South Kent News

Caledonia Community Schools decided to adopt a new English curriculum for grades 9-10 during a recent board meeting.  

The Caledonia community school district does automatic reviews of the core curriculums every couple of years to see if resources or curricula need to be enhanced or maintained. In the spring of 2022, the English department launched a pilot of a new curriculum in grades 9-12 to determine its efficacy with the hopes of adopting resources from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

“But there has been some movement in some of the surrounding districts, and they really felt, as a department looking at student engagement, that they needed to rethink the course offerings for the 11th and 12th-grade students. So they started building out courses that focus on writing and literature. So kind of playing more to students strengths or interests and so they have four new courses in research, writing, creative writing, practical communications and journalism,” said Director of Secondary Education Camela Diaz. “And then they also have four new literature-focused courses that include creative nonfiction literature, world literature, contemporary literature, and my favorite performative literature. And so students now in 11th grade will each choose one of those courses in each category both years. We will still continue to offer the AP English 11 and 12 so that students who are looking to have those courses as they're looking to college, perhaps admissions requirements, will still have that opportunity.”

In the fall of 2022, the department decided that the review should change to a 9/10 grade adoption instead of all of high school. Also in this review, it became clear that there needed to be more clarity and communication about standards, so the department changed into an adaptation phase where they better and improve their current curriculum instead of adopting new resources.

They started by building a curriculum map to illustrate student needs and pacing and show what and when students should be able to demonstrate mastery. This included actually reorganizing teachers’ classrooms based on content to create more integration. The teachers also promised to create common assessments for all 9-12 assessments which they will complete by the spring of 2023.