“Skinnying” the Standards into Six Buckets Transcript

Speaker 1: So this is what I want you to do today.

My experience with the Standards has landed me this year in my third year of teaching it.

So there’s this thing called the Common Core, and I think you’ve probably have heard of that term before, the Common Core?

I think the challenge that I find myself faced with everyday is how do I take these standards and really make them, not only applicable to my students, but come alive for my students. I need to start to empower them to become autonomous thinkers. Late last week, got these paint buckets up here on the wall.

Do you have any idea what they are?

Speaker 2: Paint buckets.

Speaker 1: They’re paint buckets.

So assigning them to buckets, putting them in student friendly language, has been an avenue for me to start to have these conversations with students in a way that I think meets all of our needs.

I worked really hard this summer to try to boil them down to six categories because my brain cannot remember all of those standards when I’m teaching. The six buckets are creating context, reading closely, analyzing, exposing precise thinking, writing to transfer, and building stamina.

I boiled them down to these six categories, and I made them categories that I think you can remember too.

Usually what happens for teachers when we look at standards, certainly in the literacy standards, we see them compartmentalized. So, we see the reading compartment. We see the writing compartment. We see the speaking compartment. We see the listening compartment. We see the language compartment. And that, alone, creates a lot of management issues. How do you talk to kids about all of those all of the time? So my goal is to try to figure out where these literacies overlapped. So, if you go to a bucket, you will find in that bucket a lot of different skills that apply to reading, that apply to writing, that apply to speaking and listening.

What I’m going to start doing is when class starts, I’m going to pull out the stick from each of these buckets, so that you know every single day what it is that I want you to leave the classroom learning.

I think it’s really helpful because I can start the beginning of class and I can say, Here’s the component of creating a context that we’re going to work on today. And it doesn’t matter if you are speaking, or writing, or reading, we always do this. And so it reinforces these skills over and over again, and really dissolves those compartments in ways that I’m finding to be really helpful.

Speaker 3: I think if the Common Core is well disguised, and, you know, like you have to think, and realize, this is on that list. I didn’t even realize that at first. Then, it really works.

Speaker 1: Off you go.

So in the 11th and 12th grade course, their challenge is to create this prototype that would embody the human qualities of people who would push the limits.

Take all the different texts that you have read. You’re trying to synthesize them, look for patterns in them, and then kind of make that a little bit more concrete on these posters.

In the 10th grade, we’re looking at Hunger Games, and I’m putting them in a situation, and I’m saying, You’re a TV producer, and we need to think about how stories get manipulated. And not only how that plays out in Hunger Games, but let’s practice the thinking that goes into that because it’s going to help you analyze and do all of these other skills as well.

Your challenge is going to be to figure out what moments from the book so far would you pull out in order to convey that concept? But I need you to do first is to talk about what you actually want to say about this concept.

The first bucket is creating context, so whether we are reading something, we’re writing something, we always have to create a door, either for us to walk through or for someone else to walk through.

So you don’t necessarily want to just summarize what’s happening in the book though. So what do you want to say about controlling the narrative?

Speaker 4: I would say like by creating fear they control the people, which lets them control the narrative.

Speaker 1: So what you’re thinking is that you’re going to look at fear? How they do that and that’s controlling the narrative?

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 5: Without knowing what really works or helps makes identifying the essentials all but impossible.

Speaker 1: The second is reading closely, and the wording of this is especially important. The act is reading, and the way in which we are reading is a close reading because there lots of way to do it. There’s not a single way to do it.

Speaker 6: We’re 400 years into this racist system, and it’s going to take a long, long time to dismantle these atrocities, so that’s just saying that they’re still holding grudges from 400 years ago. It’s not just right now.

Speaker 1: Can you talk to me a little bit about the message that you’re trying to convey?

The third is analyze. We are analyzing over and over and over again, almost every day. You’ll find that we are somehow going from the concrete to the abstract and back again.

So you mentioned bread and hope? How does that figure into hunger?

Speaker 7: Most years, we’re told to do things a certain way. We’re told to it like this or like that. This year, we’re giving our own ideas into it and our own thoughts into it so it gives us a better comprehension of what we’re doing.

Basically, we have a district where people are dying of starvation. So red is giving them food and allowing them to live, which is hope for them basically.

Speaker 1: And it’s one of those things, right? It’s one of those things that represent an idea, which is a -

Speaker 7: symbol.

Speaker 1: There we go.

I want to know the thinking behind that. It’s kind of interesting to me.

Exposing precise thinking is the fourth bucket, and this one speaks to sharing analysis.

Speaker 8: Like the rich were trying to tell them how to survive.

Speaker 1: We are constantly trying to take those implicit reading habits, and make them explicit in a way that we can communicate to others.

So how are you connecting that to playing a game?

Speaker 9: Well, I guess, they have to kind of act one way and then do another thing kind of because they want to survive.

Speaker 10: You kind of have to be two-faced in the game to survive.

Speaker 1: Okay, so you have to get that in there somewhere. Right?

Speaker 10: Would the two-faced part be where he says he likes Katniss or whatever, but then goes back and wants to kill her or whatever?

Speaker 1: Exactly. Okay, so you have to make that part a little bit more explicit.

Speaker 10: Okay.

Speaker 1: The 5th is writing to transfer. When we think about writing, there are processes that we want our students to engage in beyond just creating products. And so, writing to transfer is also about writing as an outward indicator of learning.

Speaker 11: Has anyone done passion yet?

Speaker 12: Yeah, I did passion.

Speaker 11: Okay.

Speaker 1: When we ask kids to transfer their learning from any one experience to another, that’s how we know that they’ve learned something.

So what’s the most interesting thing that you have discovered so far?

Speaker 12: Like how they all connect. Even though they’re totally different things, they all connect in a certain way.

Speaker 1: Have you figured out how they connect?

Speaker 12: They’ll have like challenges or goals they have to overcome or reach.

Speaker 1:Okay.

Speaker 12: We do a lot more out of the box thinking, while still achieving the things that are important, so it can help really push your thinking and better understand the topic at hand.

Speaker 1: What I don’t see are any connections to the actual texts.

Finally, building stamina.

It could just be coming from your brainstorming without coming from the reading. We all have those pockets.

When I started to see some of these qualities kind of continue to coalesce around each other, I understood that this notion of text complexity is important because we are working towards constantly putting more challenging texts in front of students. It’s part of this ongoing process for them to stretch.

How do you know when you come across a quote that works?

Speaker 13: It describes the characteristics that we wrote down.

Speaker 14: It even sometimes has the word in it.

Speaker 1: I also think that some of that stamina is seen in our habits. So I put in this category some of those research habits that we need students to own. And I want them to understand that again it’s not just doing the research paper, but it’s about what it takes to be a researcher.

Say what your message is so that each time you choose a moment, you’re connecting back to that big message.

Speaker 7: So right now may be a bit more challenging than say in December when we’ll be naturally analyzing things and thinking deeper, which is something we don’t do as much in our personal lives.

Speaker 3: You have to pay attention to the details. Being detail oriented and being able to read effectively is just important for any job.

Speaker 15: We’re all going to see my great handwriting now.

Speaker 12: It’s beautiful.

With our writing and our reading and our speaking, I’m sure that we’ll do all of it, but it’s just the understanding, and the thought processes, I think, will really be developed more.

Speaker 1: I hope that as the semester moves forward, students start to understand those six buckets without me telling them. I want them to be able to look at a piece of work and say, This is where I created context. Or, This is where I analyzed. Or, This is where I exposed precise thinking. So I want them to have a different set of confidence about their skills. I want them to see themselves as writers, and readers, and speakers, and thinkers.