In October, I wrote a bit about the Essential Questions a team of teachers got together and wrote in our district almost two years ago. They were the first step as our district started to develop our own secondary ELA curriculum resources. At the end of this year, the pilot of those resources will be concluded, and we’ll (hopefully) be gearing up for full implementation.
Piloting all-new resources in the midst of a pandemic when teachers have been asked to put into practice no fewer than four instructional models since the year began isn’t ideal. I’ve come to think of it as more of a consumer reports lab where context and reality have repeatedly beaten my plan for the pilot with a hammer to see how much the spirit of this project can withstand. Turns out, quite a bit.
If you’d like to see what we’ve been cooking up, you can find it here.
A few notes for context:
- Our state has rolled out revised academic standards for ELA classrooms.
- We have licensed all the materials under Creative Commons in hopes that other districts might leverage what we’ve created and share back their own work.
- The approach is tight/loose. Tight on summative, on-demand writing, types and numbers of experiences, and themes/essential questions. Loose on how teachers use the resources to get students there.
I’ll go into more details down the road. For now, I wanted to share what we’ve done and where we are so far.