Highlights from our interview with Donna Bahorich, member of the OER Advisory Board, former chair of the State Board of Education, and member of the Texas Historical Commission.
Q: Lone Star Standard
What are the goals of the OER process and materials?
A: Donna Bahorich
That is correct. The overall goal for the OER process is for the resources to be open to whoever would like them. They are not a private set of instruction materials but an open set for even parents to see.
Even if somebody is not in the public school system, they could actually take advantage of this open education resource material. The broader goal for Texas education is to prepare students for success post-graduation. And to do that, there are many things that need to be put in place. One of those is effective teachers in every classroom.
The second thing is to have proven, rigorous instructional materials or textbooks in order to be able to prepare students for post-graduation. This is where the OER comes in, creating high quality instructional materials, developed by experts, and available to anyone.
The materials are not mandatory. They are optional for school districts. We believe in local control in Texas, and districts will be able to use the open education resources, or they can use whichever set of resources they feel meets their needs in their district and are approved by their local school boards.
But, these open education resources are going to be a fantastic boon for school districts that are not advantaged with a lot of high tax properties and don’t have the resources to buy quality materials.
Q: Lone Star Standard
What is your role as a member of the OER Advisory Board?
A: Donna Bahorich
Those lessons have been reviewed extensively. There was a lot of involvement from Texas Education Agency staff, contractors that were involved at the direction of the agency, stakeholders including the Education Service Centers. All were involved in reviewing the lessons and materials and providing input.
There has been a pilot program in districts that have been online since 2020 looking at these materials and seeing how they work in their classrooms. And we’ve seen super positive results, as I understand it from the district’s using this material.
I serve on the advisory board for the Open Education Resource project. There are 15 of us on the board and I’m one of the advisors who looks at the products to see if it conforms to what is required by the legislation. We make sure it is high quality, it is aligned first and foremost with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, and it’s suitable for the age and grade of the students that it’s intended for, and it’s free from bias and factual error. Those are the things that the advisory board has been working on.
Q: Lone Star Standard
Which resources are you particularly excited about?
A: Donna Bahorich
I am very excited about the English Language Arts products that I have been focusing on lately. It is incredibly content rich. Kids love stories. And this curriculum that’s being designed in the English Language Arts has all of it tied in. History, science, arts, all integrated into it.
It has some great stories. Some of the stories that have been chosen along the way are very interesting. But it also includes true history stories that kids will be learning. The result is they’re going to learn and build their knowledge base as they improve their reading skills. It’s not just learning skills in English Language Arts as is typical in a classroom you would see today. The new resources are integrated from history to science to technology and the arts. I think that is a really big development.
Q: Lone Star Standard
How will these resources help teachers in Texas?
A: Donna Bahorich
The idea with these open education resources and all the activity books and the quizzes and the variety of resources that will be provided to educators is that teachers will have to spend less time assembling all of their lesson plans and resources together. Currently, teachers spend an incredible amount of time preparing to teach, developing lesson plans and tests. With the resources provided, they will be able to spend more time concentrating on delivering the material to the students, and differentiating as needed for the kids in the classroom.
That’s going to be a big help to teachers who spend more time now figuring out how to meet the needs of individual kids and how they are going to teach this or that. So, I think the idea of providing rigorous materials is that teachers can count on these resources being grade level lessons, lesson plans, activities, and quizzes. All of that will help because they don’t have to worry whether the materials they are teaching are at grade level.
Donna Bahorich served as a member of the Open Education Resource (OER) Advisory Board. She is also a member of the Texas Historical Commission and a former member of the Texas State Board of Education, serving as Chair from June 2015 - September 2019.
Donna discusses the new Texas education curriculum as well as Open Education Resources (OER), which is an online database of school curriculum and lesson plans which can be accessed by teachers, staff, parents, and anyone else seeking those resources.
This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Listen to the full discussion here: https://texas-talks.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-21-donna-bahorich.
