The B.E.S.T. Standards

Big Ideas

Reading comprehension is not a single skill. It is the result of a variety of skills, abilities, and cognitive processes that work together; much like the strands of a rope.

The standards should be taught in a blended, or stacked, manner; reflecting how the different components of reading comprehension support each other.

Connecting the Cornerstones of Reading Comprehension

Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards for ELA states that “English Language Arts is not a discrete set of skills, but a rich discipline with meaningful, significant content, the knowledge of which helps all students actively and fully participate in our society.” Scarborough’s Reading Rope illustrates this rich discipline as the interdependency of language comprehension and word recognition skills; and provides a model for aligning, stacking, and blending benchmarks to design instructional activities that address all components of reading and reading comprehension.

Language comprehension includes background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge, phonological awreness, decoding, spelling, and sight recognition skills integrated together like the strands of a rope. Language comprehension becomes increasinly strategic while word recognition becomes increasingly automatic.

Scarborough, H. 2001. Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, practice. Pp. 97-110 in S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson (Eds.) Handbook of Early Literacy. NY: Guilford Press. Illustration from Cedar Hill ISD: https://www.chisd.net/cteed

Standards & Planning

The ability to process language is foundational to reading comprehension. Reading, writing, speaking, and listening are interrelated processes that are crucial to developing fluent language skills.

As you design instructional activities for your students; consider the following questions.

What percentage of time each week do your students spend in each quadrant?
How can you align, stack, and blend benchmarks from each quadrant within your instructional activities that support reading comprehension?

Stacking, Aligning, and Blending the Standards

B.E.S.T. Standards ELA Strands

Foundations

Phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency

Reading

Prose and poetry, informational text, reading across genres

Communications

Oral presentation, handwriting, writing, research, technology

Vocabulary

Academic vocabulary, morphology, context, and connotation

English Language Arts Expectations

Evidence, text-complexity, inference, collaboration, quality format of work, voice and tone.

Example: Stacked Benchmarks

ELA.2.R.1.2 Identify and explain a theme of a literary text.

ELA.2.R.2.2 Identify the central idea and relevant details in a text.

ELA.2.R.2.3 Explain an author's purpose in an informational text.
ELA.2.C.1.3 Write opinions about a topic or text with reasons supported by details from a source, use transitions and provide a conclusion.
ELA.2.C.1.12 Demonstrate legible printing skills.
ELA.2.C.3.1 Follow the rules of standard English grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling appropriate to grade level.
ELA.K12.EE.1.1 Cite evidence to explain and justify reasoning.
ELA.K12.EE.3.1 Make inferences to support comprehension.

Classroom Implementation

Using the classroom implementation document, start by doing the following:

Identify the ELA standards/benchmarks from the different strands that you will use to design an instructional activity. You can use CPALMS as a resource.
Identify the text/content that you will use to anchor this instructional activity (this may be a particular story, book, etc.).

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Credits and Resources

The B.E.S.T. Standards: CPALMS

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