4J District  Pilots New Language Arts Program

This year, tenth grade English classes at South are piloting two new English language arts curriculums for the 4J school district. The process of selecting a new curriculum has been a long one, starting all the way back in fall 2021. Teachers are using the first quarter of the year to pilot a curriculum created by Imagine Learning: Odell, and will use the second quarter to pilot a curriculum called ARC Core, created by the American Reading Company. The district “last adopted a comprehensive curriculum for secondary language arts 17 years ago,” and according to the district website, “some materials in use today rely on outdated educational strategies and no longer align with state standards.” 

Due to the ever changing educational landscape, the district decided to go through with a process of choosing a new curriculum, an operation overseen by a teacher on special assignment working at the district level.

The process began in fall 2021 when the district established the need for a new curriculum and began the long process of adopting a new language arts curriculum. Over the next 18 months, the district, along with teachers, narrowed the search down to two curriculums, Odell and ARC Core. According to South ELA teacher JoBeth Dailey, in the spring of 2023, the district asked teachers if they wanted to participate in the pilot curriculum. 

“We started looking at the different resources at the end of last year,” Dailey said,  “so we already had them before the summer, and we had time to look things over,” she explained. The district hopes to decide on a new curriculum in spring 2024.

Odell is being piloted in classrooms at the time this article was written, and the unit South teachers are piloting is Alexander Hamilton, the musical. The curriculum tells teachers that they can enhance the learning experience by watching the songs performed on Disney+, or as Dailey is doing, “play it from my Spotify playlist… as we close read.”

However, this curriculum doesn’t come without complaints. Madison Billings raised some red flags about this curriculum in the spring because of the new schedule. 

“When I was looking at the curriculum in the spring,” Billings stated, “[the curriculum] needed 66 lessons in order to cover this unit.” 

But the reality of the new schedule meant that teachers only had 14 lessons to pilot the curriculum, leaving it up to them to decide what was most essential and “to get a gist of what the curriculum will offer us while also feeling cohesive to the students,” Billings explained.

Dailey also had a similar complaint. 

“This particular unit is far too long to be covered in half a semester,” she said, “so we’re trying to find ways to make it fit within our schedule without cutting out crucial parts or important parts.”

Teachers have been providing this feedback in reflection journals that the district wants them to fill out. “We have these mandatory things that we have to do as pilot teachers,” Billings said. “We have these reflection journals, where we’re reflecting on how well does this curriculum fit these standards that it has to fit in order to be purchased by the district.”

To sum it up, “it has been incredibly stressful to try to figure out what parts of this unit [to use],” Billings expressed during an interview.

At the time that this article was written, teachers and students had not begun piloting the ARC Core curriculum. “All I know about Arc is that it’s expensive,” stated Billings. “The curriculum does look well laid out, but I haven’t really dived into it at all.”

ARC Core describes the curriculum as “a K–12 high-quality curriculum that combines systematic, evidence-based skills instruction with knowledge-building in science, social studies, and literature,” according to their website.

However, the final decision will come down to the school board. Based on the feedback from teachers, students, and community members, the superintendent will recommend one of the two pilot curriculums to the school board, who will then vote on whether or not to adopt the curriculum for the beginning of the 2024-25 school year.

Article by Elliott Hunt