NCTE 2009

EMC Publishing enjoyed meeting the many educators that visited our booth. As always, so much energy in the exhibit hall, as teachers searched out the newest product, or stood in line for autographed books, meeting the famous, the familiar, and the new and soon to be famous and familiar authors! Busy in the booth, we did not have a chance to visit the many wonderful sessions. One visitor to our booth mentioned she loved the workshop that included authors discussing books they were currently reading, or had recently read. Did anyone else attend this session? Or was there another session you enjoyed?

Common Core Standards for College and Career Readiness

We’re paying close attention to the Common Core Standards for College and Career Readiness being developed by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

Note that in the Introduction document, the first standard listed for Student Practices in Reading, Writing, and Speaking and Listening (the underlying premises for the core standards) is that students can demonstrate “independence.”

“Students who are college and career ready exhibit the following capacities in their reading, writing, and speaking and listening:
1. They demonstrate independence as readers, writers, speakers, and listeners. Students can, without significant scaffolding or support, comprehend and evaluate complex text across a range of types and disciplines …”

This premise strongly supports Mirrors & Windows’ unique instructional design that gradually reduces the level of scaffolding or support (applying the gradual release of responsibility model) in each unit to include independent reading selections within the textbook, providing many opportunities for students to demonstrate their independence as readers.
For more information on the Common Core State Standards Initiative visit http://www.corestandards.org/.

Visit EMC at NCTE Booths 532-536

Visit the EMC Publishing booths 532-536 at the National Council of Teachers of English in Philadelphia, PA, November 19–22, 2009! Not only can you check out the Mirrors & Windows: Connecting with Literature program at the conference, but you can attend these relevant writing sessions by Gary Anderson and Tony Romano, EMC authors and teachers at William Fremd High School, Palatine.

“Creatively Bridging Nonfiction Reading and Writing to Make Learning Concrete”
SESSION: A.39 - 9:30 AM to 10:45 AM 11/20 Marriott/Franklin 5, 4th Floor • Format: Panel
Bringing high quality nonfiction experiences to the classroom helps students make connections to the world they live in. These presenters demonstrate how students can make sense of nonfiction and how it can be used as models to find their own voices.

High School Matters — “The College Application Essay: An Authentic Writing Project”
SESSION: DE.02 - 2:30 PM to 5:15 PM 11/20 Marriott/Grand Ballroom Salon G, 5th Floor • Format: Roundtable
College application essays provide teachers with a golden opportunity: motivated students combined with an authentic writing situation. Find out how to help your students write effective college essays while simultaneously providing pedagogically solid composition instruction. This is not for your college-bound seniors only! Other students can also benefit from this assignment. Participants will examine typical application prompts provided by colleges, as well as some that are a little on the wacky side. Participants will also learn how to advise students to effectively deal with any college application essay requirement they may encounter. Authentic successful student models will be provided and explained.

Gary Anderson and Tony Romano, authors of EMC's Expository Composition: Discovering Your Voice, veteran teachers, ILEMC authors, and organizers of Writers Week—the nation’s largest and most well-known high school writing celebration—present an approach to college application essays that will help students see the task as an opportunity rather than a highwire act. Anderson and Romano will demonstrate how composition concepts such as audience, purpose, mode, voice, and tone can be employed to help students confidently craft a college application essay that will not only make a favorable impression on admissions officers but also provide students with a meaningful reflection experience.

Interactive Student Edition Provides Study Tools

Teachers have been pleased with the interactive student edition CD and interactive student edition online. The functions within each piece enable students to personalize the textbook as a study tool. Teachers noted the student can use the highlighting feature for identifying key vocabulary terms, or literary responses to an Analyze Literature activity. Sticky notes can be added as reminders, or even to provide answers to assigned activities. Working with the product, students and teachers realized that the highlighting and note-taking entries remain intact if printed out and can be used as a study tool for the struggling reader. Great suggestions from our users!! Any other wonderful suggestions for using these interactive tools?

Test Rigor Declines

A study released two weeks ago by the U.S. Department of Education’s top statistics agency, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), suggests that in order to get all their students up to “proficient levels” some states may have lowered student-proficiency standards on state tests. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), states must show that their students have achieved proficient levels of performance in reading and math by the end of the 2013-2014 school year. As the deadline approaches, it appears that in order to meet this mandate some states are changing the bar. The results show that states vary widely in what qualifies a student as proficient and that many states set standards judged to be lower than the cutoff for "basic" performance as determined by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) board. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stated that the NCES report “confirms what we’ve known for a long time: States are setting the bar too low.” Duncan said that states should be raising their standards and referred to the common-standards effort as a starting point. A link to “Mapping State Proficiency Standards onto NAEP Scales: 2005-2007” is provided at edweek.org/links.

Mirror or Window selection?

A middle school teacher from Katy, TX, remarked that she always asks her students, following a reading, if the selection is a mirror selection (text-to-self) or a window selection (text-to-world). Great idea to connect and compare literature, and to encourage class discussion.

Literature as Mirrors and Windows

Journalist Sydney J. Harris wrote, “The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” Education provides the opportunities, or windows, for students to expand their understanding of themselves and the world around them. Reading good literature can help with this transformation and initiate a journey of lifelong discoveries.
Think about when you were young and about to start school for the first time. When you stood in front of the mirror, your view was focused on your own reflection and limited by your own experience. Then the windows of learning began to open your mind to new ideas and new experiences, broadening both your awareness and your curiosity.
As you discovered reading and the power of words, you learned to connect to what you read and to examine your own ideas and experiences. And the more you read, the more you learned to connect to the ideas and experiences of other people from other times and other places. Great literature provides mirrors that help you reflect on your own world and windows that lead you into new worlds.
EMC’s literature program, Mirrors and Windows: Connecting with Literature, does just that. We hope that as you read the selections in this book, you will see yourself in the characters, stories, and themes—and that you will discover that we are all citizens of the world and part of the collective human experience.

Texas Textbook Credits

Local districts in Texas can use textbook credits to buy additional copies of any state-adopted textbooks. They can also use the credits to buy technological equipment for the purpose of accessing electronic educational materials in classrooms, libraries, and computer labs. Districts earn credits by choosing textbooks priced at levels below the maximum prices set by the State Board of Education. Although the state legislature created this program over two years ago to help combat the rapidly rising costs of educational materials, the program has been little used due to the fact that publishers almost always price their books at the maximum, making it impossible for districts to earn credits. It appears, however, that use of textbook credits is about to become more prevalent as a result of new laws passed by the legislature and the recent announcement by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) of rules that will govern the implementation of the credit process. When districts order new literature and reading textbooks in April of 2010, new open source textbooks, electronic textbooks, and EMC's Mirrors & Windows program, will allow districts to earn credits that they can use to buy classroom sets of books, computers, white boards, and e-book readers for classroom use. Textbook coordinators at the local levels are receiving information from the TEA and will be trained over the next few months on the tracking and payment methods that will become part of the standard EMAT system. If you need further information or have questions about the credit process, talk to your local textbook coordinator or read the new rules for textbook credits on the Texas Education Agency web site by going to the following link: http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/textbooks/announcements/ProposedSBOERule.pdf#page=26

Calculate your district’s textbook credit amount! Click here