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6-8 English Language Arts
Adopted Materials: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH): Intro to Literature
6-8 PPS Curriculum: All core curriculum can be found by visiting the PPS and Family and Community Curriculum Site.
Courses/Grade Levels Implementing the New Curriculum: Grades 6, 7 & 8
Adoption Years: School Year 22/23 thru School Year 2029-2030.
Implementation Expectations: Please see here for implementation expectations.
2024-25 6-8 ELA Guidance
Curriculum and materials:It is the expectation that all 6-8 ELA educators use the HMH Into Literature district-adopted curriculum. Educators will follow the established scope and sequence with one unit per quarter. Educators will use the resources within the adopted curriculum, including times marked as flex or long read. Educators will use the texts within Analyze and Apply as well as Collaborate and Compare as the unit anchor texts.
A rigorous and robust adoption process took place to choose these materials. Additionally, they are in line with the state requirements and appear on the state adoption list. Each item on the state adopted list goes through a robust material selection process. This rubric lays out what is assessed and criteria used to ensure adoptions are aligned with HQIM. Additionally, guidance from ODE on adoptions can be found here.
Assessment:
Each quarter, educators will administer the Writing end of unit task associated with the unit. A district provided rubric will be provided for grading these. Additionally, educators will give the district created common summative unit assessment each quarter for Reading comprehension. These will be provided to educators and should not be edited. It will be the expectation that students input their answers into the HMH platform to allow for data aggregation.Research behind HQIM:
Materials matter, and they matter the most to our most disadvantaged students. As it stands now, students’ chances to learn challenging content depend on whether they are lucky enough to attend a school, and I will add, step into a classroom that provides it. Providing a strong, comprehensive standards aligned curriculum raises the floor and promotes equity across classrooms. Students shouldn’t have to step into the right classroom to provide high-quality learning experiences, it should be an expectation. And if we provide high-quality curriculum to teachers, that is the base level of access in each classroom. We want to ensure that all PPS students regardless of zip code are engaged in rigorous grade-level aligned course work.
Standards and literacy shifts-aligned:
The standards were created to focus on complex text and knowledge-building. In fact, we quite literally cannot engage in the work of the standards if students are not practicing them within complex text, focusing on learning about the world around them.
Our reading comprehension standards begin with Standard 1- ensuring that all the work we do is grounded in the text itself. Standard 10 ensures that the text we’re working with is appropriately complex. These are like the supports of a ladder. Without these supports, the ladder’s rungs (or in this example, standards 2-9), would simply fall flat to the ground. That’s to say that if we’re not grounding learning experiences within complex text, we’re not actually engaging in the standards as designed.
A standards-aligned approach means centering the meaning of each text in every lesson. For example, starting with a complex text and using the standard in service of understanding the deeper meaning of that text or topic, rather than starting with a standard and picking a text to teach that standard.