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Westhampton Beach Middle School. FILE PHOTO
Westhampton Beach School District is making changes, additions and revisions to its English curriculum for students in sixth through eighth grade.
Through SpringBoard, CollegeBoard’s English Language Arts and math education curriculum, students will build critical thinking and problem-solving skills through close observation and analysis of texts, evidence-based writing, higher-order questioning and engaging academic conversation, according to the nonprofit’s website.
“It will help us align our reading, writing, reading comprehension and listening goals,” Westhampton Beach Middle School Principal Charisse Miller said at the June 6 Board of Education meeting. “We’re thrilled. We can’t wait to start. We always align our curriculum, but now, the assessments, the vocabulary, the reading materials won’t overlap; they only build upon each other.”
SpringBoard is fully aligned to college and career readiness standards, in addition to a range of custom state standards, and helps students develop the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in pre-Advanced Placement and AP courses and on the SAT.
It’s also backed by research. A nationwide study found that, when schools used SpringBoard, it improved classroom engagement and students received higher SAT scores and took more AP courses and exams — with AP English participation increasing 8 percent and overall AP participation increasing by 4.5 percent. PSAT and National Merit Scholarship qualifying test-taking also rose by 8 percent.
“It includes direct instruction and assessment of knowledge and skills measured in SAT student assessments while also creating a global community of learners,” said Westhampton Beach Director of Curriculum and Instructional Technology Dr. Jessica Williams. “The teachers know exactly what students are learning the grade before, so when they go into the next grade they can build upon those skills. That’s a major plus.”
Every SpringBoard lesson is also differentiated for each learner in the classroom. For every activity there’s different levels of questions and assignments for beginner to advanced learners.
“It previews each activity and sets a purpose,” Dr. Williams said. “There’s a look at learning strategies, note-taking and paraphrasing. Then, students do a general read and close read before answering questions and demonstrating their understanding of the text.”
SpringBoard has different themes for different grade levels. Grade 6 is centered around change, Grade 7 is about choice and Grade 8 is focused on challenge. It also allows for different book titles and genres across the grades instead of students potentially reading the same book at different ages.
“There’s learning strategies for planning, drafting, revising and editing their own writing. They learn grammar, punctuation and sentence structure,” Miller said. “What we really enjoyed as we’ve gone through and met some other districts and reviewed this with the professionals at CollegeBoard is the curriculum alignment and the academic vocabulary that not only our general education students, but also our special education students will benefit from. And what’s so dynamic is it not only gives a digital format, it also gives kids workbooks and different reading and writing workshop materials that they’ll be able to work with.”
The district will also be implementing the online tool Turnitin’s Revision Assistant, which provides students instant feedback to improve his or her writing before handing in an assignment.
“It doesn’t give answers, but helps them develop their sentence structure and word choices before submitting their work to a teacher,” Miller said. “This curriculum also gives teachers the opportunity to still deliver the instruction how they would like, but they will be following the same common assessments — all students will be measured the same way — so we can put supports in place or we can enrich when needed in each of the areas.”
Teachers will meet with CollegeBoard research experts across four days to unpack the curriculum before implementing it next school year.
