Customizing High School ELA Curriculum: A Collaborative Success with Denver Public Schools

All students deserve an education, where they see themselves and their communities in what they learn. At CommonGood, we believe culturally sustaining, locally relevant education should be available to everyone. Part of our mission is to collaborate with educational institutions to design and support curricula development that is inclusive, culturally responsive, and academically rigorous. Our recent partnership with Denver Public Schools (DPS) to enhance their high school literacy program is a testament to the power of collaborative efforts in curriculum development to achieve those ends. Anne Marie Blieszner, the High School Literacy Curriculum Specialist at DPS, shared valuable insights into this transformative project.

Identifying the Need for Change

After much review of various curricula, DPS deemed Odell Education’s High School Literacy Program worthy of adoption. However, the district recognized a critical need to adapt the curriculum to better reflect and center their students' identities and historically marginalized perspectives. Blieszner explained the impetus behind this initiative:

“We planned to implement a high-quality high school literacy program across the district, and while the curriculum is highly rated, it was not intentionally designed to center our students’ identities or historically marginalized perspectives and experiences. In order to best serve our students, we knew we would need to adapt the curriculum to align to our Humanities team’s driving principles that assert the importance of centering linguistically and culturally diverse experiences and challenging dominant narratives to promote student learning and achievement.”

This understanding led DPS to seek CommonGood’s expertise to ensure their curriculum met high educational standards while also aligning to culturally sustaining or asset pedagogy.

“We’ve collaborated with a lot of curriculum teams over the years,” says CommonGood co-founder Evan Gutiérrez. “There are a number of good curricula out there. Close to none were developed with culturally sustaining pedagogy as their original purpose. So when schools set asset pedagogy as a priority, there’s work to be done - even when starting with a good curriculum.”

Collaborative Successes

CommonGood's approach to co-design goes much further than gathering teacher feedback - educators' priorities and ideas led the adaptation and design through phase of the project. Blieszner highlighted the key successes of this partnership:

“The CommonGood team prioritizes collaboration and honors teacher expertise. They have made curriculum adaptations following the findings from an initial review of the curriculum performed by a team of DPS teachers and central office staff. These adaptations include adding language supports, adding resources to support teacher intellectual preparation, curating supplemental resources to localize the content (some of which has been supplied by teachers), and improving authenticity of assessments.”

Using Odell’s curriculum as a base gave teachers and the CommonGood team a solid foundation for localized customization. The modular format of Odell’s curriculum gave way to adapting existing units to DPS’s diverse student population, as well as include new units which were fully designed by DPS teachers.

Blieszner continued: “Teachers are most excited about the reformatting of the curricular resources because the layout better positions teachers to make planning and instructional decisions in response to their students’ needs. They are also eager to try the augmented vocabulary resources since our district has a large population of multilingual learners, and the resources support biliteracy development.”

DPS teachers were involved throughout the processes of evaluating the curricula, decisions on new units to add to the curriculum, and designing and reviewing the new curriculum. In a co-design process, teachers collaborated with one another, guided by Blieszner and the CommonGood team, on new units for texts such as The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros, and There There by Tommy Orange.

As Blieszner noted: “We are also excited by how much teachers have been able to participate in the process. Notably, CommonGood led a cohort of teachers in designing new units that reflect teacher and student interests that we will incorporate into the high school program.”

Teachers engaged in the co-design process for the new units were not only giving their expertise, but also gaining skills in curriculum design. A teacher who was in the designer role, Donald Dilliplane, shared that “...using all the tools and methods was an excellent learning experience and will be useful to me in the future. … I am excited to use the skills taught and honed during this whole process.” 

Mallory Kimmell, another teacher who had a reviewer role during the co-design process shared that she “...enjoyed the collaboration with other teachers in the district to hear and offer their perspective.” Kimmell continued stating that she “also appreciated that teachers were creating and reviewing, knowing that they understand our students and classrooms best.”

Hopes for the Future

Looking ahead, Blieszner expressed her hopes for both teachers and students as a result of this work:

“We hope teachers will be excited to use curriculum that is designed to center our students’ experiences and perspectives with the goal of supporting their intellectual and personal development, and we hope these adapted materials will empower teachers to make instructional decisions based on their students’ identities, interests, and instructional needs. We also hope students will be excited by content that is more relevant to them and is celebratory of their cultural and linguistic knowledge. We hope to see improved student outcomes through the increased diversity of learning demonstration opportunities.”

Blieszner adds: “Ultimately, our goal is to continue developing teacher planning and instructional capacity as well as their cultural competence, which will support students in feeling empowered and in knowing that their cultural and linguistic identities are celebrated.”

Continuing the Journey

Our work with Denver Public Schools has been a remarkable journey, filled with collaborative problem-solving and meaningful changes. As we move forward, we’re excited to keep building curricula that truly empower both students and teachers, making education an inclusive and impactful celebration for everyone involved.