Post about effective practices for reviewing and selecting instructional materials
The end of the school year and the impending ESSER cliff are two forces compelling districts to review their K-12 curriculum materials to determine which instructional resources to keep and which to discard. If you are involved in making those decisions in your district, the first question you are likely asking is, “Which materials are teachers using?” Several companies, including …
If you care about instructional materials, you need to know about legislation that is sailing through the Texas legislature: House Bill 1605 (Buckley) and its identical companion Senate Bill 2565 (Creighton). The legislation would implement significant changes in how instructional materials are selected and used in Texas classrooms. Why should you care? California, Texas, New York, and Florida have long been …
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 …
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 …
Having too many instructional materials can be as challenging as not having enough materials. Too many resources complicate teacher planning and can lead to a lack of consistency in curriculum implementation across classrooms or campuses. The result: curriculum chaos.
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 …
If your district or campus will be adopting new materials this year, someone in your campus or district is probably starting to plan the adoption process. Over the last decade, Learning List has assisted hundreds of districts, both formally and informally, with instructional materials adoptions. Based on research regarding selecting and implementing high-quality instructional materials and our own observations of …
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