The Educational Partners LLC
With Superior Solutions LLC
Your Partners in Educational Excellence!
/ImageGirlbk.jpg)
 |
|
|
|
 |
Adequate Yearly Progress for All Our Students is Our Goal
Products:
Part 1: An Overview of Curriculum Mapping and Alignment (PDF)
Part 2: The Principal's Role (PDF)
Part 3: Reference Page (PDF)
Services:
Curriculum Alignment Faculty Meeting
Monitoring, and Evaluation Package
Just When You Need It In-services
Overview of Services
This seminar package focuses on the Curriculum Mapping process and includes 8 days of team-based professional development workshops given throughout the year along with a mutually agreed-upon number of days of onsite coaching during the mapping process.
Curriculum Alignment Faculty-Meeting Staff Development Packages:
These packages include monthly or twice monthly full-staff workshops built around the curriculum alignment process. These workshops are designed to be delivered during staff meetings or district administrative meetings. In addition, they include two to four days of onsite coaching around the process and around your student achievement goals.
Curriculum Implementation, Monitoring, and Evaluation:
With the federal and state focus on all students making AYP, none of us in education can afford to wait until the end of the year to evaluate the success of the school improvement/student achievement goals we have put in place in our districts or schools. We need our goals to be written as SMART Goals with specific, multiple, ongoing ways to measure and monitor their success in increasing student achievement, but even more than that, the results need to used immediately to impact student learning.
TEP understands this need and can help you implement effective ways to monitor and evaluate the learning systems you are putting in place in your district or building. To do this, our team utilizes the inquiry-based data-driven decision making process, which is an ongoing process that utilizes SMART Goals, Action Steps, and data collection and analysis to provide ongoing evaluation of the program and to make sure that your curriculum is addressing your students learning needs.
Just When You Need It Curriculum In-services:
While TEP believes in job-embedded ongoing professional development around your goals, we realize that it may not meet your immediate needs. Therefore, we have several in-services for you to select from in this category. These workshops are highly interactive and are designed to meet NCSD’s standards.
We all know that principals have to guarantee that essential content is covered. Therefore, they have to the monitor coverage (Marzano, 2002). Having said that, guaranteeing coverage is not enough, the principal has to focus on student learning, too.
In a learner-centered school, everything is focused on the learner’s needs and the learning process. So there is a strong feeling that if the students have not learned it the teacher has not yet taught it. That alone makes a big difference in the way the school operates (Wiggins and McTighe, 1998; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Lipton and Wellman, 2000).
This change in focus from what is taught to what is learned must be nurtured by the principal. Effective principals must work with their staff members to articulate clear and measurable goals; to identify indicators that offer evidence of progress; and to develop systems for monitoring those indicators on a continuous basis (DuFour, 1999)...
The Impact of Curriculum Alignment on Student Achievement
It is hard to overestimate the importance of fully aligned curriculum—a curriculum where all formative and summative common assessments are aligned to the State Content Standards, Benchmarks, and Grade Level Content Expectations—a curriculum where all instructional resources are aligned to the assessments—a curriculum that is fully understood by stakeholders and being learned by all students. This is more than an ideal. This is a realistic goal that everyone in the school-community has a right to expect—especially the students and their parents.
“Access to equal educational opportunity should mean more than having the opportunity to attend school. It should mean that all students have the opportunity to acquire what has been identified as the knowledge and skills essential to their success” (DuFour, 1999). This happens with a fully aligned curriculum. In fact, 35 years of research has identified 11 factors that are the primary determinants of student achievement…a guaranteed and viable curriculum is listed first and refers to the fact that no matter who teaches a given class, the curriculum will address certain content and will be taught adequately in the time allotted (Marzano, 2003).
The second factor is important when we remember that our goal is not content coverage but rather increased student learning. As we create learner centered schools—schools where the needs of learners and an emphasis on learning processes drive all school improvement efforts (including curriculum alignment) (Wiggins and McTighe, 1998; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Lipton and Wellman, 2000), we must come to terms with the inherent dichotomy that exists between the two views of curriculum. There often is a world of difference between “I taught it” and “the students learned it.” A fully aligned curriculum supported by common formative and summative assessments can help eliminate this difference by focusing everyone’s attention on the same instructional goals and seeing to it that these goals are adequately monitored throughout the entire year and indeed, when carried out from one year to the next, throughout the entire learning history of each student. This type of attention to detail results in increased student achievement as well as increased professionalism of the entire staff as they come together in professional learning communities whose single goal is increased student achievement.
Therefore, curriculum alignment not only sounds like the right thing to do, it is the right thing to do if we want to increase student achievement.
It also is a powerful staff development tool. As everyone comes together in teams to unpack the standards and create common assessments, meaningful conversations occur. As the participants discuss ways to monitor student achievement, the seeds of collaboration begin to grow into professional learning communities that are dedicated to the principle that not only can all children learn but that all children will learn at our school—at our grade level—and most importantly in our classrooms. (PDF)
(Jessup, Sally. (2007). The Impact Curriculum Alignment on Student Achievement. The Educational Partners LLC. Online)
© 2007 The Educational Partners LLC