1. Summer Leadership Institute
Administrative “Look-Fors”: Text Complexity
Karen Colarossi, Kimberly Natal, Rose Sedely
August 9-10, 2012

2. Common Board Configuration
Date:
Vocabulary: Complex Text, Comprehension Instructional Sequence, NGCAR-pd
Bell Ringer: What do you already know and how have you seen complex text utilized in your school?
Agenda: 1. Overview
2. Reviewing complex text
3. Resources for complex text
4. Meeting the needs
5. Classroom Look-Fors
Learning Goal: Administrators will have a better understanding of what they should see in a classroom with regard to using complex text and know what the plan is for training teachers.
Benchmark: RI.6.10 By the end of the year, read and comprehend literary nonfiction in the grades 6-8 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.
Summarizing Activity: Rate how your knowledge about text complexity has changed as a result of this overview.
Bell-ringer: Index cards: Elementary one color, Secondary another: Ask administrators to think about what they already know, and have seen with regard to identifying and using complex text.
Objective: Administrators will be able to demonstrate an understanding of what should be observed in a classroom using complex text.
Homework:
Essential Question: Why does text complexity matter?

3. Lake County Schools Vision Statement
A dynamic, progressive and collaborative learning community embracing change and diversity where every student will graduate with the skills needed to succeed in postsecondary education and the workplace.
Mission Statement
The mission of the Lake County Schools is to provide every student with individual opportunities to excel.
Lake County Schools is committed to excellence in all curricular opportunities and instructional best practices. This focus area addresses closing the achievement gap, increased graduation rate, decreased dropout rate, increase in Level 3 and above scores on the FCAT, achieving an increase in the number of students enrolled in advanced placement and dual enrollment opportunities and implementing the best practices in instructional methodology.
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4. 21st Century Skills Tony Wagner, The Global Achievement Gap
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Collaboration and Leadership
Agility and Adaptability
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Effective Oral and Written Communication
Accessing and Analyzing Information
Curiosity and Imagination
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: To compete in the new global economy, companies need their workers to think about how to continuously improve their products, processes, or services. “The challenge is this: How do you do things that haven't been done before, where you have to rethink or think anew? It's not incremental improvement any more. The markets are changing too fast.”
Collaboration and Leadership: Teamwork is no longer just about working with others in your building. “Technology has allowed for virtual teams. We have teams working on major infrastructure projects that are all over the U.S. On other projects, you're working with people all around the world on solving a software problem. Every week they're on a variety of conference calls; they're doing Web casts; they're doing net meetings.”
Agility and Adaptability: Ability to think, be flexible, change, and use a variety of tools to solve new problems. “We change what we do all the time. I can guarantee the job I hire someone to do will change or may not exist in the future, so this is why adaptability and learning skills are more important than technical skills.”
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism: Taking chances and being a risk-taker. “I say to my employees, if you try five things and get all five of them right, you may be failing. If you try 10 things, and get eight of them right, you're a hero.”
Effective Oral and Written Communication: The ability to be clear, concise, focused, energetic and passionate around the points they want to make. “We are routinely surprised at the difficulty some young people have in communicating: verbal skills, written skills, presentation skills. They have difficulty being clear and concise; it's hard for them to create focus, energy, and passion around the points they want to make. If you're talking to an exec, the first thing you'll get asked if you haven't made it perfectly clear in the first 60 seconds of your presentation is, ‘What do you want me to take away from this meeting?’ They don't know how to answer that question.”
Accessing and Analyzing Information: The ability to know how to access and analyze large quantities of information. “There is so much information available that it is almost too much, and if people aren't prepared to process the information effectively it almost freezes them in their steps.”
Curiosity and Imagination: The development of young people's capacities for imagination, creativity, and empathy will be increasingly important for maintaining the United States' competitive advantage in the future. “People who've learned to ask great questions and have learned to be inquisitive are the ones who move the fastest in our environment because they solve the biggest problems in ways that have the most impact on innovation.”
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5. High Effect Size Indicators
“The Department’s identified set of indicators on high effect size instructional and leadership strategies with a causal relationship to student learning growth constitute priority issues for deliberate practice and faculty development.”
-Florida Department of Education, 2012
Student learning needs and faculty and leadership development needs will vary from school to school and from district to district. However, contemporary research reveals a core of instructional and leadership strategies that have a higher probability than most of positively impacting student learning in significant ways. The indicators below link formative feedback and evaluation to contemporary research on practices that have a positive impact on student learning growth.
• Research on the cause and effect relationships between instructional and leadership strategies and student outcomes address the effect size of a strategy: What degree of impact does it have?
• In the context of district instructional and leadership evaluation systems, effect size is a statistical estimation of the influence a strategy or practice has on student learning. Effect size calculations result from statistical analyses in research focused on student learning where the correct and appropriate use of a strategy yields better student learning growth than when the strategy is not used or is used incorrectly or inappropriately.
• In research terms, those strategies often identified as “high effect size” are those with higher probabilities of improving student learning.
Classroom teachers need a repertoire of strategies with a positive effect size so that what they are able to do instructionally, after adapting to classroom conditions, has a reasonable chance of getting positive results. As school leaders and mentor teachers begin to focus on feedback to colleagues to improve proficiency on practices that improve student learning growth, emphasis should be on those strategies that have a high effect size. Where every Florida classroom teacher and school leader has
Summer Leadership Institute

6. Classroom Teacher High Effect Indicators
School Leadership High Effect Indicators
Learning Goal with Scales
Tracking Student Progress
Established Content Standards
Multi-tiered System of Supports
Clear Goals
Text Complexity
ESOL Students
Feedback Practices
Facilitating Professional Learning
Clear Goals and Expectations
Instructional Resources
High Effect Size Strategies
Instructional Initiatives
Monitoring Text Complexity
Interventions
Instructional Adaptations
ESOL Strategies
Summer Leadership Institute

7. Text complexity is the key to accelerating student achievement in reading.

8. Bell-Ringer
What do you already know about, and what have you seen teachers implement with regard to teachers using complex text?
Think, write, share
30 seconds to think, 30 seconds to write, 1 minute to share.

9. What is Complex Text?
How do you know if your teachers are using complex text?
How often should you see it used in the classroom?
Where can your teachers find resources for complex text?
Who is available to support your teachers?
What is the plan going forward?
This overview for administrators is designed to answer these questions, and to give some classroom look-fors when visiting a classroom.

10. How Do You Know if Your Teachers are Using Complex Text?
In the folder you will see two text samples- one is complex and one is simple.
Use the matrix and the “cheat sheet” and your table partners to read each piece of text then discuss each piece in terms of complexity.
Choose the piece you believe is complex- be prepared to support your choice with evidence from the text and details from the cheat sheet.
Need two sides of the room/ Elementary and Secondary. Elementary tables will be Orange and Secondary tables will be green (need cards with an E for Elementary and an S for Secondary).
Have Elementary and Secondary principals sit together. Offer them two texts, one which is complex, one which is simple from the same grade level band. Give them the matrix and the “cheat sheet”. Ask them to work with a partner to try to determine which of the texts they have in front of them is complex and why. Ask them to use the four areas (vocabulary/language demands; text structure; knowledge demands; purpose) to justify their choice.

11. Where Can Teachers Find Resources?
Choose an excerpt of text from Appendix B as a starting place:
Use available resources to determine the text complexity of other materials on our own.

12. Additional Resources Ebsco DBQ Essays Lake County Home Page EBSCO
lakecounty (Username)
lakecounty (Password)
DBQ Essays

13. How Often Should You See Complex Text Used by Students?
Students should be interacting with complex texts
1/3 of the time by October
½ of the time by January
2/3rds of the time by April
Interaction with complex texts should be throughout the student’s day

14. Use of Informational Text

15. What is Informational Text?

16. Who Can Help? Literacy Coach
Your Literacy Coach was trained to identify complex text using the Fl DOE matrix.
All Secondary and two Elementary Literacy Coaches are trained to deliver NGCAR-pd and/or CIS(Comprehension Instructional Sequence) which assists teachers in understanding how to teach students in their content area to use complex text.
Other Elementary Coaches are encouraged to team up with their middle school/high school feeder Coach to attend or deliver NGCAR-pd or CIS training.

17. What is the Plan Going Forward?
Your Literacy Coach should deliver NGCAR-PD training to a selected cadre of content area teachers.
Already Reading Endorsed/Reading Certified or CAR-PD trained teachers should have training on implementing complex text through the Comprehension Instructional Sequence.
Elementary Coaches/CRT’s will have continued training on CIS to begin training teachers at the school level.

18. In Summary: What you should see-
Students reading and interacting with complex, content area text in the reading block and/or content area course.
Students interacting with complex text by marking the text, using directed note-taking, and generating their own questions about text while working in groups and pairs.
Authentic student writing (short and extended) based on informational, complex text which includes citing from the text in every subject area. (e.g. Argument/support essays, DBQ’s etc. )

19. MORE….
An increase in the use of complex, informational text at all grade levels in all subjects.
Teachers using scaffolding and support strategies to assist students with complex text.
Think Aloud strategy
Deliberately formatted reading groups: pairs or triads
Opportunities for student directed dialogue
Organizers to assist and support student questioning, understanding, and reflection
Teacher Read Aloud (as needed)
Socratic Seminar

20. What you should NOT see-
Students reading complex informational text independently with packets of work sheets and questions to answer.
Students reading complex text as homework packets.
Silent classrooms with no text based discussion and no writing.

21. How Can You Monitor? OBSERVE teachers and students in the classrooms.
EXAMINE the text being used in the classrooms.
ASK teachers how they evaluated their text for complexity.
REVIEW samples of student writing, including short and extended essays in all subjects, DBQ’s and Science Fair Projects.
ATTEND a Comprehension Instructional Sequence (CIS) or NGCAR-PD training conducted at your school.

22. Rate Yourself
On a scale of 1-4 (one low, four high) rate yourself on your comfort level with understanding what you should see in a classroom using complex text.

23. Participant Scale and Reflection (Please complete and turn in)
0-Not Using
No understanding or implementation steps taken away
1-Beginning
Little understanding and inconsistent implementation steps taken away
2-Developing
Moderate understanding and implementation steps taken away
3-Applying
Consistent understanding and implementation steps taken away along with monitoring componets for effective execution
4-Innovating
In addition to criteria of Applying, enhanced understanding, implementation, monitoring, and execution take aways
Summer Leadership Institute