Striving Readers Work Team

The North Dakota Native American Essential Understandings (NDNAEU) were adopted by North Dakota as an on-going part of the state’s efforts to promote Culturally Responsive Practices and to provide Indigenous perspectives from local indigenous Elders for education. Literacy skills, especially in the forms of reading, writing, listening, viewing and speaking, are at the heart of the resources created to support the NDNAEU.

In the summer of 2020, the Office of Indian/Multicultural Education created a (virtual) work team of both educators and Elders to begin work on the above-described tasks. The combination of educators and Elders allowed rich dialogue to guide the process and accomplishment of the following tasks:

Alignment of the current NDNAEU lesson plans and resources to the updated ND State Content Standards,
Continued exemplar lesson development in all content areas with a focus on Language Arts and Literacy,

These tasks align with the North Dakota Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Grant goal:

“The state’s overall goal for NDSRCL is that ND will integrate and align resources and policies to support the literacy skills of Disadvantaged Children birth to Grade 12 to graduate Choice Ready with the knowledge, skills, and disposition to be successful in whatever they choose to do.”

The tasks also align with the following ND State Literacy Plan Goal Areas:

Goal 1 Prioritize serving disadvantaged children
Goal 3 Implement high quality comprehensive literacy instruction that is evidence based
Goal 6 Provide professional development to support teachers
Goal 7 Improve literacy outcomes