This week in the land of sabbatical I continued to write a journal article and white paper on academic questioning and teacher prep. My hope is to have the article finished in the next week and a half. The superintendent search in my home district continued and concluded this past week with recommendations sent to the joint board. I also was able to get all of the paperwork in to serve as an educational surrogate and will now wait to hear about training. The other opportunities I looked into sent me down a rabbit hole of learning; both of these looked at vetting high quality instruction materials (HQIM).
In some of the states I have been fortunate enough to be working with/in there are state department of education resources and vetting procedures for HQIM. These states include: Louisiana, Massachusetts, Texas, and Arkansas. Other states are part of this Instructional Material and Professional Development (IMPD), but I have not worked directly in or with these other states. The pandemic has really pushed the coalition of states to find HQIM’s that would provide acceleration rather than just remediation of learning. In Massachusetts, the Curate Project focuses on rating English Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science/Technology products (textbooks, learning tools, etc.) on how they align to the state standards, and components of classroom application. The state standard alignment looks at text quality and organization, and the tasks students are asked to do while instruction takes place. Classroom application has a Universal Design for Learning component as far as accessibility for students, a usability component for teachers, and an impact on student learning. The impact on student learning is not yet captured because of the “newness” of this project and not having the data to report on yet. All of the states in the IMPD coalition seem to be, in a sense, contextually validating the work that is done by through EdReports. The thought behind both is to provide teachers with high quality instructional materials that will have an impact on student learning. Currently, I have an outside view looking at these reports and hearing about individual state’s processes for using these reports. If you know anything about me, however, an outside view and just a passing stamp of good work without a deeper dive into learning how these curriculum products are vetted is not enough. So, all this to say the rabbit hole I went down this week was applying to be a reviewer that sits on the Curate Project and for EdReports on the national level. I want to see how the rubrics they use are similar and the discussions that takes place as collaborative teams evaluate material. I also want to see if this vetting of materials is something that pre-service teachers could be taught before they enter the classroom so that they are “knowledgeable” consumers of instructional material and know how to supplement it for its short-comings. The part of the rubrics that interests me, as a special educator, the most is the accessibility in classroom application. The data, from another study which is under-construction on my end, shows that 87% of teacher preparation programs were inadequate or needed improvement in how they prepared pre-service teachers to differentiate to meet all students needs in the classroom. Could knowledge and use of HQIMs that account for accessibility start to change the levels of rigor and opportunities for all students in today’s classroom?
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February 2023
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