I’m just now finishing Peter Johnston’s wonderful book, Opening Minds. I loved his earlier book, Choice Words, and this one is a great read, too.

School will start in a couple of weeks. Each summer I find myself reading something nourishing for the soul, not a “how-to” book on teaching technique, but something that inspires, that makes me stop, get that vacant stare in my eyes, and dream. Johnston’s book does that for me.

I love his clear description of learning mindsets — fixed v. process or growth — that emerges from Carol Dweck’s work, and his emphasis on the language of inquiry and the place of uncertainty and tentativeness in learning. But what I want to think about now is how his ideas about a learning community (his chapter on thinking and working together) might help provide a context for some of the important Common Core related work we will need to do.

I’m moving from third to fourth grade next year. As I’ve been studying the fourth grade ELA Common Core, I notice that much of what it seems to be about is using evidence to begin to make arguments about ideas. For instance, here’s some standards from the Reading Literature and Informational Text sections:

Standard 1: Refer to details and examples…when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences.
Standard 2: Determine a theme (main idea) and explain how it is supported by key details…summarize…
Standard 3: Describe/explain…drawing on specific details/information in the text…

Note the heavy emphasis on providing evidence to understand a text, or justify a point of view or an interpretation. This is yet another step towards more formal argumentation than was present in the third grade standards.

A look at the upcoming Smarter Balanced (SB) assessments also shows that finding evidence in texts will be “tested” when Iowa (likely) adopts the SB assessment within the next two years.

Setting aside for now whether these SB assessments really do ask students to think, come up with their own ideas, and engage in meaningful intellectual work, Johnston’s book helps me understand that the real reason students might be interested in reading closely, citing evidence, and thinking deeply about texts is not because I (or the State of Iowa) tell them they have to, but because when learners are engaged in real intellectual work they become intrinsically interested in what others are thinking. One cites evidence because one cares to communicate an idea worth communicating. Johnston notes research that shows that when students are engaged in a learning community that values conversation and ideas, they are much more likely to cite evidence (and more of it), to entertain the possibility of multiple interpretations, and think more flexibly and synthetically than when learning is more about individual performance and skills. Johnston notes:

“Children who have learned to think together in dialogic groups learn to take each other seriously. Students learn to listen to and find each other interesting, and these become the properties of the learning community.”

So, this upcoming year I can meet the Common Core Standards by teaching the kids some skills like how to generate ideas, cite evidence, and offer interpretations, OR, as Johnston seems to argue, I can concentrate my energies on creating a learning community where kids do those sorts of things because they are interested in the ideas of fellow humans.

I know which pathway I want to follow! For now, I’ll have to trust that when the tests come ’round the mountain riding six white horses when they come, the kids will be ready because they’ve cared enough about ideas to know why they cite evidence in the first place…