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Working with districts over the past 15 years to write and implement a balanced curriculum has been a wonderful experience; especially as so many of the districts that I worked with saw their student achievement improve (Squires, 2013). Now, thousands of students are getting better results because the curriculum was developed and well implemented using the Balanced Curriculum model. As is evident by the chapters about other school districts, the balanced curriculum is not the only way to get improvement, as the districts highlighted in this book also used curriculum as a framework for improving achievement. In this chapter I will highlight lessons learned along the way about developing and implementing curriculum. Using ideas described in chapter 6, we will highlight what major roles need to know and be able to do in planning, developing and implementing curriculum. For those with experience of working within a district, this will give one model to compare your district's curriculum writing and implementation efforts. We begin by dividing the effort into three areas: planning, writing, and implementing curriculum. To plan, we create a planning team to guide the process of writing and implementing curriculum. We don't separate curriculum writing from curriculum implementation because how the curriculum is implemented will, in part, depend on how the curriculum was written. We believe that such curriculum development and implementation has the potential to last over several years, and we believe that such an effort needs people who can stay the course over those years, so the effort is not wasted. © 2014 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.
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In reading through the district stories about using curriculum as a framework for improvement, many innovations were interwoven into ancillary efforts for curriculum development. As these are part of the stories of district curriculum development, we thought that discussions of these "ancillary efforts" were important. The innovations considered in this chapter are: Power standards, Professional learning communities, Common assessments, Data-driven decision making, and Walk-through's. We will consider these as if they were being implemented alone, and assess their power to produce student achievement gains using the ASIA framework. References to the district stories will be given. © 2014 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.
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A curriculum is not known to improve academic achievements. This book offers case studies of three Connecticut districts of high, medium and low socio-economic status, three districts from a national sample that won the prestigious Booker prize mainly representing low SES districts, and 10 districts that have implemented a Balanced Curriculum with a sample of various SES districts from high to low. All of them have used their curriculum as the vehicle toward improved achievements. The districts studied have four common themes, represented by the acronym "ASIA", for Alignment, Structure and Stability, Implementation and Infrastructure, and Assessment. All districts aligned their curriculum to state standards and assessments. They had a structure for the curriculum and had stability at the superintendent's position. The districts applied a lot of effort and attained results from implementing the curriculum and developing the infrastructure to support implementation, and they finally incorporated frequent district-wide assessments into their design. The book documents the subsets of these four areas that were present in most districts that might help other districts to replicate the findings. Research in the four areas is also documented. This book demonstrates through the case studies that it is possible to use curriculum as a framework for raising test scores. This is not normally thought of as a path to improved achievements. The fact that districts from a wide range of socio-economic statuses have used their curriculum to improve achievements demonstrates that a wider application of this direction could yield positive results for other districts. © 2014 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.