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The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers have developed and recently released a set of Common Core Standards for English Language Arts.

"The Standards set requirements not only for English language arts (ELA) but also for literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Just as students must learn to read, write, speak, listen, and use language effectively in a variety of content areas, so too must the Standards specify the literacy skills and understandings required for college and career readiness in multiple disciplines."

-From the Common Core Standards website

Based on long-term goals of college and career readiness for all students, these standards call for a general ramping-up of expectations for students at all levels, and specifically an attention to higher-level thinking skills as they play out in reading, writing, and in speaking. The Reading and Writing Project has studied these Standards intensely in order to understand their infrastructure, to locate the ‘power standards,’ that enable a host of other proficiencies, and to highlight gaps between existing practice and the Common Core Standards. Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth and Chris Lehman co-authored a book with Heinemann to help school districts rally to the challenges and opportunities the Common Core Standards provide.

Throughout our staff development, our leadership and specialty courses, and our conference days with teachers and school leaders, the Project will share with you information, insights and methods pertaining to the Common Core Standards. Curriculum modifications began last spring when an early draft of the Common Core was released, and we have continued to find places in our curriculum where the Common Core Standards can prompt us to lift the level of student work and to broaden the scope of instruction. For example, it is clear that in reading, the Common Core values compare and contrast work as an example of analytic thinking across texts or parts of texts: this is something that teachers can support in a character study (as well as many other places) by teaching students strategies to think across characters, both in the same book and in different books as well as in genre-based book clubs and the like. We are making that work explicit.

We are also currently working with the New York City Department of Education to create performance assessments that enable teachers to track students’ performances in relation to the standards. Hundreds of schools are now using the new performance assessments we have developed to assess readers’ progress along the strands highlighted in the Common Core, and we will soon embark on a gigantic effort to learn from those data. Meanwhile, we are currently developing two new writing continua, aligned to the Common Core Standards, one for opinion/argument writing and one for informational writing. These continua will also be closely aligned to the narrative continuum both in content and structure. Studied side by side, the three continua will show how the different types of writing that are highlighted in the Common Core Standards are connected and how work in one bolsters the others.

The Common Core Standards can be accessed at http://www.corestandards.org and we encourage you to look at these as we have done, talking with colleagues about what you notice and the implications for your teaching. We will have many opportunities across the year to reflect on these standards and to continue developing support materials to assist you as you align your work to these new benchmarks.

Teachers and school leaders from schools that work directly with the TCRWP will notice that the 2012-2013 Reading and Writing curriculum calendars that inform your work are aligned to the Common Core Standards. As part of this effort, we developed brand-new (and we think quite exciting) units, aligned to the Common Core. We’ve developed charts that display ways in which RWP Units of Study align to the Common Core Standards.