This is the Keynote that guided professional development on August 13 and 14, 2012 in the St. Joseph School District. The specific focus was text complexity in all content areas.
3. Text Complexity Matters
“Being able to read complex text
independently and proficiently is
essential for high achievement in
college and the workplace and
important in numerous life tasks.”
*From Appendix A, page 4 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.
4. WHY TEXT COMPLEXITY MATTERS
“Over the last 50 years, the complexity
of college and workplace reading has
increased, while text complexity in
K-12 has remained stagnant.”
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.
5. WHY TEXT COMPLEXITY MATTERS
“Research indicates the demands that
college, careers, and citizenship place
on readers have either held steady or
increased over roughly the last 50
years.”
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.
6. WHY TEXT COMPLEXITY MATTERS
“The difficulty of college textbooks
has increased since 1962.”
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.
7. WHY TEXT COMPLEXITY MATTERS
“Students in college are expected to
read complex texts with substantially
greater independence than are
students in typical K-12 programs.”
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.
8. WHY TEXT COMPLEXITY MATTERS
“A 2005 College Board study found
that college professors assign more
readings from periodicals than do
high school teachers.”
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.
9. WHY TEXT COMPLEXITY MATTERS
“The word difficulty of scientific
journals and magazines from 1930 to
1990 has increased.”
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.
10. WHY TEXT COMPLEXITY MATTERS
“Workplace reading, measured in
Lexiles, exceeds grade 12 complexity
significantly, although there is
considerable variation.”
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.
17. Applications for Student Loans: 1270
College Textbooks: 1215
W4 Forms: 1260
CD-DVD Instructions: 1080
18. Applications for Student Loans: 1270
College Textbooks: 1215
W4 Forms: 1260
CD-DVD Instructions: 1080
Wall Street Journal: 1320
19. Applications for Student Loans: 1270
College Textbooks: 1215
W4 Forms: 1260
CD-DVD Instructions: 1080
Wall Street Journal: 1320
Where the Wild Things Are: 740
20. Applications for Student Loans: 1270
College Textbooks: 1215
W4 Forms: 1260
CD-DVD Instructions: 1080
Wall Street Journal: 1320
Where the Wild Things Are: 740
Grapes of Wrath: 680
30. What does Lexile measure?
A Lexile® measure is a valuable piece of
information about either an individual's
reading ability or the difficulty of a text, like a
book or magazine article. The Lexile measure
is shown as a number with an "L" after it —
880L is 880 Lexile.
From: http://www.lexile.com/about-lexile/lexile-overview/
31. The idea behind the Lexile
Framework for reading is simple:
if we know how well a student
can read and how hard a specific
text is to comprehend, we can
predict how well that student will
likely understand the text.
From: http://www.lexile.com/about-lexile/lexile-overview/
32. When used together, Lexile
measures help find books/articles
at appropriate level of difficulty
and determine how well that
reader will likely comprehend a
text. You can also monitor growth
over time.
From: http://www.lexile.com/about-lexile/lexile-overview/
34. A student gets his or her Lexile
reader measure from a reading
test or program.
Lexile measures can range from
below 200L to above 1700L.
http://www.lexile.com/about-lexile/lexile-overview/
36. It is best to select books based on a
reader’s Lexile range rather than
focus on one reader measure. "The
“Lexile range” is the suggested
range of Lexile measures that a
reader should be reading—50L
above to 100L below his or her
Lexile measure.
54. LITERARY
Stories:
Poetry:
Includes children’s
Dramas: Includes nursery rhymes and
adventure stories, folk
Includes staged dialogue the sub-genres of the narrative
tales, legends, fables,
and brief familiar scenes poem, limerick, and free verse
fantasy, realistic iction,
poem
and myth
INFORMATIONAL TEXT
Includes biographies and autobiographies; books about history, social studies, science, and the
arts; technical texts, including directions, forms, and information displayed in graphs, charts, or
maps; and digital sources on a range of topics.
Block party activity: Take quotes from the next 3 slides and put them on several sheets of paper. Cut into strips and put into the middle of the table. Have each person at the table draw a quote. Play music while everyone mingles. When the music stops, each teacher finds 2 others to form a triad. Each person introduces themselves and then reads their quote and explains their interpretation of it. Repeat this process by playing more music.\n
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.\n
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.\n
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.\n
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.\n
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.\n
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.\n
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.\n
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.\n
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Have each group guess the Lexile level of each of these publications and record their answers as a group. Give them 5 minutes to do this.\n
Go through each bullet and share answers. You can ask each table to take turns announcing their guess, or go around the room and listen to every group’s guesses before revealing the answer. This activity is a precursor to a later slide stating that Lexiles don’t always tell the entire picture.\n
Go through each bullet and share answers. You can ask each table to take turns announcing their guess, or go around the room and listen to every group’s guesses before revealing the answer. This activity is a precursor to a later slide stating that Lexiles don’t always tell the entire picture.\n
Go through each bullet and share answers. You can ask each table to take turns announcing their guess, or go around the room and listen to every group’s guesses before revealing the answer. This activity is a precursor to a later slide stating that Lexiles don’t always tell the entire picture.\n
Go through each bullet and share answers. You can ask each table to take turns announcing their guess, or go around the room and listen to every group’s guesses before revealing the answer. This activity is a precursor to a later slide stating that Lexiles don’t always tell the entire picture.\n
Go through each bullet and share answers. You can ask each table to take turns announcing their guess, or go around the room and listen to every group’s guesses before revealing the answer. This activity is a precursor to a later slide stating that Lexiles don’t always tell the entire picture.\n
Go through each bullet and share answers. You can ask each table to take turns announcing their guess, or go around the room and listen to every group’s guesses before revealing the answer. This activity is a precursor to a later slide stating that Lexiles don’t always tell the entire picture.\n
Go through each bullet and share answers. You can ask each table to take turns announcing their guess, or go around the room and listen to every group’s guesses before revealing the answer. This activity is a precursor to a later slide stating that Lexiles don’t always tell the entire picture.\n
These are Lexile levels of various reading materials in occupations in various career clusters.\n
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Notice the difference between the range of complexity of the existing core versus the common core expectations. \n
Use Article from Educational Leadership, March 2012, entitled: “Adolescent Literacy: More Than Remediation.” Need to be in groups of 4. Person #1 reads the introduction and “Increasingly Challenging Texts”. #2 reads “Different Reading for Different Disciplines.” #3 reads “Digital Reading.” #4 reads “How to Support Adolescent Literacy”. Should take 5-10 minutes to actively read their pieces of the article. Each person shares the big ideas of the article with the rest of the group starting with #1 and continuing in numerical order until #4 has finished. Leader needs to keep the time and monitor the sharing to 4-5 minutes per person. Total time for activity: no more than 30 minutes.\n
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Activity: Each group has 3 pieces of 8 x 10 paper with three headings: one headed “Qualitative”, the second one is headed “Quantitative”, and the third one is headed “Reader and Task Considerations”. When the leader releases the group to start, each group will open the yellow envelope of bullet points. The group’s job is to attach the bullet point descriptor to the correct column. Once all bullet points have been placed in a column, the facilitator will give each group one or two large sentence strips with bullet points on them. In the front of the room, have 3 pieces of chart paper, each with a heading stated above. Have each group come up to the front and put their sentence strip on the correct piece of chart paper.\n
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We use SRI\n
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These are the new Lexile bands by grade level as stated by the Common Core compared to the old Lexile Ranges.\n
Be cautious--Lexiles are only one piece of the puzzle. Don’t get tricked!\n
Compare this slide to the next slide.\n
These are the new Lexile bands by grade level as stated by the Common Core compared to the old Lexile Ranges.\n
Compare this slide to the next slide.\n
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These are the new Lexile bands by grade level as stated by the Common Core compared to the old Lexile Ranges.\n
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Take a piece of reading and have everyone plug it into Lexile.com to determine the Lexile Level. Check to see if everyone got it right before moving on. Everyone does this with the same piece of reading. We need to pick a common text, and read it and predict lexile before entering it into Lexile.com.\n
Missouri is developing an extensive rubric teachers can use to evaluate the qualitative measures of a text. It is currently not officially released, but it is in draft form and has been shared throughout the district.\n
There is a checklist of questions you can use to evaluate for reader and task considerations. (High School CA PD--hand out these questions and have teachers practice with their piece of reading.) These are questions a teacher must ask him/herself to determine if a particular piece of reading meets the needs of the individual student and the task the teacher is wanting the reader to do. This is up to the individual teacher’s judgement.\nAll other PD sessions--give the handout with the 3-column table showing characteristics of low, medium, and high-complexity texts. As a group, determine whether the piece of text used earlier to find Lexile meets the low, medium or high complexity range. Do this as a large group to make sure everyone understands the thinking involved in making this determination.\n
Let’s practice some more!\n\nWith 2-3 more articles at your table, find the Lexile measure and use the rubric to determine the complexity of the text.\n\nReport out and norm the entire group on levels.\n
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Notice that the expectations for the type of reading students must be doing shifts as the student gets older to more nonfiction, informational-types of reading. It is important to note that this is what the STUDENT’s experiences should be. This is not what each teacher should be doing in their classrooms. It is therefore very important for teachers to work together to ensure they are meeting the needs of their students.\n
This slide points out the differences between Literary and Informational Texts.\n
According to Fisher, Frey, and Lapp: “...Simply selecting hard books and telling students to read them is not an appropriate course of action.”\n
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Fisher, Frey, and Lapp have written an excellent book regarding text complexity. Chapters 4 & 5 of the book details the strategies they believe teachers should use to help students tackle increasingly complex texts.\n
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Let’s watch an example of close reading. As you are watching, jot down the process you see the teacher using with her students. Once the video is finished, share your notes with others at your table. Come to a consensus at your table as to the process and steps to close reading.\n
Let’s read more about close reading. Use the article from Fisher and Frey--skip to the Close Reading portion of the article on pages 8-11. Read silently at your table and then discuss whether or not you recognized any of these components in the video you just watched.\n
As a large group, have each table report out one big idea they learned from the article excerpt.\n
As a review of the close reading process, go through the next slides one by one and summarize the main points for the group.\n
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Needs:\nHe is alone and lonely (“is a boy who is no one’s friend, whose name the teacher cannot remember”,: the throat that must clear itself and apologize before it speaks”)\nHe has little at home (“lives behind a raw wood doorway where comes are the color of bad weather (para. 1)\nHe has lots of responsibilities (feeds the little brothers, picks up the crayons when Arturito drops them in the intersection, waits for the little brothers to take them home after school).\nStrengths:\nHe is trusted with responsibilities (he feeds his little brothers, helps his mama, who is busy with the business of the baby, takes his little brothers to school and back each day.)\n\n\n\n
Hopeful:\neyes the color of caterpillar suggests metamorphosis—what will he become?\nthe hundred little fingers of red, green, yellow, blue and nubs of black—a rainbow, which occurs after a storm.\nPainful:\nGeography of scars (para. 3)\nHistory of hurt (para. 3)\n\n\n\n\n
Breathlessness is important to understand that Salvador is always in motion. \n\n
キHe is more than what we see on the outside.\nキHe has a past and present that are sometimes painful, but he has joy, too.\n\n
Salvador means “savior.” Use evidence from the text to show how Salvador is the savior of his family.\n
Notice how these next two questions now move beyond the text, but only after there has been a thorough discussion of the reading first:\n\n