Guidance for Selecting or Curating High-Quality Instruction…

on a single material. (Prado Tuma et al. 2022, 7). The challenge for district and campus leaders is validating the quality of these resources.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute evaluated the quality of the most frequently downloaded high school English language arts resources from three popular sources: Teacher Pay Teacher, ReadWriteThink, and Share My Lesson (Polikof et al., 2021). The following criteria were used to evaluate the curated resources:

Common Reasons Teachers Search for Instructional Resources

• To fill gaps in their existing materials • To engage students • To provide scaffolds or supports to help students master grade-level content • To review content from prior grade levels that students had not mastered • To differentiate instruction for students enrolled in special education, for English learners, or for advanced learners • To provide culturally relevant instruction.

• Alignment to standards • Rigor and text complexity

• Instructional and assessment quality • Adaptions for students and supports for teachers • Usability

(Prado Tuma et al ., 2022, 10)

Validating curriculum leaders’ concerns, the Fordham study concluded that 64% of widely downloaded materials should not be used or are probably not worth using. Less than 10% of the materials on each of the three sites were rated exceptional . The Fordham study showed that the popularity of teacher-curated resources is not an indicator of high quality. So how can districts ensure that teachers are using high-quality lesson resources? Instead of trying to fight this trend, embrace it. We offer the following seven-step process for reviewing and selecting high-quality curated resources, which is consistent with the process for reviewing instructional materials described above.

Create Submission Process

Begin by surveying teachers to determine the type of materials they are currently using, what purpose each resource fulfills, and what types of resources they would want to use. Encourage them to participate in the survey by explaining