Schools plan to realign curriculum

Middle and high school students may find themselves facing a new slate of language arts classes when fall rolls around.

The changes are planned ahead of revisions to the Alaska state educational standards planned for the 2015-16 school year, school officials say. They’re also planned to take advantage of consistently improving language arts abilities among incoming sixth-graders, said Bob Davis, a language arts teacher at Stikine Middle School.

The majority of changes will take place in the middle school, Davis said.

“It’s partly” standards, he said. “The elementary school has beefed up their output and we’re needing to up our standards.”

“It’s kind of a nice problem to have,” he added.

Incoming sixth graders will now have separate reading and writing classes. The reading class will focus primarily on non-fiction oriented around science material, Davis said.

“A lot of science and social studies,” he said. “We’ll start out with books about germ theory and various diseases. We’ll also use a lot of newspaper articles and magazine articles.”

The topic was selected in part because teachers hope to use reading and discussion on those topics to boost test scores in science and reading, Davis said.

Seventh grade students will take silent sustained reading, with some discussion, in the morning followed by a traditional writing and literature class in the afternoon, though the reading class will face some discussion. The amount of reading and discussion will ultimately be determined by the individual teachers, Davis said.

“We’ve been using a lot of direct instruction materials,” he said.

Direct instruction led to improved scores, though those materials now appear slightly dated, given elevated proficiency in students, Davis said.

“We’re replacing those because of the improved students we’ve been getting,” he said. “We’re replacing that with non-fiction.”

Changes in the sixth and seventh grade class structures mean students will be able to advance more rapidly, freeing them up for changes in the eighth grade designed to prepare them for high school, Davis explained.

The classes will be split up. Talented readers and writers will head into a leadership-themed class designed to prepare them for similar classes in the high school.

“They’ll look at various leaders in various fields,” he said. “The focus will be on leadership.”

Students requiring a boost in math literacy, will attend a second helping of figures and formulas.

The boost leads into a high school writing workshop focused around getting students published.

The curriculum shifts are only meant to structurally enhance content changes already underway in all classes, Davis said.

“Individual teachers have already started moving toward the new standards within the classes we already have,” he said. “Some of the changes are going to be structural. That will continue, I’m sure.”