The Indian Prairie School District 204 Board of Education is set to consider a new middle school English curriculum at its meeting next month after a successful two-part pilot program, officials said.
The new English Language Arts curriculum is built around an instructional resource called CommonLit 360. Middle school teachers who piloted the new curriculum told the district Board of Education at its meeting last week that the resource is pushing students to write more often and asking them more difficult questions that go beyond simple reading comprehension to encourage critical thinking.
Students were asked as a part of the pilot program what they thought of the new curriculum, and according to student responses included in the presentation at the meeting, they said the new curriculum helped them better comprehend what they were reading, improve their writing and connect with their peers.
One student quoted in the presentation said that they can now read books faster and comprehend them better because the questions asked in the margins during CommonLit helped them to ask themselves their own questions while reading personal books.
For teachers, the new resource was easy to use and contained everything they needed to teach lessons that were structured but still allowed for teachers to add their own personal touches, according to the two teachers who spoke at the meeting.
“I’ve had the chance to pilot a few different curriculums throughout the years, and I will say this has been the easiest to implement,” Angie Crowe, eighth-grade ELA teacher at Granger Middle School, said at the meeting.
CommonLit also includes readings that are both current and older, along with readings that personally connect to many of the students, according to Scullen Middle School seventh-grade ELA teacher Michelle Line.
She said the curriculum includes a whole class novel, poetry and informational texts, some of which is challenging, so it gives students experience with a variety of different types of texts.
The new curriculum also better aligns with state standards and testing, according to director of District 204 Middle School Core Curriculum Barbi Chisholm.
She told the Board of Education at a meeting in May that middle school English Language Arts instruction currently does not have a common resource used across the district, which makes it difficult for the district to develop a curriculum that is equitable across all of its middle schools.
During that meeting, Chisholm updated the board about the curriculum’s pilot, which had completed its first semester in the spring and was heading into its second semester in the fall. That first semester had 39 teachers, and one unit of the pilot curriculum was taught per grade.
The fall semester pilot has now been completed, Chisholm told the district Board of Education last week. That pilot expanded beyond the first, bringing in 56 teachers with three units of the pilot curriculum taught per grade, according to her presentation.
This phase of the pilot was open to all teachers who were interested, and 68% of standard ELA teachers ended up participating, she said.
The fall semester pilot also included whole-class novels for each grade, according to Chisholm’s presentation. Those books were “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, a book that is currently a seventh-grade title, for sixth grade; “Brown Girl Dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson, a new title, for seventh grade; and “Twelve Angry Men” by Reginald Rose, which was included in the winter pilot, for eighth grade.
The total cost of the program will be $220,000 for a five-year digital license and the purchase of new books, Chisholm said.
District 204 Board of Education members appeared in favor of the program, as they did in May, particularly because of its focus on writing, reading comprehension and cohesion across the district. The board is set to vote on the new curriculum at its next meeting on Jan. 13.
The course curriculum changes will be open for comment until that meeting, and the resources presented at last week’s meeting will be available for review at the Crouse Education Center, which is the district office, at 780 Shoreline Drive in Aurora.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
