Overview and Purpose

Welcome to the TEKS Guide, BETA, for reading language arts. The purpose of the TEKS Guide is to help teachers understand each student expectation in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and to provide valuable resources to support instruction.

Bookmark us now and return often as we respond to your feedback, evolve, and grow.

What are the TEKS?

The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) are the state standards for what students should know and be able to do in each subject and grade level. The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) has legislative authority to adopt the TEKS for each subject of the required curriculum. The SBOE periodically reviews and revises the TEKS for each subject area. To learn more about the process and timelines for review and revision of the TEKS please visit https://tea.texas.gov/curriculum/teks-review/.

Take a tour of the TEKS Guide

This video provides a guided overview of each component of the TEKS Guide, BETA. 

Unpack Student Expectations:

Teachers can begin unpacking each standard by exploring the following information on the overview tab for the student expectation:

  • Detailed explanations of the standard
  • Glossary support for key terms
  • Supporting information including:
    • Related 2009 student expectation(s)
    • Summaries of research related to the student expectation
Student Expectation thumbnail

Demonstrated Proficiency:

For each student expectation, the overview tab includes one example of how the standard might be assessed. This could be a formative assessment activity or a released STAAR assessment item. These examples assist teachers in measuring their students’ demonstrated proficiency of the TEKS. In addition to the activity or question, the demonstrated proficiency section includes rationales for STAAR answer choices and further explanations for teachers about the assessment example.

Demonstrated Proficiency thumbnail

Alignment:

Information in the alignment tab helps teachers make connections within and among the student expectations. Breakouts allow teachers to visualize each component of a student expectation while the vertical alignment shows related knowledge or skills in other grade levels. The focal points are intended to show the multiple connections among student expectations within the grade level.

Alignment thumbnail

More to Come:

Why is TEKS Guide in BETA?

Planned enhancements will make this resource even more useful for teachers. For example, TEA will solicit examples of student work aligned to the TEKS from Texas classrooms throughout the 2019-2020 school year. Student work will be added as exemplars in the TEKS Guide 2.0 that is scheduled to be available in Summer 2020. If you have a great example of student work, please contribute it!

To see what has been added or changed recently, please review the version log.