Alaska ELA: Teaching in the Weeks Around PEAKS

Quick answer: Keep teaching your ordinary ELA units and move the interruption-proof ones into the testing window. PEAKS covers ELA and math in grades 3 through 9, so classes empty and refill in shifts for several weeks. Short reading and writing tasks that a student can join late, finish alone and hand in for a grade will hold the term together better than review drills.

What does the PEAKS window really do to an Alaska timetable?

Testing rarely arrives as one clean block. In a school working around a single reliable connection and a shared device cart, the schedule bends to bandwidth: grade 5 on Tuesday morning, grade 7 on Wednesday, and your Thursday period starts with eleven of nineteen students. Layer an itinerant travel schedule or a four-day calendar over that and one lesson lands three different ways.

The Alaska Content and Performance Standards do not pause while the Performance Evaluation for Alaska's Schools runs, and neither does what a student owes you in May. Correspondence and distance students sometimes appear on site only for the assessment itself, which makes these weeks the rare stretch when you can conference face to face. Spend that time on the feedback that travels badly over a video call.

What should I teach while the grades above and below me are testing?

Choose work whose unit of completion is one lesson. A single prompt, drafted and revised inside a period, produces a piece of writing from every student present without a chain of prerequisites behind it. For the elementary rooms, Grade 3 Creative Writing – Structured Prompts & Story Starters is built that way, with structured story starters framed so a child walking in from the testing room at 10:40 can begin without a recap.

Grades 10 through 12 are usually losing rooms and staff to proctoring rather than testing themselves, and those classes still need something substantial. Analysing Cartoons – Step by Step suits that gap: a step-by-step route through political cartoons where the source carries the analysis, so a senior who missed two days has not missed a novel. One period, one artifact, one grade in the book.

How do I get graded evidence out of an interrupted month?

Decide before the window which standards you are collecting, and collect each one twice rather than five times. A short constructed response scored against the same rubric in week one and week four shows movement that a make-up packet never will. Write the rubric language straight from the standard so a report card comment can quote it back to a family.

Keep the record simple enough to survive absence: a named task, a date, a score, a one-line note. When a student misses the assessed lesson, reassess the same standard in a later task rather than building a separate catch-up worksheet you then have to grade twice. Grade-banded material on Alaska Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12) is sorted so you can pull the parallel task instead of writing one at midnight.

How do I plan the rest of the year around this?

Treat the PEAKS weeks as a fixed obstacle on the map, not a surprise. Anchor the heaviest units, the extended essay and the novel study and the research task, in the stretches on either side, and reserve the window for skills that repeat: sentence control, evidence selection, revision moves. Anything needing the whole class on consecutive days belongs elsewhere.

A full year of middle school material removes most of the improvising. English Language Arts Complete – Ready-to-Use Curriculum for Middle School ELA gives grades 6 through 8 a sequence you can cut into and out of, which matters when a four-day calendar has already taken a teaching day out of every week. Anyone curious how other states time this can start from State Standards Navigator: Teaching Resources by State and work back to what Alaska's geography and calendar allow.

Frequently asked questions

Is it worth pausing my unit for test preparation?

Familiarity with the format helps; weeks of drilling add little that your regular ELA teaching is not already building. One or two sessions on the tools, the highlighting, the response box, the timer, cover the mechanics. Everything else is reading closely and writing clearly, which your units ask for anyway.

Are these resources connected to DEED or to PEAKS?

No. These are independent teaching materials, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development, any assessment provider or any exam authority. They are written in standards-style language so you can map them to the Alaska Content and Performance Standards yourself.

What do I do with students who miss a graded task while testing?

Reassess the standard rather than the task. Keep a parallel version ready, same rubric and different text, and let the student complete it in the following cycle. Marks stay comparable, nobody is penalized for a schedule they do not control, and you avoid a pile of hand-built make-up work.

Related reading

• Mapping ELA Units to the Content and Performance Standards in Alaska
• ELA in a Long Block: A Plan for Alaska Teachers
• Alaska Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12)