EMMAUS, Pa. — East Penn School District administrators heard a presentation Monday on proposed curriculum changes to the math and English programs to update standards and meet challenges post-COVID.
In the 2023 PSSA examsfor district students in grades 3-8, 66% were proficient and above on English Language Arts, and 49.6% on math.
The curriculum changes are expected to be formally approved at an upcoming meeting.
The district in the past two years has been placed under two state-directed targeted support and improvement notices for Lower Macungie Middle School's economically disadvantaged students and Emmaus High School's students with disabilities.
Presenters said that post-COVID, the district is seeing a rising number of children who need additional time to learn to read and write.
Current course curricula for East Penn School District can be viewed here.
Math to feature new courses
In Fall 2022, presenters say members of the K-8 math faculty started to undertake a "root cause analysis" of current academic challenges for students, according to the presentation.
"There's one big spiral that's happening, and as kids are progressing up to their grade level, we're asking them to take this content and interact with it in a more challenging way that then is reflected in our PSSA."Holly Pethick, district elementary math coordinator and fourth-grade teacher
The teachers presenting said they took feedback from teachers and other district leaders, seeking to realign the curriculum to state standards and assessments.
"Something that's really important to us when we are choosing curriculum materials is looking at research and studies that have looked at that material in contexts other than our own," Murphy said.
As a result, a pilot course is proposed for fifth- and sixth-grade students in the upcoming school year, with students to be placed in the course based on performance data.
Called "Course 1-2", it condenses content in preparation for a to-be-proposed seventh-grade 2-3 and eight-grade grade Algebra 1.
Students will have an opportunity to re-enter Course 2 in seventh grade and take Course 3 in eighth grade if the non-accelerated course is needed.
A curriculum program known as i-Ready Classroom Mathematics is to be used as the main resource for teachers regarding the curriculum.
As for typical K-8 courses, the instructors explained the updated progression for math students, highlighting the different focuses for each grade.
For example, growing from base 10 multi-digit operations in grade five and basic graphing in grade five to analyzing proportional relationships and basic probability reasoning.
By grade 8, students will be expected to investigate patterns of association within bivariate data and understanding radicals and integer exponents.
"There's one big spiral that's happening, and as kids are progressing up to their grade level, we're asking them to take this content and interact with it in a more challenging way that then is reflected in our PSSA," said Holly Pethick, district elementary math coordinator and fourth-grade teacher.
ELA Changes
K-5 and seventh-grade ELA and reading curriculum also is proposed to have an update.
In K-5, the team said that to reach improved reading comprehension skills, they revamped their way of thinking around a concept called "Scarborough’s Reading Rope."
In it, knowing how to decode phonological sounds and sight recognition of words and understanding the varied aspects of language comprehension such as vocabulary, background knowledge and language structures, are melded together for skilled reading.
"We literally went thread by thread [in the program] and made sure that we had resources and programming that addressed each of those components for students in our core."Dr. Erin Murphy, East Penn School District's office of teaching and learning
That provides a foundation for going from teaching simple elements and gradually bringing them together into reading skills.
"Ultimately, [researchers] offer this model as a way of saying that if one of the pieces is missing, it doesn't work." Murphy said.
"We literally went thread by thread [in the program] and made sure that we had resources and programming that addressed each of those components for students in our core."
For seventh grade, goals for the upcoming year include increasing minutes spent on reading and writing instruction, and integrating speaking and learning standards across the curriculum.
It acknowledges that post-COVID, "more students than ever" are reading below grade level.
Curriculum changes and refocuses are nothing new in recent times. In late 2022, school board members controversially phased out the "general preparatory" level of instruction for English curriculum in the school.
