TEA Available Instructional Materials

TEA provides districts and educators with an optional set of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) designed especially for Texas.
 
Two scopes of materials are available to school systems in Texas:

• Full-subject materials: full sets of materials designed to provide the teacher with everything needed to cover 100% of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) in a grade level/band, including scope and sequence, daily lesson plans, and student materials.
• Supplemental materials: materials not designed to cover 100% of the TEKS but designed to complement, enrich, and/or extend supports in a particular subject and/or grade band.

For material of any scope, TEA may make it available in two different types of licenses:

• Texas Open Education Resources (OER): state-developed materials where the underlying intellectual property is either owned by the state of Texas or it can be freely used and modified by the state in perpetuity. These materials are made freely available forever in digital form to Texas school districts and educators to use or modify as they see fit. They can be printed to ensure students have access to paper instructional materials. In the future, TEA plans to ensure students have access to printed versions at cost. Finally, these materials are updated to improve their quality with new versions over time based on feedback from teachers and parents.
• Temporary State-Licensed Resources: state-acquired digital materials where TEA has procured a state-wide license so that the materials are freely available to Texas school districts and educators for a specified range of school years.

School districts and charter schools retain the responsibility under state law to ensure TEKS are covered in ways deemed most appropriate by the local school system. Prior to publication, materials go through a rigorous third-party review based on an approved rubric. Review criteria include TEKS alignment, support for all learners (including students with disabilities) progress monitoring, implementation supports, age appropriateness, and more. Materials also are subject to a focus group of Texas educators. For most OER materials, TEA operates a continuous improvement process to update the content of the instructional materials to ensure is of the highest quality, based on feedback from districts, teachers, and parents. 

When the COVID pandemic began to disrupt in-person learning, Texas public schools were not prepared to provide remote or hybrid instruction with appropriately designed instructional materials, and children fell behind because of lost instructional time.  As a result, TEA undertook an accelerated process to acquire effective instructional material resources for schools that could support remote, in-person, and hybrid instruction, both to support schools during the pandemic and to speed up learning recovery efforts longer term. Click here to learn more about this response and Texas OER content moving forward (PDF).

All content found in OER materials available from TEA is provided online in the links below to allow for maximum transparency so that parents can see lessons offered to their students in classrooms that may be using them; review and feedback are always appreciated.

Visit each material page below to learn more about each product, including online viewing for all materials available to students and teachers.

Full-Subject Materials: Texas OER 

Full-subject materials are designed to cover 100% of the TEKS in the indicated grade level/band. These materials will be updated with new version releases as part of a continuous improvement process (except for K–5 Science).

*Denotes a resource that educators may already have access to (e.g., trade books or materials in a science kit) which is required for a high-fidelity implementation of the material.

Full-Subject Materials: Temporary State-Licensed 

These core materials are designed to cover 100% of the TEKS in the indicated grade level/band. They will be freely accessible for a limited time by school districts. If schools wish to continue using them locally after the access term, they will be available for purchase from the vendor.

**Denotes a resource that must be purchased from the vendor for high-fidelity use of the material.

Supplemental Materials: Texas OER

The following OER supplemental materials for secondary math and science remain available; however, since they were released before COVID, they have not yet been reviewed by a third party and are not currently updated by TEA.

Supplemental Materials: Temporary State-Licensed

These materials are not designed to cover 100% of the TEKS, but they complement, enrich, or extend supports in a particular subject and grade band.

Supplemental Tutoring: Temporary State-Licensed

As part of student support in response to COVID learning loss, the following tools have been made temporarily available.

Digital and Print Access

In addition to digital access, all products allow educators, campuses, or individuals to self-print the materials. For more information on printing instructions or options for purchase, please email us: printoperations@tea.texas.gov

Supporting Students with Disabilities

Specially Designed Instruction (SDI) is changes to the content, methodology, or delivery on instruction students receive when they are eligible for special education support services. SDI Field User Guides are intended to be a bridge between existing student support plans and the instructional content available within the HQIM suite of resources from TEA. For more information, please visit www.inclusionintexas.org.

Table Definitions

• Trade book: an authentic text written and published for the public that is used within the curriculum; many are commonly found in school libraries
• Unit reader: a text developed and compiled by a publisher that is under a license that prevents free use
• Science kit: a set of materials for use in hands-on science exploration

Data Collection and Privacy Practices

TEA takes data security seriously and has robust protections in place to guard confidential student data. Currently, Open Education Resource products have a digital component that is only accessed by teachers so that they can see lesson plans and related content, no student-level data is captured. Digital versions of OER content for students is limited to PDFs that can be shown on student laptops, although printed versions of the material are preferable for learning. Importantly, no student surveys are ever administered as part of any OER product.

Beyond OER, all digital learning products used in schools must comply with federal & state student privacy laws. Any student data collected, in assessments or otherwise, are fully protected by federal law in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 20 U.S.C. §1232g, and Texas law including Texas Education Code §32 Subchapter D and Texas Government Code §552.114 and §2054. Any digital learning materials made available to school systems by TEA must meet high standards of data privacy and cybersecurity enforced by contract terms and conditions by TEA and for cloud services must also comply with the Department of Information Resources TX-Ramp program.