A new English curriculum is coming to Indian Prairie School District 204 middle schools next year.
The District 204 board on Jan. 13 officially approved changes to the middle school English Language Arts curriculum.
The district will now be using a digital curriculum resource, the 360 Curriculum by CommonLit, for middle school students. Additionally, all sixth-graders will read “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, while seventh-graders will read “Brown Girl Dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson and eighth-graders will read “Twelve Angry Men” by Reginald Rose.
The new curriculum was tested out via a pilot program in many district classrooms over the past year. Last spring, 39 ELA teachers participated, and the total was up to 56 this fall, according to a presentation given to the school board.
Teachers are currently participating in the pilot in all seven middle schools and will continue to do so for the spring semester. The program will be rolled out to all middle school students next fall.
District teachers told the school board last month that, while piloting the new curriculum, they felt it pushed students to write more often and encouraged critical thinking, according to past reporting.
CommonLit is a nonprofit founded by a former middle school English teacher, according to the organization’s website. In addition to the curriculum itself, teachers in the district will also be given professional development, assessments developed by the program and tools for analyzing data on students’ performance.
Barbi Chisholm, Indian Prairie’s director of middle school core curriculum, said these resources were some of the major benefits of the program.
“There are embedded assessments within, so that our teachers can respond if (their) students are struggling with these specific skills, I have a measurable data point that now I have a direction to go in,” Chisholm said in an interview on Thursday. “Everything is aligned to state standards. It just makes the teachers’ job more straightforward and allows them to really focus on what their individual students need within the lesson.”
“The Giver” previously was read in the seventh grade, and “Twelve Angry Men” was included in the spring semester pilot. “Brown Girl Dreaming” is new to the district’s middle school curriculum. All three of the works are part of the CommonLit curriculum, but students will continue to read other supplementary texts alongside it, Chisholm said.
The CommonLit 360 Curriculum license will cost $5,750 per school per year, according to the meeting agenda. And it is expected to cost $220,000 for purchasing the texts, a five-year license and professional development for teachers. Chisholm said the cost difference between this curriculum over the next several years and what’s been done in the past is minimal.
“CommonLit is a fairly economical resource,” Chisholm said. “That’s not why we chose it – we chose it because we thought it was the best resource. But it’s definitely a benefit, so that it does allow us to use our funds elsewhere.”
The district did not previously have a single resource that made up its core ELA curriculum for middle school, Chisholm said, instead having relied more on teachers to develop the curriculum. She hopes standardizing the curriculum will not only help teachers, but also level the playing field for students in the district.
“One of the things that is really exciting is to know that our students across the district are receiving similar experiences no matter which school they are in,” Chisholm said. “That is really important as part of our district plan, to have those equitable learning experiences.”
And the pilot has already had a promising start, according to Chisholm.
“The texts and the tasks within the curriculum are rigorous,” Chisholm said. “And our students so far have really risen to the challenge. That’s been the feedback that we’ve gotten from students – some of them are doing things they did not know that they were capable of doing.”
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com
