School Comm approves curriculum updates

The Norwood School Committee met last Wednesday and voted to approve curriculum updates to the Grades 5-12 Math Curriculum and the K-4 English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum.

In the math curriculum, 5-12 Math Department Chair Robert Harris and Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Coordinator Laura Donnelly shared the reasoning for the curriculum update, the most obvious of which is time.

“The last time we did a curriculum review was 2014, and then what was adopted was a 10-year contract with Big Ideas for grades 6-Algebra 2,” Harris said. “And if you look at that timeline, a lot has changed even prior to 2019, and if you look at our district, a lot of our demographics and our needs have changed dramatically since that time.”

Harris said Big Ideas was one of the top-of-the-line products for that period, but it seems not to be the case now. Harris said they were looking to align a lot of the curriculum between mathematics and STEM to help the learning process.

Harris said he and Donnelly have been working on finding a new state-approved math curriculum, forming a committee, and meeting monthly to determine what the district needed.

“We valued teacher feedback, student feedback, and also what the students were kind of looking for,” he said. “Early on we had them do this kind of portrait of their mathematical biography, and what that would do for us is give us a history of their math experience and the things that would fall into two buckets: things we do not want to continue to have happen – you can feel and hear some of their trauma that relates to their mathematical experiences… And things we want to continue.”

Harris said they landed on the program curriculum known as Reveal Math. He said teachers and students gave good feedback on the lessons they tried versus the other curriculum they looked at.

Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum JJ Muñoz said the full cost of the curriculum would be $210,000 for the first five years for materials, support and access for grades 5-8, and he said high school would include other costs. Harris said the reasoning for that was that the eighth grade math scores have been above 60 percent proficiency in MCAS standardized testing, which is a good result. He said that is a “programmatic result,” basically meaning that they don’t want to fix what isn’t broken.

Harris said they want to continue to improve on that program, as it has had rippling effects up through the high school level.

This was a point of contention with some School Committee members, like Joan Giblin.

“That’s continuing through and we’re getting more kids into AP (Advanced Placement classes) and so, I’m unclear as to why we’re changing our curriculum?” she asked. “Why would step away from something in mathematics that’s working really well?”

Harris said they’re trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, the bathwater being the old curriculum.

“What is working is what teachers created,” he said. “If we’re talking about the eighth grade, years after COVID-19, the Big Ideas Material (the old curriculum) started to become just a foundation piece, or a place where we would be able to use procedural fluency. Assign some homework or practice with that. But the core of what happened with the curriculum and what the eighth grade team was able to do with the curriculum was, it was really about how do we teach mathematics and what we are we putting in front of the kids?”

He said the eighth grade was able to stick with the scope of the curriculum, but they were creating the nitty gritty themselves over the last three or four years.

“That’s been the catalyst, to my reasoning, and that’s been the reason for that growth number of 60,” Harris said. “And that’s if we just look at the MCAS piece.”

Muñoz said they will keep the AP and eighth grade curriculum basically the way they are to keep the gains they’ve made since the pandemic. Giblin asked why are they changing anything with growth numbers like that. Muñoz pointed out they still have many students not grading proficient in math.

“There is growth and there is proficiency, right?” he said. “We still have a lot of kids not on grade level, and we paid for a curriculum that teachers weren’t using with fidelity. They were taking parts of that curriculum and meshing them together. That contract is now [structured] so we would have to rebuy that curriculum to use pieces of that, and we’re creating our stuff, or we pivot and say we’ve experienced growth in one grade level, but our proficiency is not moving up but math is getting better over the years, and still half of our kids aren’t on grade level yet, just looking at MCAS data.”

Muñoz added he feels this new curriculum would help the district to do that. Giblin said she would still prefer to let the teachers work out their own curriculum.

“I’d rather pay the teachers than a curriculum company,” she said.

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The committee voted to approve the purchase unanimously.

The K-4 ELA curriculum argument was similar. Literacy & Humanities Coordinator Stefanie West said at least in the ELA department, they felt buying a curriculum was more efficient and easier to unify between grades and subjects than letting each teacher create their own curriculum.

“Our goal was to identify high quality materials that would strengthen and improve literacy instruction while aligning to updated state expectations,” she said. “In literacy, the state is really pushing for these high quality instruction materials that you have to pay for from a curriculum, because teachers can’t always be curriculum writers. So if we’re able to purchase a curriculum that is able to help us think about helping students on EIPs and have multiple language learners access these materials, then that’s less work that the teachers have to do, and they can do more of the fun work of teaching alongside the students.”

West said the ELA materials are coming to the end of their cycle, and though they were not as old as the math, it is not considered high quality by the state. She said the main goal is to focus on students’ ability to read, ability to write, and the ability to think critically. She said process for selecting a new curriculum started in October with the formation of an “ELA Curriculum Council” where they met and searched for appropriate materials, tested two of the best and have now started planning for implementation, assuming the School Committee agrees and votes to approve.

The two finalists were Arts & Letters and Fishtank Learning, and Fishtank was what the council landed on. The total five-year funding would be around $330,000, with about $200,000 in upfront costs and a $26,000 annual cost for the service, paid annually for five years.

West did say however that existing grants will ease those costs. “All the funding is through the PRISM Grant,” she said.

The School Committee voted unanimously to approve the new curriculum.

Lastly, the Committee voted unanimously to approve the name change from the Willett Early Education Center to the Willett Elementary School.

“This isn’t to try to pull a fast one or do anything, it’s a really simple change,” said Chair David Hitlz. “We just want to update the name so we’re in line with Department of Elementary and Secondary Education policy.”