Supporting Middle School Content Teachers’ Transition to the Common Core: The Implementation and Effects of the Literacy Design Collaborative

• In Event: Tools to Support the Common Core State Standards: Implementation, Impact, and Next Steps for the Literacy Design Collaborative

Abstract

States and districts across the country are grappling with the challenge of helping their teachers to transition to the new, more rigorous Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts (CEP, 2012). For secondary content teachers now expected to integrate literacy development into their classes, the challenge is daunting indeed. The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) provides one possible strategy to help these teachers, and CRESST’s LDC evaluation, the subject here, can provide insights not only about LDC intervention, but the opportunities and obstacles for any transition effort.
LDC supports secondary teachers’ CCSS transition by providing flexible, module templates to enable teachers to seamlessly incorporate ELA into their disciplinary instruction. End-of-module writing tasks provide the heart of the approach. Teachers use fill-in the blank templates to design extended writing tasks that integrate relevant disciplinary content with CCSS literacy demands. An LDC-specified “instructional ladder” helps teachers to design and deliver instructional tasks to provide students the requisite content knowledge and literacy skills to successfully complete the writing task. Core steps of the ladder scaffold student learning and provide ongoing opportunities for formative assessment. Teachers participating in LDC implement at least two modules during the academic year, one targeting explanation, and another targeting argument.

Data Sources
The CRESST study examines LDC implementation in 8th grade social studies and science classrooms in two states. It features:
• A quasi-experimental design to examine LDC’s impact on students’ state assessment performance
• Special measures of LDC implementation, including teacher logs, analysis of classroom artifacts, and survey results.
• Special measures of student learning directly aligned with LDC goals;
Complete data has been received from 40 teachers and approximately 1000 students.

Results
Results appear promising. Based on log, artifact and survey data, fidelity of implementation is quite high. However, there is substantial variation in the specific literacy and formative assessment strategies that individual teachers implement. Results also show considerable variation between social studies/history and science teachers, with the former showing higher fidelity of implementation.
CRESST’s special learning measures are currently being scored and longitudinal state assessment data will be available in the fall. Subsequent analyses will examine LDC impact on both sets of measures; and the relationship among and between students’ and school characteristics, reform support, implementation patterns, and student learning.

Significance
We locate our research in the literature on instructional change. Although classroom practice is notoriously impervious to reform (Cuban 1982; Lortie 1975), an emerging body of research has documented the relationship between student achievement and specific instructional practices that create “opportunities-to-learn” (see Bryk, 2010; Rowen & Correnti 2009; Winters & Herman, 2011). Our implementation focus is classroom instruction, while recognizing that multiple factors influence and inhibit teacher innovation and instructional change (see, for example, Desimone et al. 2002; Fullan, 2008; Owsten, 2003). Our ultimate goal is to leverage these findings to inform efforts required for teachers to successfully implement rigorous CCSS demands.

Authors

• Joan L. Herman, University of California - Los Angeles

• Scott Epstein, UCLA/CRESST