Tennessee ELA standards panel approves wording changes, debates point-of-view vs. perspective

The Tennessee State Board of EducationEnglish Language Arts Standards Recommendation Committee met electronically Sept. 22, 2025, and approved a slate of wording edits across K—2 reading standards while debating how to handle "point of view" and "perspective" in the grade progression.

The committee, chaired by Chair Cornelius and led day-to-day by Vice Chair Hilliard, voted 8-0 to accept the meeting recording as the official minutes after the board cited TCA 8-44-108 requiring roll-call votes for electronic meetings. The group spent the remainder of the session reviewing reading standards language, agreeing to a number of edits by consensus and flagging several items for follow-up in the standards guide.

Why it matters: The SRCwhich advises the State Boardis revising K—2 English/language arts standards that guide classroom instruction across Tennessee. Changes to wording and examples affect how teachers interpret expectations (for example, whether to teach "technical language" or to emphasize digital-literacy distinctions). Several items the committee debated could shift classroom focus on teaching literal vs. figurative meaning, genre awareness, text-structure analysis and how students learn to judge information online.

What the committee changed and agreed on - Consistency for examples: Members adopted an editorial change to use "e.g." (example) rather than "such as" or a trailing "etc." across multiple standards for consistency in how illustrative examples are presented. - Figurative/connotative language and interpretation: For grades 6—8 and 9—2 the panel agreed to pair "analyze" with a separate clause to "interpret the meaning of figurative and connotative words and phrases," creating a clearer progression from earlier grades. - Removal of the term "technical": Committee members removed the word "technical" from several reading standards and replaced it with phrasing already used elsewhere ("figurative and connotative"), after noting the paneland the Department of Education reviewershad flagged the inconsistency. - Examples and EG lists: The group moved many lists previously introduced with "such as" into parenthetical example lists ("e.g.") for editorial uniformity. - "Illusions" and informational texts: After discussion, members agreed to include analysis of "allusions" (earlier transcribed as "illusions") in both literary (RL) and informational (RI) standards where…