A Great ELA Curriculum Does Not Equal Achievement: Designing for Excellence

Children at work

So, you have invested in the development of a new ELA curriculum. You have procured all the necessary materials, reviewed with teachers the written lessons or units of study, and the measurements and exemplars. You agree that the work done by teachers, administrators, and consultants is excellent. You can see how the documents achieve cohesion across the school year and that there are strong alignments between the documents and the standards. 

Now, you are field-testing the work. On a recent walk-through of the school, you spent time reading student work displayed in the hallways and noticed that there does not seem to be an improvement from the beginning of the year to now regarding the quality of student thinking or composition. What's happening?

Unfortunately, in the design of the curriculum, an administrator's guide to analyzing student work was undeveloped, incomplete, or simply not enacted. To better ensure student achievement, participation by school and district administrators, in addition to teachers, in the analysis of student work needs to occur regularly. Analyzing district assessments can offer broad and important insights but analyzing student performance of key tasks during a unit of study yields far more actionable data. By identifying key tasks within a unit to study, teaching and learning can be seen, analyzed, revised, and corrected. Just as curriculum development is a design challenge, so too are the guides for the analysis of student work. These documents are important to create alongside the curriculum.