As a throwback to our most popular holiday E-Hint, A CLI Christmas Recipe Book, we’ve compiled five more recipes! Bring these delicious holiday snacks to your classroom party or keep them at home for you to munch on. Each one is a tried-and-true hit from our CLI staff.
Happy Holidays!
Districts are challenged more and more to develop or maintain a systemic culture for curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Very often, the first challenge is in determining the extent to which a systemic culture exists and in this E-Hint, our goal is to give you the questions and some tools to figure out where your district is and what steps might help move you closer to solving the challenges of establishing a systemic culture.
While not a comprehensive list by any means, we present this list of questions to initiate and open a dialogue regarding district-wide academic processes among stakeholders within a district. These challenging questions, posed from a first-person perspective, could help an administrative team affirm or evaluate their current curriculum structures and processes.
Although not exhaustive, these are some examples of questions that the Curriculum Leadership Institute Model for School Improvement provides support in answering. Click here for a rubric to determine where your district’s current strengths and weaknesses are in addressing these critical issues.
It is a familiar scenario and solution. The pressure is felt to improve reading skills to score higher on standardized tests. Elementary teachers can’t extend the school day, so they borrow time from a content area which doesn’t have a state assessment or one not as often. Social studies and science take a backseat. Even though this move seems logical with the best intentions, the results are counterproductive. Since the 1990s, the amount of instructional time in science and social studies has decreased over 90 minutes per week. It is often the first place teachers look to “pull” students from if they need interventions. Unfortunately, by cutting these courses, the opportunities for developing content vocabulary and knowledge about real life is also reduced.
Why teach social studies and science? Social studies classes provide content knowledge, but most importantly, students learn the foundation for why it is necessary to contribute to society as a good citizen. Science activities are a way to capture the interest of students with fun, hands-on, and minds-on lessons. Learning activities related to science and social studies help students develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills while connecting concepts to their world.
Support for the Key Shifts in English/Language Arts Standards Many states have revised their English/Language Arts Standards in recent years and have outlined key shifts from past standards. Continuing to schedule regular science and social studies classes allows opportunities to teach needed skills. The background knowledge gained from social studies and science provides the context to understand new and complex text for greater comprehension. Reading about science is no replacement for phenomenon or inquiry, but it can help build the knowledge base for “doing” science. Plus, citing textual evidence from informational text helps provide pieces necessary for accurate analysis of an investigation.
Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension English/Language Arts Standards require students to use domain-specific words in their writing and while speaking. Science and social studies classes provide opportunities for students to learn word meanings, read and hear them applied correctly in context, and use the words for communicating. Students receiving explicit instruction over the meanings of affixes and root words benefits the current class, but that knowledge is utilized by the students to become stronger readers in all classes. Vocabulary acquisition improves the comprehension of complex literary and informational text.
Student Engagement A significant, well-documented reason to keep regularly scheduled science and social studies classes, is that students love the activities these topics provide! The natural fit for collaboration and project-based learning allows students opportunities for implicit learning, developing good work habits, and applying what they learn to their lives. Learning while having fun is impactful in many ways!
Teachers are well aware of the importance of reading on grade level by the 3rd grade. If this doesn’t happen, opportunities to be successful in the future will be more of a challenge. Capturing every moment available for learning is critical. If you are interested in utilizing an integrated approach to teach more than one content area at the same time, download CLI’s FREE Civic Education Resource, Life, Liberty, Law. This resource is aligned to National Standards in Social Studies but also references ELA, Math, Science, Fine Arts, and Social/Emotional Learning Standards. Get yours at cliweb.org/resources-2.
We’ve all heard it. Kids talking about their schedules like this, “Yes! I’m going to get an A in math this year because Ms. So-and-so is so easy!” Or, “Dangit, science is going to be so hard. I got Mr. Tough-stuff, and he doesn’t let anything slide.” As teachers, you never want to be considered the easy teacher, but you also don’t want to be the hard teacher that the students dread. But, what if there was no easy teacher or hard teacher, and all learning environments were equally fair? Here are three ways to even the playing field for your students so that the “teacher lottery” becomes less varied.
Set Clear Curricular Expectations
First things first, standards are not curriculum, and neither is a textbook! Depending on the state and content area, some standards are written to be very broad and general. Some are written for a grade band rather than a specific grade level. In many cases, a standard can be interpreted differently by different teachers. Additionally, standards are not organized into teachable units and may not include a level of emphasis or rigor. Textbooks, on the other hand, may include levels of emphasis and rigor, but may not reflect local priorities and may have more lessons than can be taught in one school year. In my Intro to Business class for example, my textbook included 28 chapters. But in any given year, I could only get through 13 of them with my students. The textbook that my school had adopted for that class included more than twice the amount information that I could teach my students.
The solution to both of these issues, is to develop a local curriculum that is organized into teachable units made up of learning targets that are written clearly (so all teachers interpret them the same way), are measurable (avoid verbs like understand, learn, etc.), and is appropriate for the amount of time that you have with your students. This way, the expectations are clear for both teachers and students.
Make End-of-Unit Assessments Common
When all teachers for the same course are using the same assessment to determine success, students are held to the same expectations. To further ensure that teachers are administering the common assessment fairly, include a set of “administration guidelines” as a cover sheet. Information that should be clarified in the Administration Guidelines includes:
Please note that the Administration Guidelines as explained above are meant for general education students that are not on IEPs. Any student with an IEP must be given the modifications that are outlined within their IEP. Similarly, when administering common assessments to ELL students, consult their ELL teacher to determine appropriate accommodations.
Collaborate as a grade-level team
The big idea for all curriculum and assessment work is to improve classroom practices. By collaborating with your grade-level team, you’re able to share what worked and what didn’t. So, if something didn’t work in your lesson, ask a colleague who saw success to share what strategies they used. It’s OK to be vulnerable, and in fact, improving your teaching depends on it. Look for areas that you can improve and help those that can use your help to find more success in their classroom.
Students have enough to deal with without having to worry about which teacher they’re going to have. It will take a bit of work up front to complete the steps outlined above, but your school will be better for it. Your school doesn’t need easy teachers or hard teachers, they need good teachers.
Need some help with these things? Let us know!
As the summer break from the classroom challenges continues, it is time to reflect on how to best prepare novice and new teachers for the school year ahead. After hiring a teacher, a school district has an obligation to make every effort to assure the students assigned to the new teacher’s classroom will have the best possible opportunity to learn and grow.
There are many factors that encourage new teachers to leave the classroom. Besides the usual culprits of low salary, extreme demands on time, frustration with the challenges of motivating students, there are factors that can and should be addressed by the district before the school year starts. Support before the school year prepares new hires or novice teachers for the challenges to face them and, perhaps, encourages the new teacher to stay as an effective classroom teacher and a contributing member of the professional community of the district.
According to Kendyll Stansbury and Joy Zimmerman in the WestEd publication Designing Support for Beginning Teachers, “A third of beginning teachers quit within their first three years on the job. We cannot stand for this kind of dropout rate among students, and we can no longer afford it in our teaching ranks. … What lifelines can we offer so they will remain in the profession and develop into highly effective classroom educators?”
How can districts capitalize on the time available to make sure new teachers are ready for the challenges facing them?
In designing such an opportunity for your new teachers, there are considerations other schools or districts have added to their programs. The following list of priorities is compiled from recommendations and discussions from Susan Totaro and Mark Wise of West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District in New Jersey, Stansbury and Zimmerman from WestEd, David Goldblatt of SwingEducation, and new teacher orientation agendas prepared by Curriculum Leadership Institute Consultants.
A common mistake in “new teacher orientation” plans is to try to deliver as much information as possible for procedures that will occur throughout the year. While every district has its own structures for new teacher orientation, the cited authors all cautioned against packing the orientation time with deadlines and rules that can be communicated later in the year.
Clearly, a new teacher who has thoroughly interacted with the district’s Vision and Mission and identified the district’s learning expectations of all students starts the school year with a clear picture of how to best serve the students assigned to them!
Most school districts have a “cycle” for revising curriculum, so that each subject is reviewed every five to six years. The first cycle takes the longest because the curriculum must be created – a Subject Area Committee (SAC) must make decisions about what is most important and what will be required of all students. Subsequent cycles usually take less time because our starting point is the existing curriculum, which has been implemented and assessed for a period of time. However, there are still several considerations to be made as a curriculum is reviewed anew. We still need to consider state or national standards (which may have changed), and we need to gather teacher input. Now, we also have curriculum for other subject areas, which may not have been completed when the target subject was first written. The existence of these additional curricula allows us to look more thoroughly for cross-curricular support than we might have been able to do in the first cycle.
Below are some recommended steps for a second (or subsequent) cycle of reviewing and revising curriculum.
Districts that have used the CLI Model for the first cycle are accustomed to using large sheets of butcher paper on the wall, with color-coded strands for curriculum topics. Most districts find this is not really necessary in a second cycle, since they are using the existing curriculum as the starting point. However, some CLI districts have found it helpful to make large-size copies of their curriculum and cut it apart. They then highlight outcomes and components in color by strand so they can track standards across grade levels.
Depending on the extent of revision necessary or the quality of the assessments in place, the tasks listed above may take one school year or more, if necessary. Some SACs may find their task can be completed in less than a school year if there are few changes required.
