How are GCISD students Performing Academically?

Many decades ago a philosophical approach to reading emerged called "whole language" reading. It rejected the prior phonics and "sounding out" based method of teaching children to read and instead advocated for techniques that relied on making inferences (mostly guessing with pictures and by using the first and last letters of words).

After years of collecting data on the results of this anti-phonics approach, the academic world finally concluded that the "whole language" reading method was both ineffective and detrimental to children learning to read. The harm this method caused is famously documented in the podcast Sold a Story narrated by Emily Hanford.

As a result of this finding, GCISD's new Director of English Language Arts and Literacy, along with other higher administration staff, recommended that the Board of Trustees purchase a new phonics-based curriculum for GCISD's elementary school learners, which they rapidly did. It's published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and is called "Into Reading."

Roll-out of this new curriculum began mid-year in January of 2023 at the 5 elementary schools that were determined to have the greatest need. The remaining 6 schools began the resource the following August at the beginning of the school year. 

Although the curriculum is still quite new, feedback from teachers has been overwhelmingly positive and it is clear from preliminary scores that GCISD's students are making progress!

The 5 schools of greatest need have a high concentration of English second-language learners. Classrooms with these students were provided both an English and a Spanish version of the resource to facilitate students' gradual and fluency in English before middle school.  

Prior to implementation of this reading and writing resource, teachers used a variety of other resources that were not necessarily connected, and sometimes had to translate the resources into Spanish themselves. With this new comprehensive resource, the reading and writing flows seamlessly together, both reducing teacher workload and enhancing student learning.

The Curriculum and Instruction Directors are leading the charge to realign GCISD's curriculum with the TEKS to improve classroom outcomes.

*TEKS = Texas Essential Knowledge & Skills (aka the state standards)

The district has provided, on its website, community-facing documents to keep taxpayers in the loop about what is being taught in the classroom. These documents include Year-at-a-Glance (YAG) information for K-12 that have:

• a course overview
• an estimated time frame for units
• unit summaries
• unit alignment with Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)

Other curriculum revisions on the back-end will utilize the TEKS Resource System (TRS) and include teacher-facing documents to help design lessons (TEKS Clarifiers and Lesson Guides). 

• At this time, parents can log in to their students' Canvas accounts to see what assignments they are given by their teachers.
• Access to in-class instruction is not yet available.

*Canvas is an on-line learning platform that organizes student classes and work. It starts being used in middle school. K-5 students likely use a platform called Seesaw, but that varies by class and school.