Will you be participating in curriculum writing this year? If so, mapping resources to the district curriculum is a critical task in the process. Having materials mapped to the district curriculum saves teachers hours of work and helps facilitate standards-aligned instruction.
This two-part blog series contains stepped-out guidance and important tips to help you map your resources to the district’s curriculum.
Caveat Emptor … a Latin phrase meaning, “Buyer Beware.” For centuries buyers have been held to a standard of due diligence; do your homework before you buy or suffer the consequences. Purchasing instructional materials is the single largest annual purchase a school district typically makes. To put it in context: school districts spend more on instructional materials annually than you …
Would your students benefit from a digital program with cross-curricular content to support literacy development? Take a look at Learning List’s review of McGraw Hill’s Achieve3000 Literacy.
Achieve3000 Literacy is a fully digital, supplemental literacy program for grades 2-12. Students work through language arts, science, and social studies content to develop reading skills and comprehension. The program is adaptive and intends to provide reading content and practice of literacy skills at each student’s individual level.
The program assigns student levels based on initial and ongoing assessment. The adaptive nature of the material enables students across reading levels to all read the same content at their individual reading levels. The content provided is primarily informational texts.
Are you searching for instructional materials to support foundational skills instruction? Take a look at Learning List’s review of Sadlier’s From Phonics to Reading.
Sadlier’s From Phonics to Reading is a comprehensive phonics program, intended to supplement literacy instruction in Grades K-3. The core instructional material consists of teacher and student books, available in print or eBook format, and additional digital materials provided on the program platform.
The goal of the program is to support students as they become readers by providing explicit and systematic foundational skills instruction. The material provides explicit and systematic phonics instruction reflective of the Science of Teaching Reading. It employs consistent instructional routines and lesson sequences, beginning with alphabetic knowledge and progressing to more advanced foundational reading skills, such as encoding, compound words, and suffixes and prefixes.
If you have perceived an increase in state control over the adoption of instructional materials, you are not alone. This blog explains the reason for the shift away from districts’ control over the selection and use of instructional materials. In a recent EdWeek article, education leaders who shaped the standards movement argue “that states should be doing more ‘quality control’ when it …
Over the last three years, yours, like most districts, likely scrambled to meet students’ needs in lots of new ways. The district may have purchased new materials to support at-home learning. Teachers may have subscribed to online resources individually. And, since students returned to school, intervention, and tutoring resources have likely been purchased.
When you analyze the current list of materials in your district, do you have an abundance of instructional materials? If so, are all being utilized, and are they meeting the needs of your students and educators?
When purchasing supplemental materials, how much weight should you give to the alignment percentage? In this blog, we explore the differences between comprehensive and supplemental materials when it comes to assessing alignment. Educators in every district are working hard this year to close students’ Covid-19-related learning gaps. Consequently, many campuses and districts are selecting supplemental materials. This blog discusses important differences between supplemental and …
Does the following scenario sound familiar? The state’s math standards recently changed, and your district purchased new instructional materials for mathematics. Teachers use the materials for a few months, but when students struggle to master the content, the teachers grow skeptical about the material’s quality. Increasingly, they turn to lesson resources they have developed themselves or borrowed from their colleagues. …
In the first two blogs in this series, we offered guidance for planning an instructional materials adoption and customizing a rubric to reflect your district’s priorities. Generally, districts would use that information when selecting core materials. Supplemental materials are most commonly selected at the campus level, and campus leaders typically rely on word of mouth (Wang et. al., 2019) when …
This is the second blog in the series about effective strategies for reviewing and selecting instructional materials. Our first blog discussed planning a successful adoption, which included distributing and aggregating the results of a needs assessment. Now it is time to develop a rubric for the adoption. Developing a rubric from scratch can be daunting. More often, educators look for …
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