INFOhio ICoach

I knew and it is confirmed that the Ohio’s Model Curriculum for Technology was going to be aligned with Ohio’s Learning Standards for Technology because the format is complementary to one another.  Both share strands, topics, and content statements, which are sorted by grade band.

I reviewed HMH Collections which we use in Lakota and was disappointed to see it only partially met standards! The weakness was as follows:
"There is inconsistent support and guidance for the coherent implementation of writing, speaking, and listening work in culminating tasks over the course of the year, although there are many opportunities for practicing the component parts." That is probably the most important element that a teacher needs support on rather than finding rigorous texts, honestly.  I doubt we will be buying in to textbook companies moving forward but I'm grateful to know that I can research any curriculum supports as needed here. I certainly wish I'd known about this option when we were adopting these expensive textbooks!

Our middle and high school ELA department is piloting a few different curriculums before making a decision on which one to adopt for next year.  I looked up two they are researching.  Wit and Wisdom and StudySync.  Both had high ratings, which I found interesting because anecdotal feedback from the teachers on these two programs are not entirely positive.  

I looked up McGraw Hill Illustrative Mathematics for grades 6-8. It did not surprise me that it met standards in both allignment and usability. We adopted this curriculum 3 years ago, and some teachers did not like the curriculum at first and wanted to use a curriculum that was not alligned as well.

Out of curiosity, I looked up elementary science curriculums, since we currently do not have one. I was surprised to find only 3 options, and the best option only met the usability standards partially. Amplify Science was the only curriculum that I would feel okay to recommend for our district.

I'm going to be honest. Our district does not use a "set" curriculum, so this does not necessarily help us out much. I did skim the report for the "Paths to College and Career ELA 9-12". I am not sure whether I am surprised by the report, but I did notice it was from 2015...eight years ago. While I do feel the text probably does meet the standards and expectations set forth, but my issue with the expectations and standards are the way they are written and supposed to be implemented. The standards and expectations for our students don't always align with what they should be learning in the classroom, but rather what they can understand and "learn" to pass a test. So, how useful are the reports? Well, they're great when we need to check boxes for our student and make sure they are learning their standards. But they are completely useless when we are trying to teach our students how to be responsible members of society and how to actually function as a human being instead of a student.

I looked at the I-ready curriculum after talking with several collegues and looking at it online.  The usability number of 24/27 is impressive.  To me, usability is very important for staff and students.  Students are self-paced and once they master an area, the program moves them on to another area without direct instruction inside the classroom.  We have a district curriculum meeting Tuesday and are hoping to get back to a stronger curriculum.  We have not updated ELA in 8 years and it is long overdue.  

I looked at Developing Core Literacy Proficiencies.  It helps students to build litercay and comprehension. Helps teachers to see how the students is progressing.

I chose the iReady/Math because I thought it might be similar to the IReady Math and IReady ELA that we use. The Focus and Coherence score (14/14) and the Rigor and Mathematical Practices score (18/18) were impressive. I wish that there was more of an explanation on why the Usability score was a 24/27. What was it lacking that others provide?

Many of these texts have digital versions; however, I didn't see any digital curriculum. Our school utilizes digital programs like No Red Ink, IXL, and IReady for math and language arts. I am surprised that these are not reviewed.

In Ohio Materials Matter Review, I wanted to look up Social Studies, since it's the next curriculum to be updated, but under SUBJECTS, it only listed ELA, Math and Science. So I tried to look up IXL, which I used in my 21st CCLC program, and found that it wasn't available to review.

Wit and Wisdom k-8 - we recently adopted this platform for ELA and the ratings confirm everything we noticed in our district evaluation.  The product nearly maxes out in all of the domains.  This is great to see!

The Savvas materials we have for middle school math also meet expectations.  I’m happy to see that the work our instructional committees put it aligned with both of these reports.

Springboard was surprising high in both alignment and usability along with meeting standards.

I looked at GoMath because we are currently using this curriculum. It scored low on the rigor and mathematical practices section and was labelled as partially meeting expectations. This shows that our curriculum does not fully meet the standards.

I also looked at Wit and Wisdom because we will be starting to use this next year. It shows high marks across the board, which makes me glad that we chose this curriculum. 

One of the curriculums that our district uses is My Math by McGraw Hill. I was not surprised to see that it was green which means it fully meets all criteria to be a high-quality instructional material. However, I also looked up our reading curriculum and phonics curriculum. Both of which are in yellow for partially meeting expectations. It rates low in text quality and building knowledge. One of them rates low in researched based and standards-based instruction. Both of which were very surprising to me and made me wonder what other options we can look at as a district.