- These skills include phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency.
- The standards mandate the early, systematic, and explicit teaching of foundational skills.
- Educators should teach all aspects of English and language arts simultaneously and in a coordinated manner in kindergarten, first, and second grades.
Comprehension:
- Instruction should engage students in high-quality texts that they read closely and critically.
- Educators should use research-proven reading comprehension strategies that use gradual release of responsibility approaches.
- Teachers should be ready and able to help students apply strategies when they are reading especially difficult or challenging texts.
“Specifically, the [standards] stress the importance of teaching students to engage in ‘close, attentive reading.’ This means that students must learn to engage independently in critical reading, determining what a text says explicitly, making logical inferences, and analyzing a text’s craft and structure to determine how those affect the text’s meaning and tone, evaluating the effectiveness or value of the text, and using the information and ideas drawn from texts (often referred to as ‘evidence’) as the basis of one’s own arguments, presentations, and claims,” according to the IRA’s guide.
Vocabulary:
- Vocabulary instruction and strong vocabulary skills are particularly important for English language learners and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
- Vocabulary teaching is usually “explicitly linked to reading comprehension, but the [standards] provide this explicit emphasis within the Language strand of the standards where it is easily overlooked.”
- Educators should look for vocabulary development references throughout all of the standards.
- Word-solving strategies and teaching individual words both should be employed as instructional methods.
- All subjects throughout the school day can offer chances for vocabulary development.
Writing:
- Students should have opportunities “to write in response to reading across the curriculum.”
- Educators should incorporate both print and digital texts in reading requirements.
- Teachers should have professional development to learn how to teach students how to write the kind of texts required by the standards.
Disciplinary Literacy:
- This involves teaching reading and writing across other disciplines such as history and science, and focuses on the way that reading and writing are used within each specific discipline.
- The standards require that students in grades 6-12 learn disciplinary literacy.
- Content teachers in each discipline will have to collaborate with English and language arts educators.
The standards “require equal outcomes for all students, but they do not require equal inputs. Vary the amounts and types of instruction provided to students to ensure high rates of success,” the report says. “Monitor student learning, and provide adjustments and supplements based on that information.”
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