Unity of Purpose in Our Practices

Here in the Department of Teaching and Learning, in collaboration with our system-wide committees, we have been putting a lot of thought into making our curriculum, assessment, and data team practices more unified.  Our goal is to provide teachers and students with a sense of purpose and rhythm as they progress through the year's curriculum.  To this end, we have begun to restructure how our curriculum documents and assessment documents function and the schedule on which they will be implemented.  The objective is to make our CFAs, benchmarks, and curriculum documents all synchronize with the data team process.  Below you'll find a few documents that explain what we're working on.

Because our data team schedule is roughly based on calendar months, we'll be reorganizing our curriculum pacing guides to align with this.  In order to do this, we studied how many "instructional days" are in each month for the coming school year.  We defined an instructional day as a day in which teaching time was available.  In other words, an early-release school day equals approximately 0.5 of an instructional day.  This was enlightening to see how different the months can be in this respect:  Analysis document at this LINK.

We want to ensure that teachers, students, and parents can easily understand they ways in which CFAs help to guide and assess learning.  We also want to have a clear and simple connection between CFAs and benchmark assessments - showing that CFAs are the discrete building blocks upon which the benchmarks are built.  To this work, we've added a new and exciting grade-level capstone assessment.  Our district improvement plan states that we should be doing regular performance assessments, but it has been unclear how to implement this without taking away large amounts of instructional time.  We will begin to develop interdisciplinary performance assessments for each grade/content area.  Students will be asked to integrate the learning from a year's study to demonstrate that they have internalized the curriculum.  A conceptual model of how all of this will work together is available HERE.

Another exciting development is our continued growth in the implementation of instructional data teams.  We believe that, in a gradual-release model, Ansonia teachers are ready to move to the "we do" stage of implementing data teams.  By this we mean that we have the talent and are ready to take on more responsibility for facilitating our own meetings.  Our colleagues from ACES have been instrumental in our growth in this area.  Now it's time for us to take on the reins with continued support from ACES.  THIS document explains our plan for 2011-2012.