Developing Common Core Habits Transcript

JILL JACKSON [sync]
00:00:04 I’m so glad to be here and share a bit of information about the Common Core and really kind of simplify some of the big Common Core work and make it applicable.
JILL JACKSON
00:00:13 Today I came to the Getty Center to provide professional development on how to take the Common Core standards and simply apply them to integrated arts lessons.
00:00:22 [TITLE: Arts Integration: Professional Development – Developing Common Core Habits]
JILL JACKSON
00:00:26 Today, the lesson was focused on how the Common Core standards are organized. And then to connect two main habits that help me teach the Common Core standards – close reading and text dependent responses.

00:00:38 The whole point of this is to get kids to be independent and so, if they can take the structure of close reading with literature and apply it to art, they know where to start. So, they don’t just look at a piece of artwork and go, “I- I like it?” because they have a place to analyze.
JILL JACKSON [sync]
00:00:54 We have two habits – close reading and text dependent questions. If I’m a student and I’m learning close reading in my English Language Arts and now we use the same habit and we apply it to the art, now I feel like I know where to start.
JILL JACKSON
00:01:08 Close reading underpins so many of the Common Core state standards. For the RI, the Reading Informational text standards, and the RL, the Reading Literature standards, Standards 1, 2, and 3 are going to happen during the first read.

00:01:20 Standards 4, 5, and 6 during the second read, and 7, 8, and 9 during the third read. When you understand how the standards are organized, and then you marry that with close reading, you realize, “Oh, close reading is the vehicle for teaching the standards.”
JILL JACKSON [sync]
00:01:34 Close reading - if you have your packet in front of you, circle “what it says, how it says it, and what it means.” Close reading is laid out according to the standards. First read – what the text says. Second read is how it says it. Third read is what it means. By implementing close reading I am now implementing the standards.

00:01:57 With whatever I’m doing, whether it be text, whether it be art pieces. So, for our artwork – first look, what is it. Second look, how was it created. Third look, what does it mean.
BEARD
00:02:09 Close reading doesn’t have to be written text. You can use artwork. It’s not what I thought-
JILL JACKSON [sync]
You thought it was just for text. Once we have the habit of close reading, we can apply it broadly. Probably more broadly than we thought. Is that fair enough?
JILL JACKSON
00:02:23 To just start with a question like, “How does this piece make you feel?” is probably going to get you a lot of crickets chirping when you ask kids that question because they don’t know where to start. So, you start with the analysis of the piece and then you move into deeper comparing and contrasting so they have something to lean back into.
LORENZA ARENGO-YARNES
00:02:41 The whole text dependent questioning that we were doing, I really felt like they were getting bored. Because we were giving them the question- We kept asking questions. And it felt like it was more of a question-answer. How do we get the kids to think on their own.
JILL JACKSON [sync]
00:02:53 I’m not sure if you know this – 80 percent of the Common Core standards are underpinned by text dependency. In other words, in order for kids to master 80 percent of the English Language Arts standards they have to be able to respond to text dependent questions.

00:03:08 So that’s a high utility, super powerful habit we want to embed right away.
JILL JACKSON
00:03:12 In order for a question to be text dependent it requires the student to have looked at the piece of artwork or read the piece of text or listened to the piece of music – i.e. there’s no way that they could answer it completely and correctly or get a 100 percent on it had they not seen the piece.
JILL JACKSON [sync]
00:03:27 So many kids they talk about things that they’ve never seen and they’ve never experienced. In fact, what I find is that some of our struggling students have become masters of acting like they know what’s up as a coping mechanism. And text dependent questions root that out.
JILL JACKSON
00:03:44 For us as teachers, we’ve got to take our old questions of, you know, “What do you think about this?” to “What do you think about this and what gave you that feeling? Give specifics.” And get used to asking those kinds of questions.
JILL JACKSON [sync]
00:03:57 Old questions might be, “Do you like this painting?” Could you have done no analysis on the painting and yet still answered the question? Yeah. So, the new Common Core aligned questions that we might ask – “Do you enjoy looking at this piece? If so, talk about what’s enjoyable. Give examples.” Teaching kids to go deeper into their responses.
JILL JACKSON
00:04:16 And then we married how the standards are organized and those two habits of close reading and text dependent questions and said, “Ah, these speak to each other.” The habits help you teach the standards. And then I went in and gave examples. What would it look like to take the first read, second read, third read and apply it to artwork?
JILL JACKSON [sync]
00:04:33 Here are some questions that I might ask during the first read. “Tell me what you see the man doing in the picture. Give specifics.” When I say, “Give specifics,” that’s the text dependency part. Second read questions – “How does the choice of colors give you insight into the meaning?”

00:04:48 Getting into the mechanics of the piece – brush strokes, color choices. And then lastly in our third read, “How do specifics of this painting make you feel?” When you’re asking specialized questions that don’t follow a pattern, trying to be highly creative, your kids then can’t take those questions and apply it to other areas.

00:05:08 But when you give them a flow of questioning, now when they’re faced alone without you there, they have a system in their head that keeps them independent for analysis.
JILL JACKSON
00:05:18 Teaching kids to be flexible, I think, is critical for teachers. A lot of times you can get a kid really confident in art and they can really get into that, but they don’t have much confidence with literature. You can transfer some of that excitement and some of that confidence over into the literature and vice versa. And I think that’s a really powerful opportunity for teachers and, of course, for kids.
00:05:43 ***FILE END***