Assistant Superintendent's Blog

The teachers and administrators have been working for the last year and a half on a process for aligning our curriculum kindergarten through 12th grade.  The process, called Power Standards, is a three-year endeavor that will result in a number of advantages for our students.

 

Our work began with the task of sorting through the state standards to identify those in which our students must be proficient; standards we would classify as priority, and this was done in all core and elective classes.  From there, teachers dug deeper into each standard to develop them further by capitalizing on opportunities to challenge our students into thinking beyond concrete levels.  We then worked on lesson plans that would require students to perform tasks throughout units of instruction that would reveal students' level of comprehension.  This year alone we have developed scoring guides, and and we are currently working on common assessments (tests) that will provide the data needed to help us make the decisions needed for appropriate instruction.

 

Recent state and local budget cuts will require us to pull back some on our process because it does come as a considerable expense to our district.  We will continue, however, and the last leg of the process will be professional development around data-driven decision making.  In the end, teachers will be better able to make informed decisions reguarding instructional strategies based on the individual needs of our students.  Additionally, our curriculum will transition much more smoothly from grade level to grade level.