At my district, Maine Township 207, our Literacy coaches chose The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core as the framework for our literacy program. The Coaches have provided extensive professional development to help teachers better instruct students on these essential skills. This book was written to show educators ways to help their students master the Common Core standards. It specifically focuses on teaching skills so students can succeed at any subject Indeed, “The Core Six is for educators who already have a strong grasp on the Common Core and are eager to do something about it. In this book, we offer a collection of research-based strategies that will help teachers and students respond to the demands of the Common Core, particularly the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/ Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects, which are a “shared responsibility within the school...and affect every subject area and grade level”” (Silver 1).

I’m an English teacher for mostly sophomore students and the occasional senior English class. Our students no longer take the PARCC test but our class standards are aligned with the Common Core. Most classes use the Common Core as a basis for Common Formative and Summative Assessments and then we shape our curriculum around the standards. In my sophomore classes, we teach argument writing, research and figurative language. Within those core standards, we teach Raisin in the Sun, Night, House on Mango Street and Animal Farm. We also teach literary analysis and memoir writing. We have a solid curriculum with Summative Assessments that align with the standards. We also prepare students for junior year by focusing on these skills.

The Core Six: Essential Strategies sets out six literary strategies that will help students learn skills concerned with vocabulary acquisition and other reading strategies for success in any content subject in school. The Core Six are:

1. Reading for Meaning
2. Compare and Contrast
3. Inductive Learning
4. Circle of Knowledge
5. Write to Learn
6. Vocabulary’s CODE

The authors argue that these six core strategies need to be explicitly taught to the students in order to see sizable gains in student achievement. For example, instead of using Compare and Contrast as an end of the unit assessment, teachers need to use it as a learning strategy and embed it into the curriculum.

They also outline 6 important tips for Inspired Instruction:

1. Capture students’ interest.
2. Explain the strategy’s purpose and students’ roles in the strategy.
3. Teach the thinking embedded in the strategy.
4. Use discussion and questioning techniques to extend student thinking.
5. Ask students to synthesize and transfer their learning.
6. Leave time for reflection.

Most of the teachers in my district have taken the professional development offered by our coaches and have implemented many of these concepts into their teaching.

The Core Six is a didactic method of teaching vocabulary and reading strategies. It sets forth specific methods and activities for the teacher to use in his/her classroom to help students gain fluency skills. It also leans heavily on the Constructivism philosophy of education. Students use what they already know and add to their foundation by reading for meaning and learning vocabulary. The six “essential strategies” assume students already have a set of knowledge that they can increase by doing specific steps and learning literary strategies.

These are the six strategies outlined and how they align to the Common Core:

1. Reading for Meaning helps students develop the skills that proficient readers use to make sense of rigorous texts. The strategy helps build these Common Core skills:

• Managing text complexity

• Evaluating and using evidence

• Developing the core skills of reading

2. Compare & Contrast teaches students to conduct a thorough comparative analysis. The strategy helps build these Common Core skills:

• Conducting comparative analyses of academic content

• Conducting comparative readings of two or more texts

• Integrating information from multiple sources

3. Inductive Learning helps students find patterns and structures built into content through an inductive process (analyzing specifics to form generalizations). The strategy helps build these Common Core skills:

• Finding patterns and making logical inferences

• Supporting thinking with evidence

• Mastering academic vocabulary

4. Circle of Knowledge is a strategic framework for planning and conducting classroom discussions that engage all students in deeper thinking and thoughtful communication. The strategy helps build these Common Core skills:

• Speaking, listening, and presenting

• Integrating and evaluating information

• Collaborating with peers

5. Write to Learn helps teachers integrate writing into daily instruction and develop students’ writing skills (in all content subjects including English) in the key text types associated with college and career readiness. The strategy helps build these Common Core skills:

• Developing higher-order thinking through writing.

• Writing in the key Common Core text types: arguments, informative/explanatory texts, and narratives.

• Writing for a wide range of tasks, audiences, and purposes.

6. Vocabulary’s CODE is a strategic approach to vocabulary instruction that improves students’ ability to retain and use crucial vocabulary terms. The strategy helps build these Common Core skills:

• Mastering academic vocabulary.

• Improving literacy across all strands (reading, writing, speaking/listening, and language).

• Building background knowledge as a foundation for success in school, college, and career. (Silver 3)

 

The Core Six Essential Strategies expanded and explained:

1.Reading for Meaning:

According to the Reading for Meaning chapter, Silver and his partners state that teachers do not teach reading comprehension. They mention research from Dolores Durkin where she discovered very few teachers spend any time at all teaching comprehension. Indeed, according to R.B. Cooter, “In 1978, Dolores Durkin reported findings from reading comprehension studies conducted in public school classrooms. After observing a variety of “expert” teachers engaged in reading instruction in both reading and social studies classrooms, Durkin concluded that these teachers spent very little time actually teaching children how to understand texts. In fact, less than 1% of total reading or social studies instructional time was devoted to the teaching of reading comprehension. Unfortunately, many researchers conclude that the situation in today’s schools has not improved appreciably over the last 25 years” (Cooter). As I think about my own classroom, I realized that I never spent much time explicitly teaching reading comprehension. However, now I know that some students need those specifics steps taught to them. The authors of The Core Six recommend that teachers specifically implement Reading for Meaning in their classroom.

They identify specific steps to helps students learn to read for comprehension. They boil down to the following ideas:

1. Teacher should choose a reading selection.
2. Teacher will generate a statement about the text
3. Students read the statement and the selection
4. Students record evidence to support or refute the statement
5. Students discuss the reading

For example: after the students read a short story about a rabbit and a bear they fill out the following:

Students find evidence in the text to support and refute the statement. Then they will discuss the story in groups and in a whole class setting.

The book goes on to give examples for higher levels and other subject matters. It also gives an extensive list aligning the “statements” with anchor concepts that work with the Common Core. With this helpful list, teachers can develop statement sentences that will work well for this activity.

2. Compare and Contrast:

The second Essential Strategy discussed in the book is Compare and Contrast. According to the authors, “Compare & Contrast is a critical thinking strategy designed to build students’ memories, eliminate confusion, and bring crucial similarities and differences into sharp focus” (Silver 16). They cite studies by Dean, Hubbell, Pitler, & Stone, (2012) that show teaching students how to effectively compare and contrast will lead to significant literary gains. The book goes on to explain the four steps to implementing Compare and Contrast in the classroom.

Phase One: Teachers should begin with a “hook” to spark interest with the students and activate prior knowledge. Then, students should begin describing that target by creating a chart or a graphic organizer and adding descriptive criteria about the topic.

Phase Two: Comparison - Students should use the top hat graphic organizer (see below) to compare and contrast the target topics.

Phase Three: Conclusion - The authors suggest to, “Stretch students’ minds and help them draw conclusions by building discussion around concluding questions”.

Phase Four: Application - Students should use their knowledge to complete a task or create a product.

After outlining these four phases, the authors go on to outline three examples of teachers using this strategy in their classroom and how to best apply Compare and Contrast with students. The most helpful section in this part of the book is a Comparative Writing Framework that the authors produced for the book:

Teachers could easily incorporate the “Tophat” graphic organizer and this Writing Framework to any curriculum unit in order to help students engage in the learning target.

3. Inductive Learning:

Silver describes Inductive Learning as “a powerful strategy for helping students deepen their understanding of content and develop their inference and evidence gathering skills.” In Inductive Learning, students analyze topics and identify specific important parts of information. Then, they label and group these “bits” of information. Silver goes on to explain, “Inductive Learning does not stop at categorization, however; it also asks students to use their labeled groups to develop a set of working hypotheses about the content to come. Then, during the learning, students collect evidence to verify or refine each of their hypotheses” (27).

According to research from the Core Six book, “New meta-analytical research on effective teaching practices (Dean et al., 2012) suggests that teaching students how to classify information and how to generate and test hypotheses—both raise student achievement.” Learning how to classify, organize and hypothesis are important skills for classes such as science, health and history.

There are seven basic steps for Inductive Learning:

1.Identify and distribute key words, phrases, items, problems, or images from a reading, lecture, or unit.

2. Model the process of grouping and labeling terms

3.Have students analyze the items and explore the different ways they can group them

4.Ask students to devise a descriptive label for each of their groups

5.Have students use their labels and word groupings to make several predictions or hypotheses about the reading, lecture, or unit.

6.Ask students to reflect on the Inductive Learning process, and lead a discussion on what they have learned from it.

7.Over time, teach students how to generalize and conceptualize by using the inductive process to identify key words, create groups, generate predictions, and test and refine those predictions against the evidence

The text goes on to give sample lessons that describe and demonstrate the process. This figure gives the reader an idea about how to utilize this particular literacy strategy in the classroom:

4. Circle of Knowledge:

In this chapter, the authors acknowledge the challenges of conducting classroom discussion. They propose that their strategy “provides teachers with a strategic framework for planning and conducting discussions that foster student participation and critical thinking” (Silver, 37). They go on to explain the importance of real discussion in the classroom and the importance of this collaborate and interpersonal skill in the 21st century. Silver cites research that “shows that students in discussion-rich classrooms experience real academic and social benefits: deeper comprehension, greater empathy and respect for their peers, and an increased ability to handle rigorous content” (Polite & Adams, 1997). The authors offer various tips and tricks to help develop a climate for classroom discussion. They also recommend helping students reflect on their discussion and provide a way for students to reflect:

The authors provide the following steps to create positive classroom discussion by implementing the Circle of Knowledge::

1. Spark the discussion by posing an open-ended question that hooks students into the material.

2. Give students time to stop and think about the question.

3. Sharpen the focus of the discussion by posing a focusing question that highlights the central topic or theme of the discussion.

4. Have students “kindle” their responses by jotting down their initial responses and then sharing and comparing their responses in small groups.

5. Engage the whole class in the discussion. Encourage students to share their ideas, respond to prompts and questions from you or other students, refine their ideas, and evaluate the depth of their understanding.

6. During the discussion, use a variety of recognition techniques (see pp. 39–40) to maximize participation. Use Q-SPACE (see p. 42) to shape the discussion.

7. Record students’ responses and summarize key content with students.

8. Allow students to reflect on the discussion and their own participation.

9. Synthesize student learning with a task that asks them to apply what they learned during the discussion.
 

The authors then go on to describe three examples of discussion in different subjects. In terms of innovation, this particular strategy would best benefit from modern technology. Instead of forcing students to discuss in class which might cause too much anxiety, teachers could easily set up a tech “back-channel” for students who would prefer to discuss online. For example, teachers could use todaysmeet.com to allow students to add to the discussion in a manner that might be less stressful. Teachers could also set up blogs or use an LMS to create a space for online discussion. While I agree that classroom discussion is very important, our current technology easily lends itself to allowing students to express themselves in differentiated ways.

5. Write to Learn

Silver argues “Write to Learn is a set of nested tools for writing and learning in all content areas. Careful use of the tools embedded in this strategy can drastically improve students’ thinking, deepen their comprehension of content, and help teachers conduct the kind of formative assessment needed to improve student writing without getting caught in an endless cycle of paperwork” (50). Basically, the authors encourage teachers to get students writing more. The research indicates that the more students write in all the subject matters (science, history, math, health) the better overall comprehension they will have (Marzano 2004. Indeed, researchers found “that asking students to write regularly about the texts they read in science, social studies, and language arts has a significant and positive influence on student comprehension“ (Graham & Hebert, 2010).

Silver highlights important steps in Write to Learn:

1. Provisional Writing: Provisional writing is a form of quick writing, like brainstorming, that slows down and opens up the thinking process.

• Learning Logs. A Learning Log is an active response journal that infuses writing into the daily instructional routine.
• 4-2-1 Free Write. A quick write after lectures that leads to small group discussion

2. Readable Writing: Readable writing, like a classroom essay test or assignment, requires students to clarify their thoughts and develop an organizational structure for their ideas

• Argument
• Informative/explanatory text
• Narrative
• Comparison
• Analysis
• Description

3. Polished writing: Polished writing engages students in the full writing process, from coming up with initial ideas to writing a final draft.

The most helpful tip from this chapter comes in the form of the suggested graphic organizer. Silver gives three examples of a 3X3 writing frames. I have incorporated these writing frames in my class and they have really helped my students organize their thoughts in the writing process.

I have since adapted the 3X3 framework to look like this:

6. Vocabulary’s CODE:

The final section in the text specifically targets vocabulary instruction. Teachers use specific steps with students in order to help them gain a deeper understanding of necessary words. These steps help students “crack” the Vocabulary CODE:

• Connecting with new words.

• Organizing new words into meaningful categories.

• Deep-processing the most important concepts and terms.

• Exercising the mind through strategic review and practice.

Silver stresses the importance of direct vocabulary instruction even though some experts have debated the efficacy of explicitly teaching words. He cites Marzano’s research that “shows that direct vocabulary instruction focused on essential academic terms leads to an average improvement of 33 percentile points on subject-area tests” (Marzano 2004).

Silver’s four steps to learning the CODE include the following:

1. Connect. Because a significant number of unfamiliar terms can be daunting to students, the first phase focuses on helping students form a strong initial connection with these terms.

2. Organize. Students remember information better when it is clearly organized. The second phase ensures that students understand how the terms relate to one another and fit together to make up a larger structure.

3. Deep-Process. In the third phase, students use thinking strategies and multiple forms of representation to develop a deep, conceptual understanding of the most important vocabulary terms.

4. Exercise. Vocabulary terms are like muscles: skip the workouts and you’ll lose the definition (pun intended). The fourth phase of Vocabulary’s CODE engages students in meaningful review and practice activities that help them commit new terms to their long-term memory

The text gives example of using the CODE in the three different classrooms but does not give many tools for teachers to use when teaching vocabulary. Thankfully, we have extremely proficient Instructional Coaches in my district and they lead professional development that gives teachers a variety of tools to use for teaching vocabulary. This website outlines many activities that teachers could use and it’s broken down in the four CODE steps.

Here is one example of a vocabulary exercise teachers could use in the classroom: 

Many of the recommended tools involve some “new” innovative technology that will help students become better connected with the vocabulary. For example, teachers can use thinglink.com, Kahoot, Quizlet and Vocabulary.com to help students learn the words better. All of these websites are outlined in the Maine Township CODE interactive site.

For me, explicitly teaching vocabulary is not on the top of my list because we focus on argument writing and poetry at the sophomore level. However, we do teach figurative language and literary terms in Semester 2. At this point, we spend time explicitly learning the vocabulary with some of the methods from the Core Six. As an English teacher, I prioritize helping students to enjoy reading for pleasure and I want to find texts that interest them. However, in content-heavy classes, such as Science, Math, Health, and History classes, these reading and vocabulary strategies could greatly benefit the teacher and the students.

As I have spoken to some of the teachers in my school who have taken the Professional Development from this book, I have heard positive feedback. The book itself is fairly straightforward but it is dry and does not give enough guidance. Their examples do not help every teacher because they only give three examples for each section. Many teachers have trouble reading the book and incorporating the literacy skills. However, once teachers have had the training with our Instructional Coaches, they feel empowered and ready to include more literacy skills in their content classrooms. Our coaches give a great deal of examples at the high school level to demonstrate how best to use the tools from the books. Science teachers know to to use the Compare and Contrast, Write for Meaning and the Vocabulary CODE to best help their students learn science terms. History teachers can easily incorporate Circle of Knowledge, Inductive Learning and the CODE in their exploration of past ages. I know Math teachers who are adapting the Vocabulary CODE and the Compare and Contrast skills in their classrooms. Even P.E. teachers have jumped on board and are utilizing the CODE to help students master literary skills.

Overall, the book is great for helping teachers teach students skills that they need to succeed. It doesn’t offer much in the way of ground-breaking examples or application in the classroom. Unfortunately, this book is not an earth-shaking revelation for teaching literacy. Since I first starting teaching ESL 20 years ago, I’ve always wanted a magic wand to wave at my students to help them learn how to read better. Sadly, this does not exist. Thankfully, our school-wide instructional coaches have taken the ideas in the book and added enough guidance to make the book a worthwhile read.

Cooter, D. R. Reutzel |R.B. “Research on Teaching Reading Comprehension.” Education.com, 20 July 2010, www.education.com/reference/article/research-teaching-reading-comprehension/.

Dean, C. B., Hubbell, E. R., Pitler, H., & Stone, B. (2012). Classroom instruction that works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: ASCD

Graham, S., Harris, K., & Hebert, M. (2011). Informing writing: The benefits of formative assessment (A report from Carnegie Corporation of New York). Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Marzano, R. J. (2004). Building background knowledge for academic achievement: Research on what works in schools. Alexandria, VA: ASCD

Polite, V. C., & Adams, A. H. (1997). Critical thinking and values clarification through Socratic seminars. Urban Education, 32(2), 256–278.

Silver, Harvey F., et al. The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core. ASCD, 2012.