The Common Core standards emphasize reading nonfiction texts and analyzing multiple perspectives. This represents a shift from the traditional focus on fiction and personal responses. To meet the standards, librarians must collaborate closely with teachers to provide resources across different subjects and media. Students need opportunities to compare how different sources discuss the same topics and evaluate evidence. The librarian can play a key role in helping students and teachers navigate this change by understanding the standards and building teams to coordinate resources.

1. Common Core
Uncommon
Challenge
Getting Real!
Marc Aronson
http://www.corestandards.org/

2. CC and You
• CC is the one chance for the librarian to
step forward and make himself/herself
the heart of the community, the go-to
resource for teachers, students, parents
• CC is the ideal opportunity for team
teaching, for Social Studies, Art, Music,
Science, Math, ELA to work together

3. But
• You can only step into that role if you
understand what CC asks of you, and if
you build teams with teachers, curriculum
supervisors, school librarians, and
administrators
• The opportunity is here now –
take it!

4. In a word
• The Third “C” in “Common Core” is
“Collaboration”
• The librarian must be the hub of the
community; teachers must work together
• You can, if you have the tools, and the
vocabulary, to meet the CC challenge

5. What Is the
Common Core?
• ELA CC – our focus today
• Math CC – in place
• Science, Social Studies – to come
(Draft NYS CC K-8 SS Framework – 9/13/12)
• Assessments – to come
(but we have a good sense of what they will be)

6. The Key to Everything
• ELA standards are for reading, not content
• Everything we are going to talk about
today is in the ELA World
• But reading undergirds everything else
• And reading is what you have to offer
• From 2nd grade on, reading does NOT
mean simply decoding text

7. CC Turns Reading Inside Out
• Reading becomes active, not passive
• Reading is questioning, not absorbing
• Readers ask how we know, rather than reciting
what others claim they know
• We want students to see the teachers, the public
library, the school as the real Web – a place
bursting with questions, ideas, knowledge,
challenge – you are the search team asking
questions and finding answers together

8. ELA Standards Adopted by
• All states except
• Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, Virginia
• Minnesota adopted ELA but not Math
• Texas is developing own ELA
standards on same principles as CC,
but not as part of national initiative

9. What Could Possibly Get 46 States
to Agree On Anything?
• Crisis 1: students who graduate HS not
ready for college or work
• Crisis 2: state assessments so different
that Mississippi HS grad was at the level
of Massachusetts 8th grader
• Crisis 3: localism of teaching did not
match population on the move
• Crisis 4: post HS work depends on
mastery of many kinds of media

10. Our Focus
Today Is

11. Crisis One
• One third of students arriving in
college so behind need remediation
• Students extend college stay past 6
years or drop out, saddled with debt
• Students not trained in the skills
which available jobs require
• In other words, K-12 education is not
doing its basic job

12. Objections
Poverty
Poverty
Poverty
Poverty
Yes, but

13. Why?
When the pathway to reading runs
almost entirely through fiction,
students do not learn how to read
a nonfiction book until they hit
textbooks in 4th grade – thus “4th
grade slump”

14. • Texts aimed at K-12 increasingly
easy, while texts students need to
read after HS increasingly complex
• We don’t build the “reading stamina”
that students need

15. • K-12 reading focused on fiction and
personal response (“I feel,” “I relate
to”) when college and work require
analysis of what text says, how it
says it, and the evidence it uses
• How you read shapes how you will
write

16. As the man responsible
for the CC said
“When you have a job, no one
asks you to write about what you
feel about a problem, instead
they want your analysis of the
issue and your proposal for what
to do about it.”

17. CC Shifts
• From fiction focus to nonfiction
• From subjective response to objective
analysis
• From write to persuade (feeling) to
write to make a case (argument)
• From nonfiction as bland to nonfiction
as having a point of view

18. What Is Wrong With This Picture?
• Pure nonfiction informs and instructs, sticking to the facts
Creative nonfiction includes a/the story surrounding the facts by introducing place, scene, setting
Pure nonfiction describes the subject(s)
Creative nonfiction adds characterization so that the reader becomes involved and can relate to the subject.
Pure nonfiction is journalistic and scholarly
Creative nonfiction employs a literary voice-a tone- to the story
Pure nonfiction focuses on fact.
Creative nonfiction allows the reader to hear the author’s perspectives
Pure nonfiction is thoroughly researched
Creative nonfiction is thoroughly researched
Pure nonfiction never invents dialog, facts, or events
Creative nonfiction shouldn’t either- theoretically
As Susan Taylor Brown states, "If you want to teach young read-ers about the Irish potato famine, the rain forest,
or even math, tell them a story. Tell an interesting tale about interesting people doing interesting things and
readers come back for more, sometimes not even realiz-ing they are reading about something that really
happened. This is creative nonfiction."
• Donna Bowman Brattman http://donnabowmanbratton.blogspot.com/2010/08/nonfiction-vs-creative-nonfiction-
vs.html

19. Everything

20. The dominance of nonfiction
“Narrative” and “Informational” texts are to be:
• 50% of all reading in Elementary School
• 55% of all reading in Middle School
• 70% of all reading in High School
• This is across all subjects from Language
Arts to Social Studies and Science

21. Teams
• It is IMPOSSIBLE to reach those
percentages unless teachers and
librarians are in contact.
• How can you measure reading across a
grade unless you share reading lists and
coordinate assignments?

22. Common Core
Myths
• Rumors you may have heard:
• Appendix B; Short texts; no biography
• Are they true?
• How to tell – The Common Core Approach

23. Perspective or POV
“What is right in
front of my eyes
that I am missing?”
-- Dr. Lee Berger

24. Point of View – POV
• Textbooks and traditional K-12 nonfiction aims to
be “objective”
• CC says show evidence, show sources, yes, but
all NF has an approach, an aim, a style, an
agenda.
• Students must learn to compare and contrast in
texts – just as they must on the net
• NF can have voice, texture, passion, and can
engage the senses

25. Responses to Crisis One:
Pre-K and Elementary
• Pre-K to elementary students need to
learn elements and structures of
nonfiction books
– a carnival of shelf talkers
• The library should be bursting with
text and text features calling out for
attention

26. CC Considerations
NF Elements
• Feature NF text elements:
• Title, subtitle, TOC, running head, section
head, caption, sidebar, glossary, index,
sources, bibliography, author bio, author
note, expert or consultant named
• Art and text interaction: caption,
placement

27. Cluster One
Treasure Hunt
• Create a scorecard – define the text
features and turn the students loose.
• How many kinds of text features can
students find?
• Display a group of book on the same
subject, with shelf-talkers highlighting what
features each has or does not have.

28. Text Complexity
• Not just a matter of Lexile or other metric
• Hemingway is not for third graders
• Dinosaur names do not require advanced
skills
• Crossing point of difficulty in decoding and
richness of expression and thought.
• Text that asks more of the reader and
offers more in return.
• Reading challenge as sport

29. But What If My Students
Read Below Grade?
• Engagement - When a students wants to
learn, complexity is not a hindrance, POV
comes naturally when students care
• Debate is your friend – so long as it runs
on evidence and argument, not emotion

30. Multimodal
• Visual literacy is literacy – how to read a
photograph, a painting, a sculpture
• Media literacy is literacy – how to read an
advertisement, a sound bite, a news report
• Audio literacy is literacy – how does sound
shape experience?
• Scientific literacy is literacy – how do we
know what we know?
• Numeracy is literacy

31. Students need all of these
• They need to be able to “read” across
many kinds of sources, compare them,
contrast them, evaluate them, and create
within them
• That is true to being alive in 2012, and it
makes everything about learning come
alive.

32. Combinations
• From New IRA “White Paper”:
http://tinyurl.com/iraccwhitepaper
• “Provide research opportunities that
involve reading both print and digital texts,
and that require writing in response to
reading.”

33. Cluster Two
• Perspective and Multimodality joined in lively displays:
• Materials that show students how authors use evidence
to build arguments
• Displays using mixture of modes – print, printout, audio,
URL, video – on same subject
• SLJ feature from Marc and Sue Bartle:
http://www.slj.com/2012/11/standards/common-
core/putting-it-all-together-wondering-how-to-
put-common-core-into-practice-its-easier-than-
you-think/
• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?
key=0AmoozYQXl3chdFdkNXBSbzBZN3dHMkJ6enQ4c
kJuT2c

34. Examples
Three Little Pigs
Lewis and Clark
Boxing
Graffiti
Outsiders - Gangs
• Create a display or prepare a lesson, depending on how
much class time you have

35. Students Must Distinguish
• Main Point and Subsidiary Points
• What Is This Piece (book, magazine,
image, video, website) saying?
• How does it say it?
• How do these two pieces discuss the
same issue in different ways?

36. Demonstrate and Display
• With a class, compare and contrast same
subject across media, just as you did
same folktale for POV
• In display juxtapose book, magazine,
database, website printout on same
subject, highlight differences (not as
ranking but as travel guide, what do each
do? How?)

37. Assessments
• ELA CC standards released in 2010, are
being put in place now.
• CC assessments start in 2013 in some
states, to be in place in all by 2014
• Assessments being developed by two
distinct groups but can be sure focus will
be on

38. Exactly What CC
Emphasizes
Nonfiction
Evidence
Argument
Point of View

39. Want a Sneak Peek?
• http://www.p12.nysed.gov/apda/common-core
• All of the questions require close reading
of text to determine what it does and does
not say
• Train student to see what is there in the
text, not what s/he feels about the text

40. Resources
• CC is the land of compare and contrast
• CC is the land of POV
• CC is the land of juxtaposed sources
rather than homogenized textbooks
• The more chances you give students to
see different “takes” in print, online,
broadcast, etc. the better they will do on
these tests

41. We are surrounded with opinion
• Op-eds
• Sports talk radio
• Political cartoons
• Campaign ads
• Commercial ads
• Reality contest shows
• Feature these, engage students, have
them research, post, argue, listen,
compare, judge

42. Resources
CC Builds
• Evidence in text in 3rd grade becomes
comparison of fact and myth in 4th grade
and recognition of perspective within a
story in 5th grade
• The more you provide linked resources
that grow in complexity and challenge –
almost a computer game “level up” model
– the better students will do on these tests

43. Resources
• CC focuses on argument and evidence in
writing, not emotional persuasion
• The more chances students have to read
effective arguments/contentions and
learn how the author build the case, and
then to apply those understandings in
their own research reports, the better they
will do on these tests.

44. Resources
• By 7th grade CC asks students to use
many kinds of evidence and to learn how
to compare, contrast, and assimilate
information that comes from distinct media
sources
• The more resources you provide for
students to search across media to find
meaningful information the better they will
do on these tests

45. Your challenge
Your opportunity
• Many in your community do not know
nonfiction books outside of textbooks
• May not like nonfiction
• May not expect their kids to like them
(which can be a misreading of especially
boys and their interest in everything from
facts and records to disasters, battles, and
cars)

46. Bringing It All Home
• CC is a wonderful opportunity to link
teachers and librarians, to engage
students, and to see books and other
resources in new ways.
• Begin by knowing your way around the
books yourself

47. Resources
• Orbis Pictus
• NCSS-CBC Notables
• NSTA-CBC Notables
• Sibert Award
• YALSA-NF Award
• “Consider the Source” – MA column in
SLJ
• http://classroombookshelf.blogspot.com/

48. Change Is Here
Embrace it!
http://nonfictionandthecommoncore.blogspot.com