Skills & Ladders

(with more variations)

Welcome!

The Literacy Design Collaborative

An expanding set of classroom, district, state
and service providers with the will to meet
the challenge of expecting high levels of
secondary literacy, head-on.

LDC: Skills and Ladders

Our Regulars
Educators from
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Y
Z

Additional partners
from
X
Y
And our facilitators

LDC: Skills and Ladders

Our Guests Today

X
Y
Z

LDC: Skills and Ladders

Getting Comfortable
Restrooms:
Lunch:
Copies of workshop handouts and this
PowerPoint will be available at TalkingEd
after this session

LDC: Skills and Ladders

Our Construction Calendar

LDC: Skills and Ladders

Our Previous Project

Project
Reflect on the teaching experience
Score student work together, building
deeper understanding of the LDC rubric
Choose sample student work to illustrate
the results

LDC: Skills and Ladders

Simplifications for Your First Ladder

Used the sample skills
Used most mini-tasks as is (modifying
mainly to refer to specific resources
students will use)
Worked mainly on modifying instructional
strategies to work smoothly for your
teaching task and your students

LDC: Skills and Ladders

Deeper Work for a Second Ladder

Now that youve worked through the basic
idea, its time to use the full model and:
Think through the skills that fit your task
Vary mini-tasks to fit the skills
Modify instructional strategies to work
smoothly for your teaching task and your
students

LDC: Skills and Ladders

Todays Project
Project
Plan instruction, revising each section of a
sample ladder to work with your second teaching
task
Supplies
Your Task 11
Possible texts for your task
Note-taking and writing resources you have
found helpful
Modules you like from TalkingEd
LDC: Skills and Ladders

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What Skills?

11

First Thinking
In your notebook, please:
In a quick-write, jot down all the skills you
can think of that students will need for
your task 11. Go for quantity!
After writing for 2-4 minutes, please:
Compare ideas with your crew
Be ready to share with the room.

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Possible Additional Standards

Each template task has some Common Core
State Standards built in. When a teacher
fills in the template, the resulting teaching
task may also address additional parts of
Common Core.
In the LDC Guide for Teachers, Appendix B
shows which standards come built in to
each kind of template taskand which can
be addressed when appropriate.
LDC: Skills and Ladders

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Possible Additional Standards

Consider Reading Anchor Standard 3:
Analyze how and why individuals, events,
and ideas develop and interact over the
course of a text.
Will your Task 11 require that type of work?
Could you amend it so that it would?

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Second Thinking
With your crew, please:
Read through the Common Core Standards
that Task 11 can address when appropriate
Does your Task 11 asks students to engage
any of those Standards? If yes, discuss what
additional skills students may need for that
kind of work
If no, choose one of the Standards and think
about how a task could engage itand about
what additional skills students would need for
a task like that
Be ready to share some thoughts
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Possible Reading Standards

5. Analyze the structure of texts, including how
specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger
portions of the text (e.g. a section, chapter,
scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the
whole.
8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and
specific claims in a text, including the validity of
the reasoning as well as the relevance and
sufficiency of the evidence.
9. Analyze how two or more texts address similar
themes or topics in order to build knowledge or
to compare the approaches the authors take.

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Possible Writing Standards

6. Use technology, including the Internet, to
produce and publish writing and to
interact and collaborate with others.
7. Conduct short as well as more sustained
research projects based on focused
questions, demonstrating understanding
of the subject under investigation.

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Check on Tech
Do you:
Have a computer version of the template
and plan to use that?
Have a paper version of the template and
plan to use that?
Need a computer version of the template
to use?
Need a paper version of the template to
use?

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Thinking and Writing

With your crew, please:
Decide which skills your students will need to
complete your Task 11
Feel free to use ideas from your own quickwrite, your standards notes, and the LDC
samples
Add your skills list to the What Skills?
section of your template
Enter definitions for each skill, too. (Working
on defining may also help you revise how
youve named and listed the skills themselves)
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What Instruction?
Cluster 1

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Building Your Version

With your crew, please fill out the Cluster 1 portion
of your What Instruction? template section. You
can:
Fill in your skills and definitions from the list you
just made
Use or revise mini-task products and prompts from
a previous ladder, the sample in the LDC Guide for
Teachers, or any modules you like from TalkingEd
Use or revise instructional strategies from the
same sources
List the pacing you plan to use

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Sharing Some Thinking

Did you keep some ideas your earlier
ladder?
Did you borrow from another ladder?
Did you invent something new, or build in
something youre used in your own
classrooms?

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Quick Check
To strengthen your work, please:
In your LDC Guide for Teachers, review
Appendix As listing of whats required in
the What Instruction? section
Decide if anything youve done so far
needs to be tweaked to fit those rules
Be ready to share any questions you
develop as you review

LDC: Skills and Ladders

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What Instruction?
Cluster 2

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Reading and Researching

Will you limit students to a small set of
sources available in the classroom?
Take them to the library?
Ask them to search the Internet?

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Building Your Version

With your crew, please:
Fill out the Cluster 2 portion of the What
Instruction? ladder in your template,
including pacing
Make your plan for the research step clear
Use ideas from any sources, as long as
they make sense for your subject, students,
and teaching task

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Sharing Some More

Whats your thinking on the research
challenge?
What did you keep or borrow?
What did you invent or take from your own
teaching experience?

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What Instruction?
Clusters 3 & 4

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Building Your Version

With your crew, please:
Fill out the Cluster 3 and 4 portion of the
What Instruction? ladder in your template,
including pacing
Use ideas from any sources, as long as they
make sense for your subject, students, and
teaching task
Go on to complete your materials section,
listing any books, handouts, and other items
you will use, and deciding whether to use a
writers notebook
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Idea Swap

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The Ladder Makes Practice Visible

People tend to be much more specific about
what they expect by way of student
performance than they are about what in
classrooms would lead to the performance
they desire. We think you cannot change
learning and performance at scale without
creating a strong, visible, transparent
common culture of instructional practice.
City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel,
Instructional Rounds in Education
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The Plan
Each crew will divide in half, with half going to
visit another crew and half staying home.
Guests will take five minutes to share about
their task, skills list, and ladder.
Hosts will do the same thing.
Guests and hosts will take five minutes to ask
each other questions.
And then, guests will move to a second
location and do it again.
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Preparing for Company

With your crew, please:
Check over your design and see if theres
anything you want to clarify
Discuss which high points youll want to
share with others
Decide who will travel and who will stay
home

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Taking It on the Road

To start sharing please:
If youre a guest for this round, take your
notebook and your traveling crewmates, and
choose another table to join
Spend five minutes with guests sharing about
their task, skills list, and their instructional
ladder
Spend five minutes with hosts doing the same
sharing
Spend five minutes asking each other questions
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Coming Home
To finish off this learning, please:
Rejoin your own crew
Share some ideas you heard
Discuss any changes youve thought of for
your own design, and make those changes

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Project Status

36

Our Next Project

Project
Reflect on the teaching experience from your Task
11
Score student work together, building deeper
understanding of LDC rubrics and potential
collaboration across subjects and grades
Choose sample student work to illustrate the results
Supplies
Four student responses to the teaching task from
each teacher
A copy of the teaching task attached to each
response
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More on Bringing Student Work

Remove any information that could identify the
student before you come: name, school,
teachers name, etc.

If a student has included personal information in

the body of the piece, choose a different piece.

Bring copies, not originals. Youll be choosing

some pieces as exemplars of each level of
student work, and well want to collect those
from you at the end of the day.
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Organize for the Next Project

With your crew, please:
Discuss what work you need to do to be
ready for teaching
Discuss what work you need to do for our
scoring project
Make notes in your notebooks on how you
divide up any needed work
Complete your crew update and submit to
your facilitator

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Closing

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Check in About Your Learning

Please:
Rejoin your district team
Briefly share how the work is going with
your various crews
Discuss the exit slip questions together
Fill out your own exit slip
Add your name and e-mail if youd like us
to get back to you before the next meeting

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Thank You

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