The posts below are intended to make the work that I am facilitating relevant to Race to the the Top and specifically, the alignment of curricula to the Common Core Learning Standards, transparent for others. Doing so has enabled me to gain clarity and new perspectives from others who are on the ground and doing this work. They have significant expertise to share. Each week, this page will be updated as I share more of my process, the resources aligned to the work that I am doing, and what I am learning along the way.
If you are approaching similar work in your role as a teacher or facilitator, I’m eager to connect with you! Over the last few months, I’ve received invitations to collaborate with others in spaces beyond this blog, and I’m learning a great deal as a result. Please let me know if you’d like to add your voice to this conversation.
I began the work of Race to the Top by helping the teachers that I am working with define a vision for the graduate they hope to shape and the teacher they hope to become:
- It was important to me that everyone involved in our work treat Race to the Top as a means to those greater ideals, not an end unto itself.
- We began by Envisioning the Top
- Getting Race Ready involved conceptualizing our personal frameworks for professional practice and considering the positive influence that other frameworks might have on our own.
- We defined HOW we wanted to accomplish this work in addition to WHAT needed to be done.
- And in doing so, we realized how important it was to reflect, strategically plan, and attend to sustainability.
As each initiative has unfolded inside of the districts I am serving we’ve begun:
- Developing a Fluency with the Common Core Learning Standards
- This involves more than a perfunctory gap-analysis, and while unwrapping the standards can deepen our understanding of them, we’ve found that the timing of this work can have a significant influence on how valuable it becomes to teachers.
As a facilitator, one of my primary objectives is to help teachers work in ways that increase job satisfaction.
- Sharing protocols that enable teachers to align to their vision as well as the CCLS has been a critical part of this process.
- This involves fleecing out indicators of vision and thinking in bigger ways about standards, too.
Helping teachers design powerful standards-based learning experiences for students often compels us to do our own homework first:
- In each district that I am working in, educators are bringing the work of varied experts to the planning table. This enables us to identify research-based processes that might inform our own. I’ve made some recommendations here as well.
- Our work began with unit design, as it’s the intention of all of the groups that I am working with to fully align their entire curricula to the Common Core by the start of next school year. The design process enables us to think and plan in highly creative ways for certain, and I think this is critical. It also enables us to unwrap and align standards to an entire curricula with far deeper precision than other processes might allow for as well though. As unit frameworks are completed, teachers are becoming familiar with these critical instructional shifts and investigating how they might be attended to do best.
- Sizing up the staircase of complexity, helping learners approach critical thinking with complex text, and predicting where readers might struggle most has been an important part of learning and work together throughout the fall.
- As we begin implementing units aligned to the Common Core during the spring, we will rely on lesson study and instructional coaching in order to test, reflect on, and improve instructional practices.
