ELA Secondary Curriculum Review

Each curricular content area is reviewed and revised on a cyclical basis based on the adoption of new academic state standards from the state of Minnesota and Board Policy 612.  

Every 10 years, as standards in a particular curricular content area are altered, it is our responsibility to ensure that our current curriculum meets those standards and that our current curriculum is effective for our students. Going through the review process doesn’t necessarily mean our curriculum will change, but going through the process makes sure we are evaluating our materials on a regular basis. 

The table below reflects an anticipated timeline for specific content areas. These academic areas will be formally addressed following the release of Minnesota academic standards, and the timeline is flexible based on unanticipated delays in the release of the state standards or other circumstances. 

Step 1: Teachers create an instructional materials rubric that identifies best practices in their curricular content area with the support of current research.

Step 2: Teachers use that instructional materials rubric to evaluate the current curriculum used in their curricular content area. This can be a teacher-created curriculum or a curriculum purchased through a vendor.

Step 3: A steering committee researches instructional materials to consider using in the future. The committee attempts to select 2-3 highly rated options in that curricular content area.

Step 4: Teachers take the same instructional materials rubric they used to evaluate their current curriculum and use it to evaluate the 2-3 highly rated curriculum options selected by the steering committee. 

Step 5: The 2-3 highly rated curriculum options are presented to families for review and feedback.

Step 6: Teachers, administrators, and district leaders discuss feedback and make a recommendation to the school board for approval of purchasing (if necessary) and using the recommended curriculum moving forward. 

There are four sections to the rubric:

• Criterion 1: Content-Specific Needs 
• Criterion 2: Learning Supports for All Students
• Criterion 3: Teacher Materials
• Criterion 4: Assessment 

Sample items within these sections include:

• The materials are relevant to RPS students and allow for students to connect learning to their lives. 
• The materials used are culturally, ethnically, racially, and linguistically representative of the classroom population.
• The materials are available in Spanish and other languages represented by students. 
• Texts are written to meet grade level reading standards. 
• Materials provide guidance that supports teachers in planning, preparing and providing engaging learning experiences. 
• Materials include formative and summative assessments that are authentic, relevant and engaging to students. 
• Assessments offer ways for individual student progress to be measured over time. 

Specific to the secondary ELA rubric, here are the items listed in Criterion 1: Content-Specific Needs.

• Materials align to MN ELA standards
• Materials provide opportunities for daily reading and daily writing for multiple purposes. 
• Materials enable students to have multiple opportunities to self select texts and writing tasks.  
• Materials provide diverse texts (e.g. culture, race, gender) to read across genres and disciplines (e.g. narrative, informative, argumentative, persuasive). 
• Materials provide opportunities for students to write across genres and disciplines (e.g., narrative/creative writing, informative/explanatory writing, argumentative/persuasive writing).
• Materials support explicit instruction and guided practice in using strategies for planning, drafting, revising, and editing writing.
• Materials support explicit instruction and guided practice in grammar and conventions. 
• Materials provide increasingly complex text sets that are at grade level over the course of a year and through grade bands. 
• Materials frame important problems or questions in order to provide authentic purposes for reading and writing. 
• Materials pose questions that foster textual understanding of complex texts and higher order engagement with text. 
• Materials help students identify and critique claims of others, considering both their perspective and the possible perspective of the author/source. 
• Materials support students in evaluating, gathering and using evidence from multiple sources. 
• Materials enable students to communicate conclusions to an authentic audience
• Materials support explicit vocabulary instruction 
• Materials support comprehension and strategic reading instruction (e.g., determining importance, summarizing, making connections between new text information & prior knowledge, making inferences, determining themes and central ideas).
• Materials support discussion of the ideas in texts and construction of meaning across texts and disciplines.