PRAIRIE GROVE — Instead of having students memorize seldom-used words such as homonym or onomatopoeia, teachers can help develop in their students a more sophisticated vocabulary by teaching them words that offer more precision.
And when appropriate, the students will expand their vocabulary by learning when to use words, such as “required” for “have to,” “haunting” for “scary” and “mention” for “tell.”
Leaders from the Arkansas Public School Resource Center conducted the first of six “hub” meetings Thursday in Prairie Grove for a new pilot program to assist rural school districts and charter schools with the transition to the new Common Core State Standards. The Achieving By Changing Pilot Program involves 26 school districts and charter schools that aredivided into regional hubs. The Northwest Arkansas hub is composed of Benton County School of the Arts and Decatur, Cedarville, Paris and Prairie Grove school districts.
A leadership team of 35 teachers and administrators from those districts participated in the first hub meeting Thursday at Prairie Grove Middle School.
Arkansas Public School Resource Center, a nonprofit with more than 150 memberschool districts and charter schools, received a $2 million grant from the Walton Family Foundation for the Achieving By Changing program. The hubs will continue meeting monthly for three years and practice new strategies with the help of a coach assigned to each. The coach will spend one day a month at each of the schools to assist teachers with adapting the strategies to their students and campuses, said Barbara Hunter Cox, director of teaching and learning for the resource center.
“They’ve been focusing on good children’s literature but very few examples of real-life reading,” Cox said. “It’s interacting with text and using it at a higher level.” The Common Core State Standards were developed by national committees of education and content experts at the direction of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Arkansas school districts began teach-ing under the new standards for literacy and math this year for kindergarten through second grade. The standards will reach third- through eighthgrade classes next school year and high school grades in 2013-14.
National committees also are developing new grade-level and end-of-course exams based on the national standards. Those tests will be in place in the 2014-15 school year.
Through the spring, the resource center will guide the schools in studying the data systems they use to track student learning and to evaluate the level of teaching and learning taking place in classrooms, said Katie Booher, spokesman for the Arkansas center. They also will develop lesson plans and units to share with other schools in the pilot program.
“By fall, we’re hoping we’re having a semester full of activities for grades three through eight,” Cox said.
To begin, the Northwest Arkansas hub will explore a different approach for building academic vocabulary as one of the first tasks of Achieving By Changing. In the lesson on academic vocabulary, Brook Singletary, technology specialist, suggested some steps teachers could take to change how they approach vocabulary. They should create grade-specific vocabulary lists, share those lists with other schools in the pilot program and compare with other schools.
“Teaching words with only the definition does not work,” she said in her lesson. “They need to practice using the word in a variety of contexts.”
Teachers can shift their instruction by identifying words that are unfamiliar to their students, that appear frequently in language and that are related to concepts the students understand.
Group members also must lead a discussion with teachers on their campuses on the six shifts in focus for literacy and math under the Common Core State Standards, said Ellen Treadway, a teaching andlearning specialist. In literacy, one shift involves “building knowledge through contentrich nonfiction and informational texts.”
Claire Pence, an instructional facilitator in reading at Cedarville, said her district already is studying the shifts in instruction under the Common Core. In the past, schools have focused more on narrative literature, but the new standards require half of the writing and reading in kindergarten through fifth grade to be on informational, she said. In the sixth through 12th grades, about 80 percent of the writing and reading should be informational.
At Decatur, students seem to enjoy having a variety of nonfiction pieces, said Donna Gier, who teaches fifth- and sixthgrade literacy in the district. She has expanded her classroom library with information on the Civil War, ancient Egypt and on science, such as with books about animals.
“They want you to have high expectations for them,” Gier said. “They strive to please. They want to do well.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/17/2012