After more than a year of curriculum analysis, listening sessions, discussions, outreach and evaluation, the West Linn-Wilsonville School Board adopted “Into Reading” published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as the school district’s new reading and literacy curriculum during its Monday, March 4 meeting.
HMH Into Reading will be implemented in all nine West Linn and Wilsonville elementary schools and incorporates a structured literacy foundation into its curriculum. HMH Into Reading scored the highest of the three publisher curriculums evaluated by the district’s K-5 literacy adoption team, scoring better than Benchmark Advance and myView Learning.
Alongside HMH Into Reading, the adoption team also recommended UFLI Foundations to supplement the core HMH Into Reading reading and writing curriculum.
“The renewal and adoption process has really been an example of teamwork and everybody being in the boat together. It’s a testimony to the skills and the collaboration and the commitment of our teachers, our specialists, our teacher-librarians, our instructional coordinators, assistant principals, and principals, who are doing the work in the schools every day,” said Assistant Superintendent Barb Soisson during the meeting. “We also want to say that we’re grateful for the parents in our community. During this long year and a half that we have been working on this, there have been many one-on-one conversations. There have been times for listening, there have been times when they have given an incredible amount of their time to bring forward things in the spirit of partnership.”
The K-5 literacy adoption process began 14 months ago after the district received a curriculum adoption extension from ODE to establish a new ELA curriculum by the 2024-25 school year. The first phase of the curriculum adoption was speaking to teachers in all of the elementary schools about what was working with reading instruction and what needed to be improved.
A team of 67 primary school educators, language specialists, literacy coaches and instructional coordinators volunteered to join the adoption team. The group represented all nine primary schools and each of the K-5 grade levels.
Several teacher members of the adoption team joined the school board to discuss their curriculum recommendation on March 4.
“We grounded ourselves collectively as a literacy adoption team in both reviewing research as well as data,” said Megan Hogan, a district literacy coach. “We looked at research that was grounded in evidence-based ideas to guide both what we value in our instruction as well as in our chosen core and supplementary curriculum.”
The adoption team utilized available peer-reviewed and evidence-based research when analyzing possible literacy curricula.
“We did this so that as an adoption team, we could have a collective and shared understanding of our priorities moving forward, and what we know works to teach students how to read,” said Hogan. “What this outlined was evidence that strongly showed students’ ability to read and what worked for them, what had moderate evidence and what was weak evidence, and what Clearinghouse (Institute of Education Sciences) found is that the strongest evidence aligned with teaching students phonics, and their ability to relate single isolated sounds to those letters, and also to decode whole words in isolation and in context.”
The new literacy curriculum adoption process aligned with the release of the new statewide literacy framework. The WL-WV adoption team made sure to factor the new framework sections into the proposed curriculum options reviewed by the adoption team.
The adoption team had a list of “look fors” when evaluating the three possible curriculum options. These included foundational skills, alignment with research-based instruction, differentiation and access for all students, text quality, writing instruction and integration, and clarity and usability for teachers and specialists. The team then evaluated each program using the ODE curriculum rubric.
The adoption team also looked at four “foundational skills” supplementary programs to provide deeper resources for students with dyslexia or those who may need more tools to unlock their reading comprehension potential.
The teachers added that they felt the adoption process was a “back-and-forth” between teachers and wasn’t burdened by administrator oversight. This gave the team the ability to think ahead to the best way forward for the implementation and roll-out of the new curriculum.
“I just appreciate the trust that you’ve built through this process. It gives me trust in what you’re recommending and, hopefully, it gives the community trust in what we are, it sounds like, gonna vote to approve this evening. So thank you all,” said school board vice chair Kirsten Wyatt.
Following the successful adoption of HMH Into Reading, with the supplemental UFLI Foundations as well, the literacy adoption will meet one final time on March 13. At their final meeting the group will make a list of recommendations for the implementation of the new curriculum materials and professional development for K-5 teachers in all elementary schools.
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