and Listening (CCSS Goes Deep)

The Common Core State Standards reach beyond reading and writing to address speaking and listening.  The anchor standards for college and career readiness come under two headings and look like this.

Comprehension and Collaboration
1. Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
2. Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.
3. Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric.  

Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas 
4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
5. Make strategic use of digital media and visual displays of data to express information and enhance understanding of presentations.
6. Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and communicative tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.

Through the Literacy Design Collaborative, I'm seeing lots of potent work on these skills, with students becoming more able to do this work and teachers developing new insights into what further support and challenge students will need.

I'm a bit more puzzled about whether states can and will assess these skills in a standardized way.

Maybe the answer will be that, to learn academic content and make sense of complex texts they read, students will need to use these kind of speaking and listening as part of how they sort out what they are studying, and to write their own strong pieces, they will need to use similar skills on the way to organizing their work.  I see many LDC teachers adding those steps as means to the end of strong writing about important reading and essential questions in academic fields.

 Or, possibly, innovative districts like my own Danville Independent will work out richer ways for students demonstrate this sort of skill, moving us beyond what "pencil and paper" or "keyboard and screen" assessments can measure well.

Or, perhaps, some other approach is already being developed for these issues.  Part of the genius of Common Core is that, because many states have the same goals, an innovative approach can be used many places.  For all kinds of organizations working to support schools and students, that means each effort that works can spread farther and make a bigger difference.

Writing Many Ways, For Many Reasons

10. Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.

Ultimately, writing is a skill for adult life, growing steadily more important in an information age.  This last Common Core writing standard calls for writing to become a reliable, flexible habit for all students by the time they complete high school, so that they are ready for college and career success. 

That writing won't all be sonnets and it won't all be work memos: the writing the next generation will do will have varied goals and styles and deadlines, but Common Core aims for them to be ready to participate, contribute, and write in the ways that are valuable for their future and ours.

You can download the complete Common Core State Standards here. They were developed by organizations of governors and chief state school officers like Kentucky's Commissioner of Education, and they've been adopted by 46 states (47 for the mathematics standards).

Writing to Build and Share Knowledge (CCSS 7-9)

7. Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.  

8. Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.  

9. Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

Here are three more Common Core anchor standards for writing.  These focus on what goes into the writing, expecting students to gather and organize evidence, rather than just invent their pieces by imagining or imitating adult debates.   They build on the three kinds of writing (argumentation, explanation, and narrative) and the three skills for producing and distributing those writings, and again, I think they're the right thing to work on.

Standard 8 is especially valuable.   Assessing sources has always been key to well-informed citizenship, and it's become even more important as the Internet makes so many texts available with so little filtering for quality.  The next generation will need to be able to use those resources wisely, and Common Core calls for us to equip them to do that well.

You can download the complete Common Core State Standards here. They were developed by organizations of governors and chief state school officers like Kentucky's Commissioner of Education, and they've been adopted by 46 states (47 for the mathematics standards).