Cloud Hosting

Toms River Regional Superintendent discusses sex-ed curriculum

Toms River Regional Superintendent Mike Citta tells the public what to expect at a meeting on the state's new mandated health curriculum.

Jean Mikle, Asbury Park Press

New Jersey public school students will see new lessons and approaches in seven subject areas this year, designed by state-appointed education experts to prepare students to thrive and adapt to life in a globally interconnected economy.

Public and charter schools will begin to implement the standards handed down by the state Department of Education and adopted by the state board in June 2020. Revised from what they were in 2014, the new standards serve as minimum expectations students are expected to meet, starting in the 2022-23 school year.

School districts have had two years longer than usual, because of the pandemics disruptions to absorb and understand the standards before writing and implementing curriculum on the local level.

Even though most of the debate in New Jersey has centered on Comprehensive Health and Physical Education standards and the changes to sex education lessons in health classes, parents and students should also be on the lookout for lots more changes in other key subjects.

Check in with your school districts curriculum office and with your board of education to see where your school stands, as most new curricula should have been written during the summer and approved by school boards before teachers bring lessons into the classroom.

Because the resources and the standards provided by the state are intentionally broad, parents and communities canplay an important role in managing expectations.

What's new? Starting in September, look out for lessons in civics, climate change, computer programming and design thinking across all grades, and life literacy classes intended for future citizens in the 22nd century. Media arts emphasizing digital media has been added to the four subjects offered under Visual and Performing Arts, which already included dance, music, theatre and visual arts. Changes should also be coming in how students learn world languages and music.

Whats changed? Life Literacies and Key Skills was added to the Career Readiness standards. And the old technology standards were renamed and recrafted as Computer Science and Design Thinking.

English and math standards follow a different schedule, so theyve stayed the same this year.

Overall, there are new standards in seven core subject areas: Science, Social Studies, Visual and Performing Arts, World Languages, Computer Science and Design Thinking, Health and Phys-Ed, and Career Readiness, Life Literacies and Key Skills.

Lawmakers, in addition to the State Board of Education, help determine what students learn in school. Civics education for middle school students became mandatory through Laura Wooten's Law, named after a Princeton resident who was the state's and nation's longest-serving poll worker and signed by Gov. Phil Murphy in 2021. The state Department of Education was also required to provide resources to schools on diversity and inclusion instruction, according to another law signed by Murphy in 2021.

We do a crosswalk between the 2014 and 2020 standards, said Paramus Schools Superintendent Sean Adams, when determining what has changed within the standards, and what already meets those minimum expectations.

Typically, we would spend 2020-2021 learning the new standards. Then we would spend the following year identifying and proactively putting together a framework for the curriculum that would frame out those standards and provide a direction for our curriculum team to start putting together what it will be in the summer, ahead of the board meeting, he said.

The Paramus Board of Education met on Aug. 22 to approve the curriculum for the upcoming school year. "That doesnt mean theyre done," Adams said. "Now that the revised curriculum has been approved, we just continue.

NJ teacher shortageTeacher shortages continue. Here's what New Jersey is doing to make it easier to hire more

Curriculum, said Paramus Assistant Schools Superintendent Tim Donohue, is an ongoing, living document that can change during the school year, too. "We ensure supports are put in place for teachers and students in terms of resources, teaching strategies and consistency across buildings and classrooms."

Paramus teachers, Adams said, will look at the effectiveness of the implementation and see how it is progressing. Teachers will meet during the year to articulate what they feel needs to be addressed, he said, and even once the lessons are written, teachers are constantly evaluating whether changes need to be made.

Teachers and administrators will meet to review material during the school year and discuss whether anything needs to be changed or whether additional resources are needed, Adams said.

All this stuff becomes sort of a package that then becomes the foundation that the curriculum team over the summer utilizes to write the new curriculum, which is then approved by the board, he said. Those groups become the curriculum teams that eventually write during the summer. In certain subjects, the curriculum writing takes several weeks; in others, just one.

Drop in college enrollment:'Where the heck is everybody?': NJ college enrollment is declining. We asked experts why

Ultimately the curriculum is our own and unique to Paramus, Adams said. Paramus uses resources offered by the Bergen County Curriculum Consortium, a group of districts that collaborate on identifying resources and best practices when designing curriculum, but the final lesson plans that students see in classrooms are created by the school district.

Paramus schools are providing professional development to teachers on incorporating new artistic work, reflective of various ethnic, racial and cultural perspectives, into their visual and performing arts curricula, Donohue said. The new curricula also loop social and emotional learning into the arts, so that skills like making responsible decisions and social and self-awareness can play into creative self-expression in the arts.

World languages curricula were changed to include themes that used to be part of Advanced Placement courses in all the grade levels. Paramus sixth and seventh graders will also now have the equivalent of a year of civics units spread across their social studies curriculum.

The Clifton School District will use "Imagine Robotify," a self-paced program that introduces coding and using virtual robots in second grade and through grade eight. The classes, which the district said its students enjoyed when they piloted the program in the summer, are designed to meet the new computer science and design thinking standards that require children in all grades to be exposed to programming.

The Paramus school district approached the sex education standards "in the same way we do other curricular areas, Donohue said. "We compared it with earlier standards, identified what's similar, what's different." The district will send letters to parents about what they can expect their children to learn in sex education classes, Adams said.

He said he has watched many recordings of board meetings and political forums where sex education has been raised in the context of parental rights.

The common theme he has seen, Adams said, is that from standards to curriculum to what actually happens in the classroom, theres a huge void. And parents can see the standards, they can see the curriculum, but they cant see the classroom. And so they dont know on a day-to-day basis whats actually happening. And they want to know.

Climate change: The New Jersey Climate Change Education Hub gives teachers lesson plans and guidance to integrate climate change into their curriculum for all subject areas and grade levels: njclimateeducation.org.

Civics: Middle schoolers have to learn civics for at least half a school year a whole semesters worth of lessons. The state authorized Rutgers Universitys Center for Civic Education to create lesson plans and curriculum: Middle School Civics (rutgers.edu)

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? nj.gov/education/standards/dei/samples/index.shtml

Computer Science and Design Thinking:k12cs.org/curriculum-assessment-pathways.

View original post here:

NJ schools add new standards in seven subjects this year. What parents need to know - NorthJersey.com