Language Arts Curriculum Committee
Background
The background for the need to address a district-wide literacy curriculum, instructional, and assessment structure, lies in a state and national context as much as the local district literacy curriculum climate. The United States and the state of Washington have experienced more and more explicit levels of accountability for student achievement outcomes. Districts everywhere have been challenged to have clearer and more focused curriculum. As districts struggle to develop and implement internal curricular targets that match external accountability structures, there are pressure points which come to bear on the system. Limited time, fiscal resources, technology, information-sharing structures, availability of quality assessments, shared assessment understanding and expertise and clear curricular targets all combine to impose significant pressure on systems already under stress.
In the last few years, the district has focused much of its energy on a literacy initiative. While this has led to great gains, particularly in the area of reading, there are still gains to be realized in the writing curriculum area. Currently, we do not have a district writing curriculum which has at some level, thwarted our efforts at stronger systemic writing gains for our students. Writing is clearly an area which must have a focused and coherent systemic approach.
In response to this particular need, the Language Arts Curriculum Committee was commissioned to begin the work of the development and implementation of a coherent district-wide Language Arts curriculum.
Committee Charge
The Language Arts Curriculum Committee is charged with identifying an aligned curriculum and professional development support for the use of these materials.
The following responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
- Review the reading and writing curriculum currently in place.
- Review and recommend curriculum adjustments where grade levels conflict or are silent.
- Review best practice research with regard to literacy instruction.
- Review reading and writing materials and research alignment of these materials.
- Recommend new materials where necessary to meet the alignment needs of our students and teachers in the areas of reading and writing.
- Make recommendations for appropriate professional development that would support the effective implementation of these curriculum materials.
- Define our district beliefs about literacy instruction (see Appendix E).
- Complete the district-wide instructional calendar for reading and writing (see Appendices A-D for 9-12 alignment of instructional calendar).