Use Reading and Writing Standards to Build Better ELA Assignments

Let me start with a misleading stat.

In 2018, TNTP partnered with five districts to observe nearly 1000 lessons and review nearly 22,000 samples of student work.

They found that 71% of students succeeded in their assignments.

What an incredibly high pass rate, you might be thinking, especially when only 37% of high school seniors across the nation are proficient in reading.

The truth? Just 17% of those assignments were at grade level.

The reality is that a shocking number of students in the U.S. are underperforming, partially because they aren’t given the opportunity to do better. But students are not at fault for this. We are failing them by not assigning grade-level work.

We can fix this. Here's how.

How do we ensure that students are learning at grade level?

One way we can ensure students achieve at expected levels, both in the classroom and at the district level, is to focus on the quality and consistency of the assignments we give them. 

But how do we do this? 

Start with standards.

According to TNTP's report, "The Opportunity Myth," 82% of teachers think academic standards are good benchmarks, but only 44% think their students can actually reach these standards. There is a self-fulfilling problem here: we don’t think students can do the work, so we give them easier assignments.

And it’s a vicious cycle. Kids keep getting tasks that are too easy, and they don’t build grade-level skills, which means they stay below grade level, and we have to keep giving them less rigorous tasks.  

The good news is that consciously incorporating grade-level standards into tasks and assignments can break this cycle.  

If we build tasks and assignments that authentically embed standards-level work, we’ll support students in building enduring literacy skills that prepare them for future grades and higher education.

As a best practice, ELA teachers should authentically embed 2-3 grade-level standards into the tasks they assign to students. While this can feel like a lot to keep tabs on, especially when building new assignments or updating old ones, I have a way to streamline the process.  

Cluster reading and writing standards to build better ELA tasks  

We know that the quality of an assignment predicts the quality of a student’s work. But what makes a quality assignment? We can use a simple color-coding practice to check for evidence of grade-level standards in the assignments we create or find. 

It’s not fancy or high-tech, but it works! 

Across the U.S., ELA standards are typically the academic content standards for literature instruction. This means that they express student learning expectations for reading, writing, speaking, and listening, as well as ELA content knowledge. For an ELA task to be genuinely high quality, it needs to combine these standards to give students a clear and discipline-specific purpose for writing in response to complex text(s). 

A cluster of standards works together when each standard supports the others and makes sense in terms of the types of thinking students will engage in throughout an assignment. Clearly embedding the work of a few focus standards in an ELA task guides both you and your students in the instruction that follows. 

So pull out those highlighters, and let’s get started.  

Sample grade level ELA task: color coding magic

We can color code where we see one of the focus standards in the task prompt. Here’s a prompt with its reading and writing standards highlighted. 

In this task, students are asked to understand, describe, interpret, and write about a text with supportive observations—all interconnected and grade-level expectations. 

Once you become familiar with your standards, color coding a task prompt can be a 30-second check to ensure you’re being intentional and explicit about the task's focus and your expectations of students. 

Students can also color code prompts themselves when you introduce an assignment. This is a great way for them to make sure they understand both the “what?” and the “why?” of the assignment ahead.

Color coding helps with ELA lesson planning too 

You can use this same color coding when analyzing your students’ writing products at the end of an assignment. By color coding student work for evidence of the task’s focus standards, it becomes easier to determine what skills students are adept at and what skills they still need to be taught.  

For instance, when color-coding your students’ writing products after teaching the task below, you may see that while your students have a handle on what a theme is, they have a hard time distinguishing between literal and non-literal language. You now know what your next few lessons should focus on, as well as where you may need to revise the instructions you used to teach this task.

All students can think on grade level 

As educators, we like to envision a world where the next study shows that 71% of students (or more!) are getting good grades and doing grade-level work. And while we won’t get there overnight, we can make a big difference in our classrooms if we intentionally incorporate standards to ensure that we’re building rigorous, meaningful tasks for every student in our schools.

Want to learn more about encouraging your students to engage with complexity and build skills and confidence in the process? Join our upcoming webinar, “Closing the Knowledge Gap: Engaging Every Student with Complex Texts.” In this hour-long, interactive session, we'll explore how to balance grade-level texts and tasks with students’ individual reading needs to support them in building the background knowledge and vocabulary essential to lifelong learning.