It was the second week after school let out and it was already hot. Thank goodness we were working at Lucille Erwin and they were kind enough to crank up the AC because 87 of our middle school language arts, math, gifted and talented, English language acquisition, special education and media librarian teachers worked three days straight to:
- Analyze all the new Common Core math and language arts standards
- Create a universal scope and sequence 6-8
- Engage in the process of creating standards-based units of practice using the principles of Understanding by Design
The Process
The Products
During the institute, all the work products were linked to the Curriculum & Instruction Wikispace. They became immediately available to all the teachers who were going to continue the curriculum work independently over the summer and into the fall. These documents can be found at the wikispace and form these links individually:
We are very grateful to have been awarded a Recruitment and Retention Teacher Grant from the Colorado Department of Education. These funds were used exclusively to support this work and a few snacks.
The Next Steps
When math and language arts teachers return in the fall, they should be ready to begin working with their units of study. They will use their district Wednesday professional development time to calibrate their thinking relative to the scope and sequence, units of practice, and student evidence of success. My hope is that we use that time to analyze student work samples taken from Stage 2 in their unit plans. Another area for future collaboration is in the construct of scoring rubrics related to the criteria of success. Some groups were able to start working in this area, some will get to it during this fall. Having a strong shared schema across our district for what mastery looks like will be a definite leverage in our standards transformation work.
All the handouts, slides, and resources from the the Mapping Institute can be found on our Curriculum & Instruction Wikispace.
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Since this original posting, new material has been released from CPM. I highly recommend that our math teachers become familiar with these documents in order to support their teaching of the new state math standards. We will be discussing our approach to using our scope and sequence and the supplementary materials as a district, but I expect that schools will be having these conversations as well. It is important that we are well informed, prepared, and confident in our transition to the new common core.
CPM Website - How to Supplement Current CPM Texts
