Reply to MCPS gutting humanities MS magnets and replacing with CKLA? (Are CESes next?)

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Reply to "MCPS gutting humanities MS magnets and replacing with CKLA? (Are CESes next?)"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Apparently they are discussing this at the Board of Ed meeting on Thursday-- see slide 11: https://go.boarddocs.com/mabe/mcpsmd/Board.nsf/files/DMEQEB68EB75/$file/Curriculum%20Update%20251016%20PPT%20REV.pdf

Instead of having a truly advanced curriculum for the humanities magnets, they say they are going to do an RFP for an open-source grade-level MS English curriculum that "Includes extensions for highly-able learners.
[/quote]

As MCPS tries to claim that CKLA has robust embedded enrichment and thus is a totally fine replacement for the magnet humanities curriculum, folks should understand what that means.  CKLA is all available online so you can see it for yourself.   The way CKLA enrichment works is that for every unit, CKLA provides:  1) a handful of challenge questions to ask the class over the course of the 4-5 weeks of the unit, and 2) a list of fairly vague/general ideas for linked activities at the end.  (Sometimes it also includes "have the kids read the entire book for enrichment because the main curriculum does not include the whole book.")   If you go here and just select "Language Arts" and then the grade level, it'll pull up all the units and you can click through to see the teacher's guide and activity book for each unit.

For example, this is the teachers' guide for a 7th grade CKLA unit on Hello Universe (a book enriched literacy kids are reading during FIT time in 4th grade, by the way.)  You can search for "challenge" throughout the text to get the challenge questions (like " Ask students to explain the symbolic meaning of the race Virgil describes on page 249" and "Ask students to find references to death on these pages")-- looks like there are 7 for this 25-day unit.  And then page 188 has the list of ideas for enrichment activities, like "Ask students who enjoy Kaori’s character to research the history behind astrology and horoscopes. Where do zodiac signs come from? How long have people practiced astrology? Have students present their findings in a slideshow or multimedia presentation" and "Ask students to write an epilogue to Hello, Universe—three months, one year, or five years after the end of the story. Have students describe what the characters are doing now, what they have done since the end of the story, what they are like now, and what their relationships are."  https://www.coreknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/CKLA_G7_U1_TG_Web.pdf[/quote]

This 8th grade unit appears to have the closest thing to a research paper I saw, although I might have missed something (they call it an "informative essay"): https://www.coreknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/CKLA_G8U6_TG_Web.pdf

Not entirely clear to me the length but I think it is basically a 5-paragraph essay, based on the student workbook (page 93): https://www.coreknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/CKLA_G8U6_AB_Web2.pdf

Challenge/enrichment related to this project: "CHALLENGE: Remind students that they have learned how to format quotations correctly and should look for places to add quotations to their essays" and "CHALLENGE: If students complete their revisions easily, encourage them to focus specifically on precise word choice, evaluating each word of their essays to consider if there is a stronger  choice. If students used any subject-specific terms that readers may not find familiar, have them add simple definitions to their text."[/quote]

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