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Curriculum Resource Adoption Process

Curriculum Resource Adoption Process

Definition:
What are Curriculum Resources? For the purposes of this process, curriculum resources will refer to materials that are the major source of teacher planning and preparation for the delivery of curriculum standards, and materials with which students will regularly engage in order to acquire requisite grade-level content and skills. Curriculum resources may include, but are not limited to textbooks, programs, instructional software, online Open Educational Resources, or online digital curriculum subscriptions.

Priority:
While Monomoy receives generous funding support from the communities that we serve, financial resources are not unlimited. In any given year, decisions may need to be made to prioritize different curricular resource projects over others, focusing on certain content areas, grade levels, or some combination of both. These decisions will be made in a collaborative effort between building Principals, Business Manager, Superintendent, and Director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment. 

Process:
The selection of curriculum resource materials is an important decision, one that has a significant impact on teaching and learning. Additionally, it often means the commitment of significant taxpayer dollars to support this effort. As such, a robust process is necessary to ensure that the best possible materials are being chosen to be utilized with students. 

While each curriculum resource adoption is unique and some modifications to the process may be required, the steps below will stand as the procedure for adoption of resource materials as defined earlier in this document. The process is developed utilizing this resource and this resource.

  • Developing a Team - A team of teachers and leaders with interest in resource adoption will be brought together to work on this project. Team size and make up will be determined by the resource adoption being undertaken, but generally will correlate to the department/grade levels impacted (i.e. K-4 ELA, High School Chemistry, US History, Grade 6-7 Math).
  • Data Analysis - Using the appropriate data sources related to the curriculum resource being explored, the team will explore a wide range of data sets regarding student performance, current practices, current resources, school improvement goals, demographics, and more. The team will use this data to make observations of trends and patterns in the data as well as interpretations and possible conclusions about the current state of student learning within the department/grade levels.
  • Establish Goals and Vision - Using the data interpretation, the team will establish a set of goals and an instructional vision that will drive decision making during the adoption process. The goals and instructional vision will help the team later in the process in making selections among competing Curriculum Resource materials.
  • Development of/Discovery of Rubrics - This step applies to content areas outside Math, Science, and ELA, along with non-traditional curriculum resources like technology. Utilizing the goals and vision established in the previous section, the team will need to create, find, or revise existing rubrics to use when evaluating materials that currently exist on the market.
  • Exploring the Market - The team then spends some time exploring what is available on the market and collecting some basic information on currently available resources.
  • Winnowing Choices - The team will then winnow choices to a smaller list of resources to explore more deeply. These will be a set of resources for which we will contact vendors for more complete access (hard copies, dummy accounts, presentations, etc.). 
  • Deep Dive - The team will dig deeply into the winnowed list of materials utilizing any reports available (i.e. EdReports, CURATE, research reports, white papers, etc.), digging through the actual materials, and scoring on rubrics.
  • At this stage, materials will be evaluated for bias utilizing this tool.  
  • Selecting Finalists - The team will utilize information gathered from Step 7 to select a group of finalists (see Decision-Making). In some cases there may be a single, clear choice. If that is the case, the process will end here. If not, the process will proceed to Step 9.
  • Pilot/Field Test - If two or more strong candidates are selected from the above 8 steps, the team will design a process to elicit more information. That process will include a pilot or field test of materials. This will be a short-cycle test of the materials with accompanying rubrics to score the usage. Further details will be developed by the team and are dependent upon the curriculum resource materials being investigated.

Decision Making:
The decision-making processes utilized by the team for material selection will be chosen by the group. This decision-making process will be chosen at the outset of the process during the first meeting (i.e., majority voting, polling, consensus, etc.).

Final Approval:
Once a final selection has been made, a presentation will be made to the School Committee outlining the process and the team’s decision. The team members are encouraged to attend the meeting to show support for the decision. 

School Committee Policy File IGD: Curriculum Adoption
The School Committee will rely on its professional staff to design and implement instructional programs and courses of study that will forward the educational goals of the school system. 

The Superintendent will have authority to approve new programs and courses of study after they have been thoroughly studied and found to support educational goals. The Committee itself will consider, and officially adopt, new programs and courses when they constitute a significant
alteration in instructional content, approach, philosophy, or funding.

The Committee wishes to be informed of all new courses and substantive revisions in curriculum. It will receive reports on changes under consideration. Its acceptance of these reports, including a listing of the high school program of studies, will constitute its adoption of the curriculum for official purposes.