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In 2024, the Bering Strait School District concluded that its English Language Arts curriculum was not working for students. District leaders also found that new, off-the-shelf options were costly and difficult for students to relate to.
So the district chose a different route: it would build its own curriculum from scratch.
Alex Roberts, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction, led the effort to create a new English Language Arts curriculum for grades 6-12.
“It was definitely a labor of love, working nights, working weekends, working all summer off contract,” Roberts said. “And not doing it alone, making sure I had the support of the people around me, and then just taking feedback all the time.”
Roberts said he had previously developed smaller instructional units and support materials, but nothing on this scale. Budget cuts left him as the primary administrator working on the project, he said, and creating the curriculum became his main focus for about a year and a half.
“Obviously, I have other parts of the job that I’ve had to maintain. There’s other curriculum, other pieces,” Roberts said. “And again, due to budget cuts, we had to lower my staff, so the capacity of the department wasn’t as large.”
Meeting statewide standards
The curriculum needed to align with Alaska’s English Language Arts standards, which set learning expectations for reading, writing, speaking, listening and language.
Roberts said he set out to build a curriculum around complete books instead of excerpts, responding to what he heard from parents and community members.
“A lot of it was about enjoyment, like they don’t like English, they want them to enjoy it more,” Roberts said. “A lot of the research points toward finding really good books, and really good stories, [which] helps increase the students’ enjoyment of reading in general, and so that was a big motivator, was just finding really good, high-quality books.”
Roberts, who is originally from South Carolina and moved to Unalakleet just over three years ago, also wanted students to encounter regional stories and Indigenous perspectives through local, Alaska and Native authors, as well as poetry, stories and folklore.
“Tying that directly into the units would be more meaningful for the students, and they’d be able to engage in really rich conversations and develop higher skills,” Roberts said. “Rather than dealing with these corporate curriculums that are written for the lower 48.”
Putting it into practice
Roberts developed curriculums for seven grade levels, each organized into five units. Unlike a commercial curriculum, the district’s program does not include all the support materials provided by publishers. That gives teachers more responsibility and flexibility to make classroom-level decisions.
“Our district has shifted from the curriculum being your religious guide, you have to stay in it, and you can’t deviate, to your standards are your baseline, that’s what you have to answer to, the curriculum is your tool,” Roberts said. “And if you’re a veteran teacher and you have a different lesson that you’ve done in the past that you love, incorporate it, please, pull it in.”
The district introduced the new curriculum in classrooms last school year. As teachers and students worked through the first unit, Roberts said he was still completing the final units.
“All of 6 through 12’s units 1-3 were completed by the beginning of this year, and then I worked throughout the beginning of the year to finish the last two units before they needed it at the end of the year,” Roberts said.
He said incorporating culturally relevant material is often discussed in education, but less often implemented.
“We’re putting it into practice, and it’s been amazing to see,” Roberts said.
The final story in this three-part series will examine how the curriculum worked in classrooms after its pilot year. It’s scheduled to air Wednesday.
