Announcement:

TEA is now accepting applications( opens in new window) from qualified K–5 English and Spanish reading language arts, K–3 English and Spanish phonics, and K–12 math content experts interested in reviewing materials for the Instructional Materials Review and Approval (IMRA) Cycle 24. Visit the HB 1605 webpage( opens in new window) for more information about IMRA. The TRR reports for K–8 and high school science are now available. to support local adoptions.

Foundations of Language & Literature

We would like to begin by thanking Texas Resource Review for the positive and thorough review of our materials. We have been overwhelmingly impressed by the care and attention to detail of the Texas Resource Review team and methodology. We wanted to take this opportunity to address a few places where our materials either appeared to fall short or did not fit the usual mold, to give you–the customer–as much context as possible as you consider our program.

While Foundations of Language & Literature was designed with the TEKS in mind, our aim was always a different–and higher–one: to prepare ALL 9th grade students for success in the two Advanced Placement® English courses. Our rationale was that if students could be successful in these college-level English classes, this would far exceed the expectations identified in the TEKS, and would leave them well prepared for college and career. One result is that when the TRR reviews our materials, the focus is on quality as related to the TEKS; therefore, there will inevitably be differences not because this book does not provide grade-level support but because our focus was on preparation for AP®, college, and career.

In addition to this difference in focus, we also think it’s important to mention that our materials are different from other offerings because they are not a packaged curriculum that imposes one year-long pathway on teachers and students. Rather, we have provided a flexible resource and tools to help teachers and districts make instructional choices that are most relevant for their students. We believe that no one knows their students’ needs better than classroom teachers and local administrators. The result of this decision in supporting local choice is that this analysis by Texas Resource Review includes comments such as: the materials fail to provide “increasingly sophisticated contexts” for a particular skill, or “include a rationale for purpose and placement,” or may not “support students’ literacy skills over the course of the school year through increasingly complex texts.” This review frequently judged the materials not based on quality, but on whether they mandated a strict scope and sequence. We believe that it is not the role of a publisher to dictate a lock-step curriculum, but to provide high quality materials and tools that help teachers create their own tailored curriculum that supports the needs of their students. To that end, we have included detailed suggestions for teachers to help them design a curriculum from our materials. In the Teacher’s Edition of Foundations of Language & Literature, we include a pacing guide for each text and Workshop, as well as an optional pre-built unit covering each specific genre and mode. We built Foundations of Language & Literature to foster local choice, allow for authentic differentiation, and provide in-depth support for constructing a curriculum that fits your school and your students.

With that in mind, despite being listed as Meets Expectations, we would like to address the ways that we have included grammar in our materials and why the indicators in the Texas Resource Review ELAR rubric won’t be able to quite capture the realities of grammar instruction in a contemporary English classroom. As a discipline, English teachers have long wrestled with how to teach grammar and conventions: we’ve used copying of famous passages, sentence diagramming, daily fix-its, peer editing, and many more approaches. The field has, for the most part, settled on the idea that grammar and conventions reflect a student’s own cultural, social, developmental, and educational contexts and that any improvement in the use of conventions must be done within the context of the students’ own writing. Research has shown that standalone, isolated, class-wide grammar instruction has no impact on students’ writing skills. And while Texas Resource Review recognizes this importance–for instance evaluating materials on whether there are “opportunities for application in context”–their demand for a single year-long scope and sequence makes these evaluations problematic.

As any classroom teacher can tell you, there are some students who need more support than others--and that’s okay. The TRR indicators calling for a single year-long plan for grammar go against what the field has learned long ago: conventions are developmental and students have widely varying needs for grammar instruction.

Therefore, in Foundations of Language & Literature, we focus on providing teachers and students with the resources they need to make their own choices for grammar instruction, since student needs and contexts vary widely. That is why we tackled grammar in the opening chapter on writing, laying out how and why sentences are built in certain ways. We then included Grammar Workshops that students can work through independently, or in small groups for students who have similar needs. These workshops are flexible, and as such they can be used to provide exactly the help that individual students need when it is relevant for them. The workshops ramp up in complexity: moving from instruction, to identifying errors, to revising sentences, to revising paragraphs, then returning to the student’s own writing to revise. Points were lost on this Texas Resource Review because of this flexibility–because they weren’t rigidly integrated throughout the book. Additionally, questions on grammatical concepts throughout the book tend to move past the baseline of simply understanding grammar, and focus on the effects of grammatical choices. This inherently requires a knowledge of grammar that is reinforced in the Grammar Workshops, but recognizes that simple correctness in grammar should never be the end goal of its study.

This book encountered a similar rigidness in the evaluation of research. While Texas Resource Review was looking for evidence of a “progression” or “series of research tasks throughout the school year,” what our book does is teach the foundational skills needed to research effectively, assess credibility, and write an evidence-based argument. The book provides direct instruction of how to find, assess, and use sources (Chapter 4 - Using Sources), in-context structured practice in every Conversation section, and a wealth of opportunities throughout the book in questions labeled “Research.” We provide these key building blocks, and let teachers decide when and how to deploy them, which is not what the indicators that Texas Resource Review works from are designed to assess.

With that said, in order to better meet TRR indicators III.a.3 (vocabulary), III.a.4 (independent reading), III.b.3 (grammar), and III.d.1 (research/inquiry) we have created optional full-year plans for grammar, research, and vocabulary that step out how one might utilize the resources in the program, and a worksheet for independent reading accountability. They can be found here, and in the book’s digital platform.

In closing, while TRR is a thorough and conscientious process, we would like to make clear that we believe that in order to differentiate instruction effectively, components of the review such as scope and sequence, and year-long plans should be left in the hands of classroom teachers and local administrators. We do not feel that this is the role of a publisher to dictate. We believe our TEKS alignment allows for this local decision making. We, the authors of Foundations of Language & Literature, are committed to ensuring that all students, regardless of background and skill-level, can be successful in the AP® English courses and in college, by providing clear and aligned preparation in their 9th grade class, and by providing flexible tools that allow professionals in the classroom to make the best choices for their students.

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