There are many ways districts have historically engaged in the investigation of materials. Knowing EdReports gives you plenty of information regarding the programs’ alignment to standards and instructional shifts as well as additional information regarding usability factors, your committee’s job is to review the options for your established priorities. You may find that your committee will need to engage in a few different ways of investigation to get the information you need to make a final decision.

What is this resource?

One of the most critical components of a strong adoption process is taking the time to deeply investigate your options. This resource provides your team with a variety of approaches to investigate the programs after you have winnowed your list of options to the 2-3 you are considering and offers some guiding questions to help you decide how to proceed with your investigation. Deeply studying those few options will give your team an opportunity to see just how well the materials address content expectations as well as your district priorities.

How should this resource be used?

Use the questions in this to guide your committee through deciding which of these approaches will best fit the needs of your team. The guiding questions should help you and your team land on an approach, or approaches, that will give you the information needed to make a final decision and also consider what stakeholders to engage and how you plan to collect the evidence from your investigation. We’ve also included a series of approaches that district teams have used as their selected method/s for investigating their program options. Your team may decide you only have time or capacity to engage in one of these approaches, while other teams may decide that multiple approaches is the right way to proceed.