The Tennessee State Board of Education English Language Arts Standards Recommendation Committee spent most of its Oct. 21, 2025 meeting reviewing appendix materials and the glossary attached to the draft ELA standards, directing multiple edits and asking the Department of Education to implement them.

Brianna, a Department of Education staff member supporting the committee, told members the department had two clarifications to offer: "I confirmed with the Tennessee Department of Education IT team, Microsoft Copilot is allowed in the event that you're using Microsoft Copilot specifically," and that credit hours are a local determination: "credit hours are a local decision. So we will need to remove the credit hour numbers." The committee instructed staff to remove the numeric credit-hour entries and to continue drafting the appendix and glossary edits for committee review.

Committee members worked through appendices A–G page by page. They decided to remove an older set of professional learning community material from the appendix (members said the guidance was outdated), to flag multiple tables and figure numbers for later numbering, and to ask the department to update the language-and-conventions progression chart in Appendix B because it is out of date.

Members also debated how to define and present text-complexity guidance. The committee preserved text-complexity materials in Appendix A and asked staff to retain the department’s quantitative and qualitative approaches while ensuring the glossary and the appendix used consistent phrasing such as "texts of appropriate complexity." Vice Chair Hilliard emphasized consistency for classroom users and asked staff to check references where glossary entries had been removed or changed.

On the question of screening instructional materials, Banks (a member of the textbook commission who joined remotely) urged the committee to add a definition of "literary merit" and said it should be used to help exclude low-quality or AI-generated material. As Banks wrote in a comment read to the group: "I think it would be important to define literary merit. Most of this would involve meeting quantitative and qualitative metrics as outlined in the appendix, but I'm also thinking about the importance of creating a definition wherein AI produced text would be avoided. This would be particularly important with material text selection including TCAP." The committee asked staff to draft language that would add "and literary merit" to the phrase that currently appears in the reading standards (for example, changing "texts of appropriate complexity for X grade" to "texts of appropriate complexity and literary merit for X grade") and to apply that phrasing consistently across affected rows where reviewers had previously used the older wording.

The glossary underwent extensive line-by-line review. Committee members removed or consolidated terms that do not appear in the standards (for example, references to "professional learning community" were deleted from the appendix and related glossary citations removed). The committee also directed several specific glossary edits: keep and clarify "author's choices," move "opposing claim" to the O section (the group agreed to use opposing claim rather than counterclaim in glossary wording), consolidate instances of "form" only when it appears in the standards, and remove domain-specific vocabulary that no longer matched the standards’ phrasing.

The committee and department staff agreed to add or clarify several foundational-literacy glossary entries that are used in the standards: phoneme–grapheme correspondence (the committee asked staff to provide this entry using the sound-symbol definition formerly proposed), fluency (the committee directed separate definitions for reading fluency and writing fluency, with a shared top-level definition of "fluency"), and onset and rhyme (the committee decided to list these together as "onset and rhyme" to match the standards' wording). Members tasked staff to coordinate with the foundational literacy leads at the Department for precise wording.

Staff will also resolve references and bibliography items: the committee asked the department to identify which references are cited in the standards text and which were included as background; members suggested adding in-text citation notes where terms were drawn from outside sources to aid future drafters.

The committee set a follow-up meeting to complete the remaining glossary and parking-garage items and asked staff to circulate a revised draft showing the requested changes before reconvening.