ELA Standards Review

It's day two of a five day assignment to be part of the English Language Arts Standards review for the South Dakota Department of Education. The review is conducted every 5-7 years of the standards. The current ELA standards for K-12 education were adopted in 2010. The standards that were adopted were the Common Core State Standards and South Dakota, subsequently, became one of 46 states and the District of Columbia that originally adopted the CCSS.  

When South Dakota adopted the CCSS, I was teaching Middle and High School ELA in a small school in South Dakota. My colleagues and I were part of many groups that adopted the "Common Core" with Curriculum Mapping, Disaggregating, and any other buzz word you can find on CCSS. My current staff at my Elementary School are on year three of a "Common Core Aligned" curriculum that was produced by a textbook company. There are supplemental posters, leveled readers, and online guides to assist in the teaching of these standards. We use an online program called IXL to help assess these standards as well as Moby Max to reteach or reinforce concepts. Our districts are very committed to the CCSS with our professional development time and district funds that have already been spent.

All of this being the case, when the email went out to be part of a standards review, I thought it was important to be at the table. The way we organize our professional development time as well as allocate funds over the next couple of years is dependent upon the standards that we adopt.

We started yesterday being sorted into tables by grade level. I was the administrator assigned ot the 5th grade ELA standards table. Each grade (K-8) was assigned it's own table and grades 9-10 and 11-12 were combined. As our task is to review all of our grade level's assigned standard or reinforces and then make sure the standards properly align with both the grade level above and below, we were given a document that explained why we should make changes as well as Key Features of a quality standards.

The document is very well written and our discussions on standards vs. curriculum were very good. My table is composed of four teachers, a curriculum specialist and myself. Our experience levels are diverse and we are critically analyzing every 5th grade standard during the review process. We have access to examples from other states all around the U.S. to look at as well. Eventually, I think I will use a chart like this to present some of the changes to our staff at the local level. I think it is important to remember that "standards" are not curriculum and "standards" are not textbooks, rather guidelines of the expected competencies teachers must help students meet through the use of educational materials such as textbooks, multimedia, primary sources, etc. This chart helps to explain that difficult concept. 

Right now, we are just in the early stages of reviewing standards. There will be more days that our educator group will meet this year, a time for open comments by all stakeholders (parents, teachers, students, administrators, public, etc.) as well as hearings in front of the State Board of Education prior to adoption of the new new standards. It is a lengthy process, but it will be worth it for all of South Dakota. We have tried the standards as they were written and now we will amend them after they have been implemented for five school years. 

I look forward to working with the team that I have been assigned today and over the next meetings. We definitely take our work seriously and understand the long-standing implications of every "and" "or" "explain" and "describe" as it is written in the standards. The days are very rewarding when discussions about every educational implication are reviewed during a standards review.