The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) fulfill a longstanding goal of ensuring that all students, regardless of ability, are college and career ready upon graduation. Students who meet the expectations of the standards are able to comprehend complex text closely and extract meaning and information from it. They are close readers, delving into…

An effective text dependent question first and foremost embraces the key principle of close reading embedded in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Anchor Reading Standards by asking students to provide evidence from complex text and draw inferences based on what the text explicitly says (Standards 1 and 10). A close look at the intervening…

Close Reading Exemplars pull together several key shifts within the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in a single methodological approach towards reading texts. Close Reading Exemplars focus on investigating complex texts (Anchor Reading Standard 10) via text dependent questions that rely on evidence and inferences to answer them (Anchor Reading…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) spell out for teachers what their students must learn in order to be authentically literate. By focusing on the capacities of students, the CCSS does not advocate one particular pedagogical approach over another for achieving these goals. Teachers are given wide latitude to exercise their professional…

What constitutes an informational text covers a broad swath of different types of texts. Biographies & memoirs, speeches, opinion pieces & argumentative essays, and historical, scientific or technical accounts of a non-narrative nature are all included in what the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) envisions as informational text. Also included…

The College and Career Ready Standards of the CCSS articulate a range of expectations regarding what students should be able to do with regards to academic vocabulary: (1) Interpret technical, connotative, and figurative meanings of words and phrases; (2) Analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone; (3) Determine or clarify the meaning…

What is meant by text complexity is a measurement of how challenging a particular text is to read. There are a myriad of different ways of explaining what makes text challenging to read, from the sophistication of the vocabulary employed to the length of its sentences to even measurements of how the text as a whole coheres. Research shows that no…

Significant improvements in student learning require real change at the heart of instruction: the interaction of students and teachers around the content to be learned. This paper suggests a set of design specifications for strengthening this interaction of student, teacher and content and increasing student performance across a school district.…