The Common Core State Standards are changing what many kids read in school. They're standards, sure — not curriculum. Teachers and districts still have great latitude when it comes to the "how" of reading instruction, but...
The Core standards explicitly require students to read "complex" material, and the fact is, many kids simply weren't doing that before the Core. What were they doing?
Teachers in Washoe County Schools (in and around Reno, Nev.) — and many districts nationwide — once used what they call a "skills and strategies" approach to teach reading. It was particularly common among poor schools where lots of kids struggled.
The idea was this: To learn how to be a good reader, kids needed to learn the skills and strategies that good readers use. Those include knowing how to find the main idea of a text, identifying key details, being able to draw conclusions, etc.
Teachers in Reno would begin each lesson by telling students the skill they'd be learning that day, says Cathy Schmidt, who taught elementary school.
"Like, today we're going to read to make inferences. Or, today we're going to predict. Or, today we're going to draw conclusions," says Schmidt.
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Yep! I dig the new reading approach! How did you become a reader? By doing skill of after skill set of micro paragraphs? Or by reading great works of fiction? Most real readers say the latter. The MSA test has done nothing but spoon feed our kids for years. The ELA portion of the core makes a lot of sense! And we're finally allowed to use classic fiction to do so, and honor those great writers while doing it! And we're teaching kids how to write college level essays with supporting evidence! And they are getting it!
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