Bruce Penniman works at initial Literacy Design Collaborative Meeting in New York - July 2010
National Writing Project representatives from five key states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards met in New York to pilot an action research effort, in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, examining the effectiveness of a new curriculum framework called the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC). LDC is an expansive effort of partnering educators and organizations, building off work begun by UCLA’s National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST), funded by the Gates Foundation. It aims to align literacy standards, instruction, and assessment.
Teacher-consultants from sites in Michigan, Kentucky, Idaho, and state networks from California and Massachusetts were introduced to the new curriculum development tool and began examining LDC’s usefulness and scalability in teaching to the new Common Core Standards with regard to writing instruction. While NWP is one of a growing number of partners, it has been sought for its network of TCs’ expertise in research and literacy instruction. Each state site or network will submit a proposal for testing the LDC model of curriculum development in practice and provide feedback for further development.
The new curriculum framework builds on a task-based model, generated from the Common Core, focusing the learning goal explicitly on writing generated from reading assignments. LDC tasks are accompanied by a number of developing prompt templates with three built-in levels of difficulty and interchangeable variables for the widest application across disciplines. Additionally, there is a generic scoring rubric for each task template. Ultimately, tasks lead to modules that are meant to add instructional supports and also be flexible for application across levels of rigor, discipline, and grade level.
Massachusetts, with representatives from all three local sites, will be developing a series of prototype module across grade levels 6-12 and field testing more extensively constructed modules at a handful of English Language Arts grade levels with hopes of inviting other content area instructors into the process. The Massachusetts team is made up of Kathleen Gillis and Leslie Skantz-Hodgson of WMWP, Fred Haas and Katherine Petta of the BWP, and Margo Moore of the BBWP. Bruce Penniman of WMWP serves as team coordinator.