Literacy News You Can Use - September 2017

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Literacy News You Can Use

RESEARCH

StandardsWork.org
Read the blog “Pressing Our Point: Why Building Content Knowledge is Crucial for Reading Comprehension” that elaborates on a recent analysis by the Center for Early Reading at Amplify makes clear once again the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension.

 

INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICE AND RESOURCES

Iowa Core Advocate Network (ELA)
Sign up to participate in monthly webinars that center on learning about the ELA/Literacy Shifts in greater detail and translating the Shifts into practice. Learn more about the Iowa Core Advocate Virtual Network here. Access recordings of the monthly webinars, along with the slide deck and chat on the Iowa Core Advocate site under the ELA/Literacy tab. Follow @iacoreadvocates on Twitter.

Building Knowledge Through Reading
When students explore topics in depth, they build knowledge and vocabulary—both critical to becoming strong readers—while also satisfying their curiosity about the world around them. Here are four resources that will help you purposefully select texts to build knowledge:

MOOC-ED @ Friday Institute - NEW COURSE: Teaching Foundational Reading Skills
This course will help you more effectively prepare K-3 students to become successful readers. Organized around the four major research-based recommendations of the Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade Practice Guide, this MOOC-Ed will help you effectively implement them with your students so they are able to read words, relate those words to their oral language, and read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to understand what they read. Starts 10/2/17 - Learn more and register.

Institute of Education Sciences (IES) An Exploration of Instructional Practices that Foster Language Development and Comprehension: Evidence from Prekindergarten through Grade 3 in Title I Schools
To date, efforts to include evidence-based instruction in large-scale reading programs have not generated meaningful improvements in student outcomes. To identify additional instructional practices that merit further evaluation, this evaluation brief provides an exploratory analysis of practices that are related to young students' growth in language skills and comprehension in listening and reading.

State Historical Society of Iowa - Primary Source Sets
Thinking of integrating more nonfiction into your ELA classroom? Check out these Primary Source Sets. Through a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program, the State Historical Society of Iowa developed Primary Source Sets to help educators meet the Iowa history standards within the Iowa Core in Social Studies. These Primary Source Sets address national and international history as well as Iowa’s history within each set.

Achieve the Core - Tools for a Great Year of Writing Instruction

  • Vermont Writing Collaborative's Writing Checklists - Learn how these grade-by-grade checklists help you analyze and learn from student writing.
  • Using the Writing Checklists - Follow a teacher's process as she analyzes the student work from her classroom and designs next-steps to address students' varying needs.
  • In Common Student Writing Samples - Explore this collection of K-12 student writing samples. Benchmark your students' writing assignments against these examples, and use the annotated examples to foster professional learning discussions.
  • Writing for Understanding Teacher Planners - Download standards-aligned writing tasks for grades K-12. These lessons includes recommended pre-reading texts, prompts, graphic organizers, models of student work, and more.
  • Achieve the Core Language Assessment Guidelines - Read Achieve the Core's new guidance around assessing grammar and language conventions based on the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) Criteria for Procuring and Evaluating High-Quality Assessments, and explore the grade-by-grade assessment models. 

WestEd Strategic Literacy Initiative
From the September 2017 Secondary Literacy Partnership Newsletter: The Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd will sponsor a mini-series of webinars and online extension activities focusing on disciplinary literacy and social-emotional learning.

ASCD Express - Idea From the Field: “Well-Argued Writing”

New Visions for Public Schools
Provides educators with the tools and training they need to analyze student performance, diagnose problems and design solutions to improve instruction.

  • Free Open-Source Curriculum Materials By and For Teachers
  • Find an extensive Open Educational Resource (OER) collection of curriculum materials, arranged by courses across a wide range of content areas, that help teachers plan more effectively and improve student learning!
  • Find more tools and training opportunities under the Educators tab.

Open Up Resources - Middle School ELA Curriculum
New curriculum for middle school ELA will complement existing offerings, giving school districts a broad suite of low-cost, standards-aligned alternatives to traditional textbooks. Released as OER for 2018–2019 adoption.

Blogs to Check Out:

 

ASSESSMENT

Iowa Department of EducationApproved Literacy Assessments 2017-18

Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) - Webinar: Developing High Quality Rubrics for Performance Based Assessment
Register to attend a free webinar on Tuesday, October 3rd from 1 - 2:30 pm CST to help you make decisions about the most appropriate type of scoring tool for your goals, and introduce you to features of a high quality rubric and a process for translating standards and performance outcomes into a score scale.

 

UPCOMING PROFESSIONAL EVENTS

Iowa Council of Teachers of English Fall Conference (Johnston, IA - October 12-13, 2017)

UNI Education Summit (Cedar Falls, IA - November 6 -7, 2017)

Iowa Culture and Language Conference (Coralville, IA - November 6-9, 2017)

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Annual Convention (St. Louis, MO - November 16-19, 2017)

Annual Conference on English Leadership - “Literacy Leadership for Access and Opportunity” (St. Louis, MO - November 19-20, 2017) 

Find more ELA/Literacy resources on the Literacy Resources Subject Pages at IowaCore.gov.

Read about how Iowa educators are implementing the Iowa Core Standards on the Voice From the Field monthly blog.


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Destiny Eldridge
Education Consultant (Literacy)
Iowa Department of Education
400 E 14th St
Des Moines, IA 50319
515-281-6235 (office)
515-822-2554 (cell)
destiny.eldridge@iowa.gov

Literacy on www.EducateIowa.gov
Literacy Resources on www.IowaCore.gov
ELA/Literacy Standards