School district, teachers plan new curriculum guidelines

MAT-SU -- Teeland Middle School hosted a curriculum work group with 52 teachers and a handful of administrative staff last week in an attempt to streamline and align the curriculum material some 900 teachers use across the district. The formation of the work group is a result of the curriculum management audit that the district participated in last December.

One of the findings of the audit, performed by Phi Delta Kappa, is that the current curriculum guidelines do not promote alignment, meaning the same things are not being taught at the same time throughout the district. This means some students may be learning at a slower rate, or, if they switch schools, may not learn about a particular subject at all.

The audit came up with nine recommendations to improve the curriculum used in the school district. One of those suggestions is to design a comprehensive curriculum management system to provide guidelines for education consistency and quality throughout all grade levels and schools. The audit also recommended a greater look at the student assessment and evaluation process.

To implement these recommendations, Connie Lutz, executive director of curriculum and assessment, decided to hold a week-long event for teachers to evaluate their own teaching processes, look to past teaching processes for inspiration, align curriculum planning to coincide with evaluation testing and develop documents that can help individual teachers plan out their year, providing information on was taught to his or her students the year before, and what the students are expected to know when they move to the next grade level.

"We are focusing on student learning, not just testing," Lutz said. "The [state mandated] test is one week out of an entire experience. It's good feedback, it produces a snapshot, but real feedback happens in the classroom with immediate assessment of what works best."

There are two types of testing the state uses to evaluate students: The TerraNova, a standardized test which compares individual students to the rest of the nation, and benchmark exams, which compare students to the standards created by educators across the state four years ago. Students first take the benchmark exam in their sophomore year of high school, and must pass the exam in order to graduate. They have until a year after graduation to pass the exam and receive their diploma.

Lutz emphasized that while tests play a role in this week's curriculum planning, the most important thing teachers can provide for students is to help them develop into productive citizens. Teachers cannot do this by just focusing on reading, writing and math, the subjects tested in the benchmark exams, Lutz said.

"If that [test-based curriculum planning] was the case, we'd only have two groups here, language and math," she said. "All of the other subjects being looked at here are not tested, but still an important aspect of curriculum."

Teachers ranging from grades kindergarten through 12 reviewed the curriculum for six subjects last week: Language arts, math, social studies, music, world language and health. Most teachers involved in the process described their attitude about the tools they are formulating as "fired up," "empowering" and "exciting." They said they are looking forward to the document that their work will produce for the upcoming school year.

"This is a living, breathing document," Lutz said. The evaluation process will be on a four-year cycle; each year educators will be able to tweak the document to better serve their needs, with a large review of the curriculum happening every four years. Each subject will have guidelines dubbed the "scope and sequence," which will precisely spell out what is taught in that subject area throughout K-12 grades. It will provide guidelines for when particular subject matter is introduced, when it is applied and when it should be mastered.

By looking at state standards and evaluating past teaching methods, educators this week are making across-the-board decisions on subjects such as when a student should first be introduced to finding the area of a triangle, when a student should learn about the past presidents and when a student should master cursive. By writing these into a universal guideline document, no student will miss learning about the presidents in third grade, no matter what elementary school they go to or transfer to in the district. All of the district's fourth-grade teachers will know their students have learned about the presidents the previous year.

The goal of aligning the curriculum, both vertically and horizontally, is a top priority in the school district, and Lutz says she feels the week's events have conquered many of the challenges of reaching that goal.

"I am here to help the teachers," she said. "We're doing a good job, but we want to do a great job. What a difference aligned curriculum will make."