The looming adoption of the Common Core State Standards in 2014 is creating confusion, fear and uncertainty in the educational community. But people in the know are saying, “Relax.” The CCSS are about process — listening, speaking, reading and writing with clarity and knowledge. It is not about covering, ever so lightly, a wide breadth of content. It’s about depth. It is a way of avoiding “The Shallows” as Nicholas Carr so aptly described the dangers of exposure to an infinite amount of content available through the Web without the critical thinking skills needed to discriminate the wheat from the overwhelming chaff. It’s about exposing students to coherent thought.
One of the bright lights illuminating pathways (or “avenues”) through this gloom is Dr. Myra Zarnowski, of the School of Education at Queens College, CUNY. Myra is an expert on children’s nonfiction literature and teaches both undergraduate and graduate students on the value of using high-quality reading material as mentor texts in the classroom. Fiction by great writers has long been required reading in English classes so that students are exposed to the thinking and writing of masters. Myra has the same attitude towards children’s nonfiction. Why should children read banal, watered-down “informational texts” by people who use the topics listed in curriculum guidelines as a book outline when there is rich nonfiction literature out there that communicates the same content in imaginative ways?
The CCSS stress process over content, but since you can’t teach process without content, content is taught along with the thinking about it. Traditionally, high-stakes testing has measured knowledge of content, so it is understandable that educators are on tenterhooks about the new assessment tests that purport to measure the CCSS. I have just sold one of the major test-creating companies three paragraphs from one of my books that will be the text students will have to read and answer questions about. All I can say is that if students have lots of opportunities to read for meaning on many subjects, they will ace the test that has my words in it even if the subject is new to them. Children’s nonfiction literature is written so that the content is, above all, accessible. The more kids read it the better they will do on the tests. Myra contributes her insights in The Uncommon Corps, a group blog written by notable champions of using nonfiction in instruction for children and young adults.
Myra has been supported in her efforts at Queens by the generosity of The Henry and Lottie Burger Children’s Literature Program to benefit children’s learning in a dramatic and groundbreaking way. In the interest of full disclosure, I personally benefitted from their largess last spring when I presented a program to six classes wearing my author’s hat. But the dramatic effects of the program were brought home to me when I recently witnessed the presentation of the distinguished author/illustrator, Rosalyn Schanzer to an audience of 4th and 5th graders from three Queens public schools. Here’s how the program worked:
Several weeks before the author presentation, Myra personally delivered enough copies of Roz’s book “George vs. George: The American Revolution as Seen from Both Sides” for each child in the invited classes with the request that the books be read before meeting the author/illustrator. The children would get to keep the books. Aside from the lively kid-friendly illustrations, this is a history book that humanizes the two protagonists of the American Revolution as men who had a lot in common (both were farmers and hunters who cared about their people) yet were put in positions of leadership with conflicting agendas. In other words, there is some complexity to the issues the led to the American Revolution, and the book unpatronizingly assumes that children can appreciate these complexities.
On the day of the event, Roz told the story of her book with her art brilliantly displayed as a slide show. Her spoken words were different from the words she had written but that only enthralled her audience more because they already knew the story. Roz is a practiced and entertaining storyteller and, at many of her talks, the audience is hearing a story for the first time. But the attention of an audience is always enhanced if it is not coming cold to the subject.
The questions Roz was asked at the end of the program reflected much deeper thinking on the part of the students. Since much of the book includes the real words of participants from diaries and other original source material, one kid wondered how she found this material. Another student asked a question about the art, which gave Roz the opportunity to describe all the travels she did to historic sites to make sure that the art was accurate, even to the buttons on the uniforms of the soldiers. The students were impressed with the amount of work she had put into the book, and asked how long it had taken her (“Two years, working every single day. But it was sooo much fun!”) The subtext of Roz’s presentation was that she loved doing such “cool stuff” every day. This was not lost on the students.
Kathleen Fallon, another Queens education professor had her students attend the program. Their responses to what they witnessed: “Unexpected.” “Very exciting.” “ A revelation.” And they immediately saw the possibilities for themselves as teachers for using such wonderful books in their classrooms. And the engagement of the students with the author is something the Burgers travel from California twice a year to enjoy the students involvement.
The take-away is simple for those of you who are confounded by the prospects of meeting the CCSS: if you want children to think critically, speak well, write with clarity and know how to read to learn, expose them to people who do the same, namely award-winning children’s nonfiction authors. That’s the only way the bar will be raised, which, despite NCLB, the Race to the Top, and now the CCSS, has always been the goal of education.
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