We all have hobbies. As a teacher, mine was developing the curriculum. I ended up receiving my master’s degree in Curriculum Design and always enjoyed the twelve plus extra hours per week searching for high quality instructional material. But not everyone likes building a plane while flying it, nor should they have to.
I recently listened to an interview on EdVoices celebrating the tenth anniversary of ELA Guidebooks developed by the Louisiana Department of Education (LA DOE), which went on to describe the success of their teacher-developed curriculum. According to EdReports executive director Eric Hirsch, “The ones who should determine what quality is are educators. They’re the ones who utilize the materials in the classroom. They’re the ones who should be looking at this material. We look at research, look at standards, and utilize advisories and experts, but it’s really having educators lead the process as a guiding principle, because they’re the ones who suffer so much if you don’t give them high quality scoped and sequenced materials that allow them to really do their best work.”
I really appreciate Louisiana’s innovative, teacher-focused approach to both curriculum development and curriculum delivery. I am proud to say that my organization, CCC (Copyright Clearance Center), played a critical role in helping LA DOE put their amazing work in the hands of teachers and students.
As an adoption state, Louisiana teachers are obligated to select curriculum programs from a narrow list authorized by their Department of Education. Before 2012, those programs didn’t meet the needs of their students, so teachers spent significant time searching for content, mostly on the open internet. There was inconsistency in what constituted “high quality content” and the newly selected additional content created wide variations in classroom instruction.
Common Core State Standards became a catalyst for updated curriculum adoption. In 2012 a group of 100 teachers, facilitated by Rebecca Kockler, then-Assistant Superintendent of Academic Content of the Louisiana Department of Education, set out to create a curriculum to offer as an adoption option alongside traditional curriculum options. The new curriculum includes high quality materials aligned to high expectations, but also is sensitive to the specific needs, interests, and abilities of Louisiana students.
Their creation of ELA Guidebooks gives students a scaffold to build knowledge, centering around a theme, tackling big ideas while using authentic texts written by real people for the real world. It is routinely rated as a “high quality curriculum” in the EdReports rankings. Louisiana is in their 12th year of using this curriculum and has seen success as nearly all districts in the state as well as other states across the country have adopted the program.
Building a curriculum was only half the problem. The success of the Guidebooks rested equally on the ability to make them easy to purchase, print, and implement. Recognizing that fact, Kockler describes her ethos: “My job as a state is to make the absolute best thing for kids the easiest to purchase, direct quality, incentivize, take down barriers. And that was… all we tried to do to really make change.”
Many districts have attempted the difficult task of developing a curriculum but failed to address the legal and logistical challenges of delivering that content to students and teachers. Solving that challenge is where CCC became involved.
In 2016 the LA DOE approached CCC to help them with publishing their guidebooks. LA DOE was struggling to convince districts in Louisiana to adopt the new curriculum. A significant issue was the requirement that districts locate, download, and mass copy the high-quality materials specified. Districts were concerned about the legal implications of mass copying of copyrighted materials. Districts also found the marrying of the third-party content to LA DOE lessons a labor and time intensive activity which tended to fall on the individual teacher. Two years after development, use of the curriculum in Louisiana remained quite limited.
The CCC team worked closely with Whitney Whealdon, then-Director of Academic Content, to organize the copyright permission and delivery solution. LA DOE implemented that solution with one of CCC’s long-term course materials partners, XanEdu, making the curriculum easy to deliver and use. The LA DOE negotiated a centralized contract with standard pricing through which the districts could order the required materials. XanEdu, in collaboration with CCC, obtained all the necessary copyright permissions and shipped the curriculum materials directly to the school. The successful implementation of this solution allowed the teachers to focus their time and effort on the classroom and their students rather than expend time and effort cobbling together the required materials.
In 2021, CCC expanded its ability to support the use of high-quality reading content with students through the introduction of the Annual Copyright License for Curriculum & Instruction, now part of a combined content and licensing offering called RightFind Curriculum. This solution enables K-12 educators and those who serve that academic market to identify and incorporate high-quality published content in curriculum and lessons while managing copyright compliance. Trust in teachers’ ability to choose high quality content, student-centered learning in mind, professional development, high quality texts, and ease of use are all obvious factors in the success of Louisiana’s ELA Curriculum. I applaud Louisiana for creating an exceptional plan for their educators to pilot. And to learn more about how CCC can help you build your own plan, please reach out to me directly to obtain more information or explore on your own.
With reuse rights to more than 1M works and the ability to easily obtain copies of the needed content, RightFind Curriculum allows licensees to incorporate high-quality, culturally responsive content from a wide range of publishers in curriculum, lessons, and online platforms to add value to products and services, deepen engagement with a diversity of learners, manage copyright compliance, and reduce administrative overhead.