WELCOME TO PATHS

Welcome to Paths to College and Career, a comprehensive English Language Arts and Literacy curriculum designed to meet the demands of college and career readiness standards and to support teachers in enacting the instructional shifts. Over the next few pages, you will find helpful information on the following topics:

• Features of Paths
• Using the curriculum
• Serving all students

Paths to College and Career is a year-long English Language Arts and Literacy curriculum designed to ensure that all students can do grade-level thinking, read grade-level texts, and complete grade-level tasks. Paths provides engaging and challenging learning experiences for students. Likewise, it provides meaningful support for educators as they encounter new instructional approaches and strategies that build students' skills and knowledge for success at the postsecondary level and in the workforce. Paths provides guidance to teachers for facilitating evidence-based conversations about text, developing students' academic vocabulary, teaching close reading, implementing Accountable Independent Reading (AIR), and unpacking the standards themselves.

Features of Paths

Engaging, Complex Texts

In keeping with the guidance of the standards around increased text complexity, Paths includes a range of literary and informational texts at each grade level. The program features familiar canonical literature, such as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Edgar Allen Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart,” as well as contemporary works, such as Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and Karen Russell's “St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.” Paths also embodies the LAFS emphasis on informational text, featuring such literary nonfiction as Thoreau's “Civil Disobedience,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and Julia Alvarez's “A Genetics of Justice.” Through this diversity and balance of texts, Paths gives students at all levels the opportunity to grapple with, deconstruct, analyze, and make meaning from complex texts that address highly relevant and universal ideas and issues.

Depth of Reading

Paths is paced to allow students to carefully explore complex text through reading and rereading to fully investigate ideas, structures, and layers of meaning. Paths emphasizes depth of understanding of the text students read rather than the breadth of texts “covered” in a curriculum. To allow for deep analysis of texts, some works are read in their entirety, while others are read in excerpted selections.

Paths ensures that students have the space, time, and support to navigate complex texts that are worth reading. Each lesson in the curriculum engages students in thinking, talking, and writing about the texts as they read, reread, and collaborate. In Paths, students work independently and in groups to address challenging text-based questions, recognizing and articulating their own confusions and understandings before teachers model problem solving or provide guidance. As students progress through the grades, their capacity for independent work with complex texts increases, leading to greater ownership of their own learning.

Revisiting and Annotating Text

Throughout Paths' lessons, students engage in reading both fiction and nonfiction in small chunks for specific purposes. Students may spend an entire class period on 10 lines of text to achieve a clear and common understanding. A central feature of achieving a depth of understanding involves annotating text. Paths regularly asks students to make note of specific parts of a text that contain important ideas or themes. These annotations and selections may spark connections to other parts of the text or a different text, or require additional instructional attention to support comprehension and analysis.

Academic Vocabulary

A key priority within Paths is building students' academic vocabulary through the study of Tier 2 words, which are transferable, high-leverage terms that they may encounter in other coursework or disciplines. Students encounter a large number of these words as they read a variety of challenging literary and informational texts through independent and classroom reading. Exposure to these words enables students to gain familiarity with them through context or, as appropriate, to learn their meaning from the teacher.

Writing from Sources and Research

Paths emphasizes writing from sources and research, consistent with the expectations of the LAFS. Students write in a variety of modes for a variety of purposes using the text as the basis for forming claims and making inferences. In addition to short research projects on a range of topics over the course of a year, students also participate in sustained, inquiry-based research about a topic derived from a module text.

Standards Assessed and Standards Addressed

Paths includes frequent and varied opportunities to assess students' learning and track their progress toward success with the standards. These assessments can and should be used for formative purposes, but educators also may choose to select specific assessments for determining student progress. Paths includes rubrics and other tools that give the teacher data that may drive instruction or serve as a summative assessment.

In each lesson, Paths focuses on one or two “assessed standards” and a small group of “addressed standards.” The core work of a lesson reflects the assessed standards and provides students opportunities to engage with the demands of the full standard(s). Reflecting the interrelated nature of the standards, each lesson also includes addressed standards, which scaffold student learning to support their work with those standards in future lessons and modules.

Daily assessments provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate their growth in relation to the standard(s) at the heart of each lesson. In some assessments, the language of the standard(s) is included directly in the prompt. As students gain familiarity with the standards, assessment questions begin to reflect the language of the standards less explicitly, requiring students to unpack the question.

Building Fluency

In Paths, masterful readings of whole texts or of focus excerpts model fluent reading for students and give students opportunities to hear complex text read with appropriate cadence, emphasis, tone, and pronunciation. Students reading below grade level benefit enormously from hearing the text read while they follow along, reading silently prior to deconstructing the text and conducting their own analyses. Some students may need multiple read-throughs in order to access the text with confidence. Masterful readings may be provided through audio clips or delivered by the teacher. Not only does a masterful reading bring students into the text with more confidence and comfort, but it does so while developing their ability to read more fluently. Classes with students reading at or near grade level might choose to limit masterful readings in favor of having students read independently or in small-group settings.

Independent and Regular Reading

Paths focuses in-class experiences on close reading of complex text, which is a key way to support students' vocabulary growth. In addition, however, students must read widely and extensively to build their vocabularies outside the confines of the classroom.

In Paths, students read independently and regularly for homework. Accountable Independent Reading (AIR) is an almost daily expectation for homework, and through protocols built into the lessons, students engage in accountable talk in pairs and with their teacher about their independent reading texts. Through these practices and expectations, students quickly develop habits and routines around independent reading. In Paths' AIR program, students independently read texts at an appropriate reading level, ensuring they can navigate these texts on their own. To help teachers implement AIR effectively, this edition of Paths includes suggestions for independent reading throughout the curriculum. Each module overview includes a list of books, at a variety of reading levels, that connect to that module's themes, genres, and authors.

The school librarian or media specialist should play a key role in helping students and teachers locate quality high-interest texts for students to read independently at their own reading level for homework. AIR is typically assigned several nights a week so that students quickly develop habits of mind around this practice.

Paired and Group Reading/Collaborative Work

Collaboration plays a major role in students' readiness for college and careers. Paths provides a wide range of opportunities for students to collaborate while reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

In Paths, collaborative learning and the sharing of understandings and insights develop the habit of presenting the textual evidence that leads to a conclusion or claim. Listening to peers present and support their position based on evidence from the text strengthens all participants' capacity to do the same. The standards weave together the four domains of reading, writing,...