Westwood To Implement New English Curriculum Fall 2012

The New Jersey Common Core State Standards for English were adopted the 2009-10 school year, with the knowledge that all English Curriculums would be revised to meet the standards by 2012. The Westwood Regional School District English Department familiarized with these standards in 2010 and began using them in English classes in September of 2011. By the start of the next school year, the District's English curriculum will be finalized to meet the Common Core State Standards.

The entire district is involved in curriculum revision, but other departments began these revisions either two years ago or last year. The english department delayed because New Jersey recently adopted the nationwide Common Core Standards for English, according to Joel Barbarito, head of the English Department at Westwood. Forty-six states have adopted these standards and are in the process of revising their English curriculums to meet their requirements, Barbarito said.

In September 2011, Westwood English teachers at each grade level familiarized themselves with the Common Core State Standards and applied them to their lesson plans. They've been revising the curriculum since.

While the English Curriculum must be finalized by September 2012, Barbarito said that doesn't mean it is set in stone.

"A curriculum in and of itself is a living document which can be revised and changed as adjustments are seen needed," he said.

The teachers will be revising the English curriculum on an ongoing basis.

"What they’re doing is now not only designing a curriculum in retrospective of what we did to comply and adhere to the new Common Core State Standards, but they’re also designing them as something that will allow us to move forward – where we want or need to go for the future – and so the curriculum is actually becoming a living document, sort of a wish list of development, not just a record of what’s always been done," Barbarito said.

Teachers at each grade level partnered to design the new curriculum. Each grade has units, which are now theme-based. While they must follow the requirements laid out by the New Jersey Common Core State Standards, teachers still have freedom to design their lesson plans to suit the needs of their individual classes and address their theme through different reading materials. The teachers are examining the best methods, ways of improving their units, and ways to develop more co-curriculum approaches to language arts, Barbarito said.

One part of the Common Core State Standards is applying literacy to other fields of study. Students should be able to use language arts literacy in understanding History, Social Studies, Science and technical subjects, a requirement of the newly adopted state standards. Language Arts is no longer only applicable to English, but these other subjects as well.

"Part of the reason for that is there’s a requirement that by the time students in High School reach Twelfth grade, they should be reading 70 percent non-fiction and 30 percent fiction," Barbarito explained. "So obviously to get that kind of spread you need to have cooperation for that Language Arts literacy in some of those other subject areas."

The Common Core State Standards aim to prepare students for both college and career readiness, he said. College students don't only read literature; they read academic and technical journals too. Careers are not based on English, but the ability to analyze different types of texts.

"A physicist is not necessarily going to need to know how to read a novel and analyze character building," Barbarito said. "A physicist is going to need to know how to read significantly more technical material."

This themes-based approach to language arts literacy enables the development of co-curricular learning.

"As a result of not being forced to do only American literature, instead they can pick a theme, which allows you to cross boundaries," he said. "I think it prepares students for college a lot better, because college courses, although they are sometimes are very narrow in their scope, if you want to be a truly college ready student, you need someone who can see beyond that text and make connections that probably that text intended you to make in the first place, and connect it to other subjects, connect it to interest areas, current events."

The Common Core State Standards break down requirements for each grade level K-12. They have three appendices with examples of student-written work that is ideal for each category of language arts literacy at each grade level.

"Teachers can actually use the appendices with real students’ work so that when they go back into the appendices and start looking at what they have to teach, they can say, oh I totally understand within this writing standard, this is the type of product that we should be using, this is the type of product that is good," Barbarito said.

There are ten standards addressed at every grade level. They are the same from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

"The idea is that a kindergarten teacher, an eighth grade teacher and twelfth grade teacher can all speak to the same basic parts but the complexity increases as the students progress through the years," he said. "It’s sort of like a pyramid, you build the basic structure and you continue to build levels upward as you go, and that’s something that the old standards didn’t have, but these new standards do."

The old standards were not broken down on a grade level basis. There were certain requirements for students through grade eight, and then later through grade eleven, but each grade was not addressed specifically.

"It was like, wait a second, what are we doing in ninth and tenth grade according to those standards?" he said. "Are we just re-teaching the same standard at the same level as the 8^th graders did? How do we build towards complexity at that level?"

The new Common Core State Standards indicate how to progress from grade to grade.

"It really does lay out a much more logical sequence for people to follow, and it allows us to do things that the old standards didn’t let us do," Barbarito said.

In addition to the grade-by-grade instructions, Westwood will also be requiring students do research from grades eight through 12. Prior to the curriculum revisions, only high school Juniors were required to do research.

"If we’re asking students to tie into history, social studies and technical subjects, it makes sense that part of that non-fiction and research component should allow that to tie into the English class," he said. "We’re sending kids out of here far more prepared for college."

New Jersey testing will change with the adoption of the new Common Core State Standards. The NJASK and HESPA are going to change to adhere to these new standards. PARC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) is also planning to come out with an assessment for the 2014-15 school year.

The English classes will be teaching according to the new curriculum beginning September 2012, but the tests will not be updated until 2014.

"It's a little bit behind but I don’t mind because the new Common Core State Standards are so superior to the old standards in scope, in terms of the sequence of things they need to do, in terms of the complexity of what the students continue to do, so I like it," Barbarito said.

He doesn't forsee a problem with the inconsistency of the curriculum and state tests.

"If the assessments are measuring skills that the students are supposed to obtain, we’re going to prepare them to have these skills," he said. "Not necessarily more, but they’ll certainly be developed more and they’ll be able to handle pretty much any assessment that’s thrown their way, regardless of what the format is, regardless of what it asks them to read."