Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, Grades 6-12
15 Must-Have Skills Every Student Needs to Achieve
- Jim Burke - Burlingame High School, Burlingame, CA
- Barry Gilmore - Hutchison School, Memphis, TN
Corwin Literacy
Content Literacy (K-12) | English/Language Arts Common Core | Writing (Middle/High School)
Analyze, argue, compare/contrast, describe, determine, develop, evaluate, explain, imagine, integrate, interpret, organize, summarize, support, and transform . . .
Can a mere fifteen words turn today’s youth into the innovative, ambitious thinkers we need? Yes, contend Jim Burke and Barry Gilmore, coauthors of Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, because these are the moves that make the mind work and students must learn if they’re to achieve academically. It’s that simple.
Or is it? To arrive at these fifteen critical reading, writing, and thinking processes, Jim and Barry combed through the standards, research, and secondary curriculum—and that’s for starters. Then, for each of these powerhouse processes, they developed a lesson structure, assignments, and activities so you can teach with potency, right away, and immediately cultivate in students discipline-specific habits of mind.
Here’s the best part yet: Jim and Barry distill each intellectual process into a potent concision that nevertheless spans subject areas:
- Before, during, and after sections offer essential questions, lesson ideas, and activities to assist you in instruction.
- Two sample student pieces illustrate not only what to look for but the process for getting there.
- Culminating tasks include producing an analytic essay, visual text, argument, narrative and informational writing, poetry, descriptive science writing, and explanatory writing in math.
- Every chapter has a correlation chart to Webb’s Depth of Knowledge to deepen understanding and a reproducible rubric to aid in assessment.
At the end of the day, what we want is for our students to know how to think at high levels in any discipline in school or any arena in life. In Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, Jim and Barry translate these processes into remarkable instructional protocols. Use the book and you’ll know for yourself what a revolution they’ve created.
Free resources
The A-List: Essential Academic Words
You can post this list of essential academic words, found in Academic Moves, along with their definitions in your classroom or give a copy to every student. (Secondary)
“Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness provides clarity and structure for teachers who seek to help their students become more competent and confident thinkers, and does so without compromising the critical role of a teacher's content knowledge and creativity in a dynamic classroom. Its economy of expression makes complex ideas accessible, while annotated student work provides a window into learner application. Most significantly, the book is written in the voice of teachers, who live what they recommend.”
“Burke and Gilmore present a powerful and practical synthesis of the highest-leverage thinking moves that students—especially linguistically diverse students—need to develop for school, work, and life. They provide what teachers want: clear and concise descriptions of each thinking move, analyses of student work samples, and innovative classroom practices and scaffolds that can be used to develop the moves in a variety of contexts. Fifteen stars!”
“Jim Burke’s books need to be on the ‘must-read’ list of—at the very least—all English teachers! Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness is a worthy addition to that list with the ‘academic and thinking’ moves he and his coauthor, Barry Gilmore, describe critical for any of us who want to ‘up our game’ in the classroom.”
“What sets Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness apart are its emphasis on student practice and practical application of exemplary instruction. This book speaks to teachers in their language across curriculum areas. Burke and Gilmore have hit the mark on what our students need for college and career readiness.”
This book has been adopted to be in our methods course library for English education majors, and was purchased and paid for by our Race to the Top Grant (RTTT3) in January 2016 (one copy).
Sample Materials & Chapters
The Walk Through breaks down the book's layout to highlight each feature
The first page of each chapter introduces the essential word.
Immediately useable lesson ideas and activities to guide instruction
Webb’s Depth of Knowledge demonstrates how to scaffold instruction
Planning Page for recording lesson objectives
Two student samples—one ELA and one across the disciplines—illustrate implementa
See how these moves appear again and again in Virginia’s Standards of Learning
See how these moves appear again and again in Florida’s Language Arts Standards.
See how these moves appear again and again in Indiana’s Academic Standards.
See how these moves appear again and again in TEKS.