Cape Girardeau schools aligning curricula throughout district

Cape Girardeau students completed a battery of benchmark tests last month.

Elementary students took tests to determine reading levels. Students in grades K-8 finished writing assessments. Teachers gave math pretests. They will continue to monitor students' reading levels through running records.

This is on a districtwide level. Data collected will be given to principals, who will in turn send it to Theresa Hinkebein, the district's curriculum coordinator. She will review and analyze the information. Because the tests themselves are the same, she can compare apples to apples and see teacher strengths and deficits. Hinkebein can then make suggestions to principals of teachers who may need professional development.

"I don't see it necessarily as a way to target people that aren't doing well. It's a way teachers can help each other," said Sydney Herbst, principal of Clippard Elementary.

There has been a push by administrators recently for uniform, common assessments districtwide. With No Child Left Behind's testing standards, gone are the days where teachers choose what they want to teach and how to assess mastery. State grade level expectations are used to create the curriculum and assessments are modeled on MAP, or Missouri Assessment Program, structures.

While teachers within individual Cape Girardeau schools may have taught the same topics or assessed students the same way, the idea has been expanded to include all schools. And while many of the common assessments have been around for years, the focus has been on not only using the common assessments to guide instruction but to also create curricula that align throughout a grade level and across grades.

While Hinkebein says she doesn't expect cookie-cutter schools, a fourth-grade class at one elementary school should be teaching generally the same topic at the same time as a fourth-grade class at another elementary school. Theoretically, students that move within the Cape Girardeau School District should be able to transfer from one school to another and pick up where they left off.

'On the same page'

At Franklin Elementary School, principal Rhonda Dunham estimates she has already received 50 transfer students this year. When a child transfers, their common assessments come with them, so the child can automatically be placed in reading groups and teachers can immediately identify special needs, Dunham said.

The method was beginning to be used last year, but this is the first year for schools to be completely aligned, she said.

"All students are now getting the same level of education and content. It shows that everyone needs to be on the same page. It's critical," Dunham said.

Vertical alignment, where what students are learning from one year to the next flows with ample time for review but no direct repetition, has also been stressed.

Before, teachers said, they didn't know what was being taught in previous years or how to build on a skill from one year to the next.

Becky Hicks, a second-grade teacher at Blanchard Elementary, helped develop a scope and sequence for math concepts this summer. A committee of 28 teachers and one principal gathered for two weeks to work on the math curriculum.

"High school teachers were saying 'You teach that? We didn't know you taught that. Why haven't our students mastered it when they come to us?'" Hicks said. "Before, there was a curriculum, but it wasn't cohesive."

Teachers on the curriculum committee began their process by initially looking over the state's prescribed Grade Level Expectations, or GLEs. They broke those broad GLEs into measurable objectives, and then compiled strategies for how to teach them and ways to assess.

For example, a second-grade math GLE is for students to read, write and compare numbers.

Teachers fleshed that out to an objective that students would be able to read and write whole numbers less than 1,000 and be able to round to the nearest 10. Students would learn this objective by creating an "I Can Count to 1,000" book and by using daily calendar activities to demonstrate place value.

Once the individual grade level curriculum was written, teachers met in increasingly expanded groups to ensure the curriculum was "articulate" from year to year.

"It's much more fluid," said Caroline Harper, a teacher at Blanchard Elementary.

Seven-year schedule

Subjects are on a seven-year rotation to be updated. A curriculum is written one year, textbooks are adopted over the summer, and the curriculum is implemented the following school year.

Math was implemented this year, while a foreign language curriculum is being written. In subsequent years, committees will look at fine arts, health, technology, communication arts, social studies and science before returning to math in 2014.

During textbook evaluation, Hinkebein stresses the books are merely a resource. "Teachers use the curriculum to guide the instruction, not the textbook. The textbook is there to support the curriculum," she said.

lbavolek@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 123