Supplemental ModEL Detroit Slides for EL Education K-8 Curriculum

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is EL Education, What Curriculum is Available in Kiddom, & What That Means
• About the ModEL Slides Supplement by Detroit Public Schools
• What the ModEL Detroit Slides Were Designed to Do
• Where to Find Your EL Education Slides in Kiddom

To kick it off, we’ll start from the beginning – if you’re already using the EL Education digital curriculum in Kiddom, feel free to skip to the next section to get straight into the Model Detroit slides!

What is EL Education, What Curriculum is Available on Kiddom, & What That Means

Last year, Kiddom partnered with the curriculum publisher Open Up Resources to offer top-rated digital curriculum (read more here). EL Education is the creator behind one such top-rated curricula now available through the partnership.

The EL Education curriculum K-8, while allegedly challenging to adopt, works for its schools, in a way that only a PD(Professional Development)-packed, discourse-driven, student-centric curriculum can. Not only do they have a reputation for closing the gap effectively for the schools in their community, they also received a near-perfect score by EdReports.

And now, EL Education K-8 is digitally accessible on the Kiddom platform, so you can take it with you wherever you go – but it’s much more than being portable.

Recently, at EL Education’s virtual conference What Matters Most, Dr. Amy Whitener, who teaches at Ootlewah Elementary, shared how Kiddom has transformed the way her school uses EL Education curriculum. The pairing has enabled:

1. Greater Collaboration – “Kiddom has made collaboration a huge time saver. There are no books to carry around, there’s no trying to connect across multiple books, we can plan whether people are in-person or virtual,” says Dr. Whitener.
2. Flexibility – “The lesson plans can be modified, reused, and accessed by everyone. So if there are any changes that need to be made, it’s so easy to share with them right there. We’re just always on the same page using Kiddom.”
3. Ease of Use – “It’s not a PDF, it’s all live documents, so if I need to go and change something, I change it. If I make something and my ELA team needs to add more, take away, change. It’s so easy.”

For those familiar with the EL Education curriculum, moving to Kiddom has been similarly well-received, however… one question we come across often is, “Does it come with the ModEL Detroit Slides?”

The much sought-after ModEL slides are especially helpful for teachers and schools in their first year or two of adopting the curriculum.

This week, we are excited to announce that yes, the ModEL Detroit Slides are now available in Kiddom, as a supplement to the EL Education curriculum.

About the ModEL Slides Supplement by Detroit Public Schools

Educators using the EL Education curriculum are often looking for simple visuals that can be used in class. The ModEL slides, developed by Detroit Public Schools, were created in response to this need.

Additionally, this year the DPSCD has modified the slides for effective pandemic era use. “They made it travel home beautifully, which is not what it was designed to do. So that took considerable ingenuity and plain hard work,” says Meredith Liben, Senior Fellow at Student Achievement Partners.

It’s important to note that the K-5 slides support the latest version of EL Education curriculum (2019), but the 6-8 slides support the original version. The newest version of EL Education (2019) is the curriculum available in Kiddom, so while the 6-8 supplements can still be used as guidance, they are not a direct resource for the latest version used.

As another reminder, these materials have not been sanctioned by or created by EL Education – they were created as supplements, and are labelled as such within Kiddom.

What the ModEL Detroit Slides Were Designed to Do

• Support teachers in getting a handle on how to teach the core elements of EL Education for teachers or systems first learning how to use it. The slides arguably have utility through at least the first two years of implementation.
• Provide clear guidance about What Matters Most in each ELA lesson K-8 of EL Education (remember: what was made for grades 6-8 was for EL 1.0/Willey. EL Education has now launched EL 2.0).
• Provide clear guidance about What Matters Most in each Skills lesson K-2 of EL Education.
• Help teachers understand how to prepare for teaching each lesson (the pre-slides before the student-facing slides).
• Provide student-friendly, developmentally appropriate guidance directly to students as they are first learning EL Education.
• Where EL Education offers a sometimes bewildering array of options to choose amongst (for example, with the English learner supports), offer an experienced user’s point of view on which supports or approaches align best to that particular lesson (i.e. a reduced amount of choices teachers have to sift through daily).
• Allow for new-to-program teachers to ramp up fairly quickly to a new program.
• Allow for continuation of student learning when a substitute is present.

And now, they’re loaded into Kiddom in alignment with the curriculum. They are currently included as attached presentations which teachers can use during virtual calls with students.

Where to Find the Supplemental ModEL Detroit Slides in Kiddom

The ModEL Detroit Slides are in the Lesson level of your curriculum within Kiddom, where you will most likely be planning your daily lessons. As a reminder, the curriculum hierarchy in Kiddom is as follows:

Grades > Modules > Units > Lessons

When you’re in the lesson you are planning, simply scroll down until you see the slides in the Supplemental Materials section, like so:

From there, you can download the slides for use in a live session, or embed directly into Kiddom if you’d like your students to follow along from their Kiddom home screen.

We hope you’re just as excited about these new ModEL Detroit Slides as we are to share them with you. If you’re interested in bringing Kiddom to your school or district, you can request a demo by clicking the big blue button in the header.