The Scaffold for Reading and Writing: Building Strong Literacy Foundations

So, when I heard that this week’s blog post was about National Standards, I’ll be honest, I was a little confused. As a student who’s studying to become an aspiring teacher ( in her future), I’ve been taught more about NJSLS than anything else. But when I heard about National Standards for Reading and Writing, it really peaked my interest but also made me slightly confused. So it made me think ” What’s the difference between the NJSLS and National Standards ?” and how can we use them as a scaffold for teaching literacy?

Now, I use the word Scaffolding to describe these standards because they can be used as something that gives students the type of structure they need when engaging with specific literacy skills. This reminded me of how most educators use the NJSLS as a scaffold or Guide to help them when creating lesson plans for their week and for what they’re teaching students. As time goes on, these standards, while still there, sort of start to blur into the background and give headway to teachers to start helping students develop necessary skills and confidence to perform independently in literacy skills. These can include modeling strategies, offering guided practice, and creating specific opportunities that help students collaborate with others as they learn.

Now getting into the standards themselves, when I read the first set of standards from the NCTE, it seemed as though they described standards that align with both reading and writing ( duh, why wouldn’t they?) that provided guidelines to help educators create effective literacy instruction to their students. I sort of thought of them as ingredients that go into creating the best way to teach students about reading and writing, while centralizing around the students needs/wants. The so called “ingredients” are as follows:

• Reading standards: comprehension & collaboration, Diverse texts, Textual analysis, and Integration of knowledge 

• Writing Standards: purpose & audience, process writing, Genres and Modes, research and evidence and the inclusion of digital literacy

• Speaking and Listening Standards: Collaborative discussions and presentation skills 

• Language Standards: conventions of Standard English ( aka the mastering of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary) & Language as Craft

Now, when the CCCC Principles for Postsecondary Teaching of Writing was brought into play, I really started noticing that there were some differences ( not a lot ) between those and the NCTE Standards for Reading and Writing. While both do shine a light on the ways to enhance and strengthen literacy skills in the classroom, I felt that the CCCC shone a light on specific ways to enhance specifically writing instruction in the classroom, with focuses on the Students engagement/ views to the awareness of writing to specific audiences to even using specific contexts. It comes down to everything that there is to know about being a stronger writer.

Lastly, after talking about the CCCC and NCTE ( wow that’s a lot of acronyms) we finally turn to our last acronym the CWPA and their statement outcomes for First-Year composition. Now, when I read this, to me it basically sounded like it took everything from both the CCCC and NCTE and basically combined them into a big project statement that aims to help, guide and set key goals and skills that students will learn and hopefully develop in introductory college writing courses. But, let’s not get confused and think that college writing courses are teaching to standards, they aren’t, they are teaching to the student to help them become stronger and well developed writers and readers.