The Southern Regional meeting for Cornerstone sites is just behind us; the northeastern meeting is just ahead, and I'm balancing in some sort of unexplainable limbo. A year ago Kevan and I were frantically at work on the Framework, squeezing every free moment of his visits into discussion and writing. Now, the Cornerstone Literacy Framework -- thanks to the team who worked on its design and presentation, research support and content -- is essentially complete. Except that it has just begun.

I can't recall a document in which I've ever invested higher hopes, including Mosaic of Thought. The Cornerstone Literacy Framework can and should define the focus of our literacy instruction this year and every year to come. We feel very certain of the relevance and potency of its content and scope and want it to provide Cornerstone schools with a set of targets on which they can focus - intensively and exclusively.

We mean for the Framework to define the parameters of literacy study for Cornerstone students and their teachers. We designed it to supplant existing state and local literacy standards and curriculum and feel confident that the standards defined in the teaching intentions and learning outcomes will far exceed any currently in place around the country.

The success of the Framework is still very much in limbo, however. Unless each school uses and contributes to the framework thoughtfully and regularly, it will be little better than any other standards or curriculum document cluttering the shelves in any other school office. This framework is meant to be fundamentally different than all its predecessors. Its promise lies in its potential to become a dynamic, living, breathing record of our highest hopes for children and their progress in meeting them. Unlike any other standards or assessment document about which I'm aware, the Framework is meant to be a repository not just of our ideas about what content matters most and what research supports that view, but of the ingenuity and resourcefulness you bring to instruction when you and your colleagues address the various teaching intentions. This Framework will be as alive as you now make it and can, I believe, set an entirely new benchmark for curriculum documents in this country.

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How much I would love to be part of each of the conversations you are about to have as you explore the Framework with colleagues and imagine ways in which you'll use it in your schools and districts. When I imagine your beginning work with it, I hope that coaches, principals and Critical Friends will first struggle through the terminology, agreeing on a working definition for terms like deep and surface structure systems and Crafting, Composing and Invitational Groups. This is the beginning of a shared language to define literacy in your school and, as such, is a critically important step.

Then I can imagine grade level groups of teachers clustered around the Framework posters in your school's Cornerstone room or faculty room, trying to get the big picture - how it is put together and why. Teachers can explore each of four distinct time periods in each day's literacy block and imagine a broad palette of instructional strategies they might use to address the content listed under reading, writing, speaking and listening. I can almost hear you discussing how long Crafting sessions should be and how teachers select books to use for modeling in a Crafting session. I can imagine the pauses in your conversations as you realize how little effort any of us have devoted to speaking and listening intentions in primary classrooms. We had the same reaction.

I can even listen vicariously to some of the concerns that will arise. Teachers will ask how the Framework "aligns" with state and local standards and will shake their heads and wonder at the need to use a new set of terms to describe what they've always done. "Why use the term Crafting, why can't they just say whole class instruction," someone will ask. This will give you the perfect opportunity to talk about how Crafting sessions are fundamentally different from traditional whole class instruction. This, in turn, is bound to lead to a request for coaches to visit classrooms they've never visited in order to experiment with Crafting sessions while colleagues look on and/or co-teach. Am I dreaming? I don't think so.

As long as I'm indulging the fantasy that I can be present for all these conversations, let me tell you that I envision a string of grade level meetings in which you and your colleagues begin the process of laying out a long and short term plan for instruction using the framework. You have your print version frameworks spread out before you and just like our "practice" planning sessions at the Regional Meetings, you and your colleagues can find ingenious links between surface and deep structure lessons in reading and writing, speaking and listening. You'll find opportunities to connect surface structure intentions that appeared to have little connection to deep structure intentions when they are laid out before you and you can literally draw lines between the various intentions. You'll complete a Cornerstone quarterly planning protocol and demonstrate how you might use weekly protocols to break the long term plan into more manageable bites.

At some point in the near future, probably before spring break, I think you'll find a need to convene study groups or grade level groups to revisit how the plans have unfolded. You'll want to discuss how the surface and deep structure intentions worked together, how particular instructional tactics worked more effectively on some intentions than they did on others. I can hear the questions surfacing about how to meet a variety of children's needs as they become apparent. Most gratifying, however, I can imagine the awe teachers will express when they realize sophisticated and profound children's thinking can be when they focus intensively on one or two deep structure intentions and a handful of very relevant surface structure intentions.

Inevitably, teachers will begin to clamor for information about how to accurately and descriptively assess student progress on each of the intentions. I can't wait for this to happen because it gives you an opportunity to experiment with different forms of assessment with your colleagues. You can investigate formal and informal means of recording student progress with an emphasis on students using oral, written, artistic and dramatic means to demonstrate their use of surface and deep structure strategies.

Before you know it, it will be the end of the quarter and you'll be meeting to use another quarterly planning protocol with your colleagues. As you begin the process, someone will say . . . . "you know, I really think I could create a better planning protocol than this one from Cornerstone." You will say, "You know, I believe you could. How can I help?" At this point, somewhere a grateful Cornerstone staff will breathe a collective sigh of relief because we will somehow know that, not just the coaches, the Critical Friends and the principals have begun to use the Framework as a vital part of their every day planning and instruction, but the teachers we all wondered most about. The teachers like Hope, about whom I wrote last month, will have found the utility in the Framework and will have begun to assert their own ingenuity into the mix.

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Along with this little fantasy, I send a much more concise tool I hope many of you can and will use to create professional learning opportunities for your colleagues and help all of us focus on the outcomes and changes in practice we all hope will result.

Where does the work get done? As much as we at Cornerstone long to be part of the process in all of your schools and as difficult as it is for us NOT to be with you during these conversations, the work would frankly be compromised if we were with you every step of the way. The real genius lies in the insights that arise in your conversations, in the experimentation you do in your classrooms, in the ways you encourage and challenge each other. I may just have to get used to living in limbo. I'm not worried, though. I know that the promise of the Framework, the promise of Cornerstone is in very good hands.