Identify the Common Core State Standards and other subject-specific learning goals that will be the lesson’s primary focus for teaching, learning, and assessment.

1. Analyze the Shifts

To Do: 

Read the instructional shifts related to your subject area. See tables below.

Regular practice with complex texts


Rather than focusing solely on the skills of reading and writing, the ELA/literacy standards highlight the growing complexity of the texts students must read to be ready for the demands of college, career, and life. The standards call for a staircase of increasing complexity, and outline a progressive development of reading comprehension so that students advancing through the grades are able to gain more from what they read.


Building academic vocabulary

The standards call for students to grow their vocabularies through a mix of conversation, direct instruction, and reading. They ask students to determine word meanings, appreciate the nuances of words, and steadily expand their range of words and phrases. Vocabulary and conventions are treated in their own strand not because skills in these areas should be handled in isolation, but because their use extends across reading, writing, speaking, and listening.


Reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from texts, both literary and informational


Rather than asking students questions they can answer solely from their prior knowledge and experience, the standards call for students to answer questions that depend on their having read the texts with care.
 The reading standards focus on students’ ability to read carefully and grasp information, arguments, ideas, and details based on evidence in the text. Students should be able to answer a range of text-dependent questions, whose answers require inferences based on careful attention to the text. The standards also focus on evidence-based writing along with the ability to inform and persuade, which is a significant shift from current practice.

Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction


Informational texts play an important part in building students’ content knowledge. Further, it is vital for students to have extensive opportunities to build knowledge through texts so they can learn independently.
 In K-5, fulfilling the standards requires a 50-50 balance between informational and literary reading. Informational reading includes content-rich nonfiction in history/social studies, sciences, technical studies, and the arts. The K-5 standards strongly recommend that texts—both within and across grades—be selected to support students in systematically developing knowledge about the world.
 In grades 6-12, there is much greater attention on the specific category of literary nonfiction, which is a shift from traditional standards. To be clear, the standards pay substantial attention to literature throughout K-12, as it constitutes half of the reading in K-5 and is the core of the work of 6-12 ELA teachers. Also in grades 6-12, the standards for literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects ensure that students can independently build knowledge in these disciplines through reading and writing. Reading, writing, speaking, and listening should span the school day from K-12 as integral parts of every subject.

Greater focus on fewer topics


The standards ask math teachers to significantly narrow and deepen the way time and energy are spent in the classroom. This means focusing deeply on the major work of each grade—for example, in grades K–2: Concepts, skills, and problem solving related to addition and subtraction, and in grade 6, Ratios and proportional relationships, and early algebraic expressions and equations.

Coherence: Linking topics and thinking across grades


The standards are designed around coherent progressions from grade to grade. Learning is carefully connected across grades so that students can build new understanding onto foundations built in previous years. For example, in 4th grade, students must “apply and extend previous understandings of multiplication to multiply a fraction by a whole number” (Standard 4.NF.4). This extends to 5th grade, when students are expected to build on that skill to “apply and extend previous understandings of multiplication to multiply a fraction or whole number by a fraction” (Standard 5.NF.4). Each standard is not a new event, but an extension of previous learning.


Rigor: Pursue conceptual understanding, procedural skills and fluency, and application with equal intensity

To Do:

List 5 keywords or phrases within the shifts that illustrate how the new standards differ from prior standards. 

To Do:

Identify teaching practices or skills related to the shifts that are a regular part of your instruction, and practices or skills that will be new to your instruction.  

To Do:

List two concrete actions that you will take in order to support your efforts to implement your newly identified practices or skills.

Reference Resources

• Introduction to Literacy Shifts in the Content Areas
• Common Core State Standards for ELA and Literacy: Shifts and Instructional Implications
  
• Transitioning to the Common Core State Standards: Focus on Text Complexity
• Deep Dive into Math Shifts

2. Select the Standards to be Addressed

To Do:

Identify the key skills and concepts students should know, based on a close reading of the standards in relation to the subject areas and grades for which you would like to create a lesson. 

Note: Science and social studies teachers will need to do a close reading of the ELA and literacy standards contained in the CCSS, as well as a close reading of the NGSS and C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards, respectively. 

To Do: 

Choose the top 5 standards that apply to the lesson you'd like to teach. If you are a science or social studies teacher, you should pick 5 literacy standards in addition to 5 subject-specific standards. 

Reference Resources

• Review the CCSS, the NGSS, and/or the C3 Standards by clicking below.

3. Write Your Learning Objectives

Your learning objectives will be your explicit statements that clearly express what the student will be able to do at the end of the lesson(s). The language of your learning objectives should be more concrete and intentional than the standards themselves. In a sense, your objectives should model how to interpret the learning standards.

To Do: 

Write your learning objectives tied to the specific standards you chose in step 2 above by answering: What must the student know and be able to do to meet the content standard?

To Do: 

For each learning objective, answer the question: If students have to __________ , then teachers have to __________.

Students will be able to explain what a primary source is and how primary sources can be used in biological studies.

Students will be able to determine over-arching trends in human diet by analyzing a national study.

Students will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of their diet by comparing data from their own food survey to data from a national study.

Students will be able to evaluate the efficiency of their diet by tracking the transfer of energy.

Students will be able to evaluate the claim “The average human diet is meeting nutritional needs.”

4. Move to Next Step

Now that you have identified your learning goals, start selecting and building informational and non-fiction literary "text sets" for use in your lessons. Work through our text selection and sequencing module here: Select Texts 

Reference Collection

Not ready for the next step yet?  Visit the reference collections below to learn more about the instructional shifts for math and ELA.

Math Shifts Collection 

ELA and Literacy Shifts Collection