Running a ELA Unit Across a Whole Department in Maine

Quick answer: Agree on three things and leave the rest alone: the texts, the assessed tasks and the scoring language. Everything else - pacing, warm-ups, discussion routines - stays with the individual teacher. In most Maine high schools the whole English department is two or three people, so a shared unit is less a curriculum project than a working agreement you can write on one page.

How do you get a small department to agree on one unit?

Bring a draft, not a discussion. A two-person department does not have the meeting time to design a unit from nothing, so the fastest route is for one teacher to bring a finished sequence and ask the others to mark what they would cut. Objections arrive as edits rather than as abstractions, and you leave the meeting with something teachable.

Lock the assessed tasks first. Once colleagues agree on what students will hand in and how it will be judged, the rest of the unit can differ between rooms without anyone losing sleep. A packaged unit gives you a neutral starting draft that nobody in the building has to defend, which is why Characterisation and Analysing Fiction works well as a shared spine for fiction study in grades nine to twelve.

What has to be identical across sections, and what should not be?

Identical: the text list, the final task, the rubric wording, and the week in which the final task falls. Those four make student work comparable across sections and let you sit down in March and calibrate. Anything beyond that is a tax on teachers rather than a benefit to students, and small departments cannot afford the tax.

Deliberately different: entry points. One teacher may need three days of sentence-level work before the essay, another may not. Keeping a stock of short skills material on hand covers the gap, and something like English Grammar Grade 1 – Sentences, Nouns, Verbs & Punctuation is useful in an elementary feeder classroom for the same reason - it isolates one mechanical skill so the bigger writing task is not carrying two jobs at once.

How does one-to-one device access change a shared unit?

Maine has funded a statewide one-to-one laptop program for years, historically the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, so a department can assume most students have a device in front of them. That changes distribution rather than pedagogy. A shared unit can live in one folder, get copied by each teacher and be revised in place, so the version drift that kills shared units in paper-based schools does not happen.

Devices also change what evidence looks like. Drafts with visible revision history, recorded readings and annotated PDFs are all legitimate work products, and they travel between colleagues far more easily than a paper folder. Keep one printable version of every assessed task anyway, because network trouble on assessment day should not cost a student their grade.

How do you build common graded evidence around MECAS?

Write your assessed tasks against the Maine Learning Results and let the state testing schedule sit around them. The Maine Comprehensive Assessment System runs in grades three through eight and in the third high-school year, with the Multi-State Alternate Assessment for eligible students, and none of that tells you what a good department-wide essay should ask for. Your common tasks do.

Calibrate twice a year, briefly. Bring four anonymous pieces to a forty-minute meeting, score them independently, then compare - that is enough to keep three teachers reading a rubric the same way. If your department wants a full grades nine to twelve sequence rather than a single unit, English Language Arts Complete – Ready-to-Use Curriculum for High School ELA (Grades 9–12) provides one, and New England Teaching Resources (CT, ME, MA, NH, RI, VT) shows how neighboring New England states organize the same territory. More Maine-specific material is gathered on Maine Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12).

Frequently asked questions

Are these units endorsed by the Maine DOE?

No. They are independent teaching materials with no affiliation to, approval from or endorsement by the Maine Department of Education, the MECAS program or any other education agency. Deciding how a unit lines up with the Maine Learning Results is professional judgment that stays with your department.

Can several teachers use one purchase?

Licensing terms are set out on each product page, so check them before sharing files across a department. As a rule, plan on the license covering the purchasing teacher's own classes unless the page says otherwise, and budget for additional licenses if colleagues will be teaching from the same materials.

How long does a department-wide unit take to set up?

Allow one meeting to choose the text list and the assessed tasks, then one afternoon for whoever is building the shared folder. Calibration meetings after that run under an hour. The setup cost is front-loaded and much cheaper in year two.

Related reading

• Maine ELA: Building a Unit Around the Maine Learning Results
• What Maine Teachers Teach While MECAS Runs
• Maine Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12)