In Review: The Curriculum Audit

The Curriculum Audit as I described it included three steps:

• Identifying High Priority Standards by "testing" each for endurance, leverage, and readiness,
• Comparing High Priority Standards with our current curricula to identify what is essential, and
• Unpacking Essential Curriculum in terms of rigor, prerequisite skills, and other imporant aspects of learning design.

The Curriculum Audit is designed to help manage our curricula so that we can teach for depth rather than breadth.  Because what we are teaching is essential and supported by standards that have endurance, leverage, and readiness, students who demonstrate that they understand (versus just know a lot) will be able to transfer their understandings, knowledge, and skills to new, different, and potentially more challenging situations (like unfamiliar questions on a state test, for example).
In addition, these three steps are important content for valuable conversations among your colleagues.  There are several advantages to working on the work:

• Increased professionalism and colleagiality,
• Increased student achievement,
• Lower stress levels, and
• Improved teaching.

Your expertise is important in the process.  I trust what you know of your content and the methods of teaching that content.  There are several right answers, and your discussions, arduous and time consuming as they might be, are valuable and important.
Based on some excellent feedback and conversation with teachers, I would like to clarify a couple things as well:

1. Please try to let the templates work for you.  If you find that they are time consuming, counter-intuitive, or redundant, let me know, so we can work through it.  I trust your judgment, so if there is general consensus that standards meet all three tests, skip the explanations and work through either exceptions are where there is disagreement, for example. I appreciate everyone trying to work through the template exaclty how it was written, but in some cases it was more of a detriment than a support
2. All GLEs and relevant CCSS should be audited, particularly those that apply to the two units your department will be working on this year.  The entire curriculum should be audited as well.
3. Hold a flexible mindset, please, and be prepared to revise.  This work is recursive: we may return to other steps and other work as we learn so that we can continuously improve and as we learn more about our new state test in 2013-2014.

Some teachers have expressed anxiety over coding the Board-approved curriculum in such a way that not all of it is taught.  Just this week, John Simpson and I met, and he acknowledges your work as being a prototype for the kind of work he would like to facilitate in the district from his role.
Finally, I wonder if a timeline might be helpful.  I think it might be best if I met with each department, and we determined a timeline together.  The goal, overall, for the year is a curriculum audit and two drafts of unit plans by the end of the school year.  Keep moving through the process, and if you get stymied, please ask for help.
If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know how I can be supportive.

Curriculum Audit, Part 3: Unpacking Essential Curriculum

Having identified High Priority Standards that have leverage, endurance, and readiness and using these standards to identify Essential Curriculum, there is an important, albeit potentially time consuming, third step: Unpacking Essential Curriculum.  Working through this step now has several advantages because unpacking essential curriculum:

1. Anticipates other areas of knowledge or skills students may need to demonstrate understanding (this may help fill in gaps and will be useful when writing unit plans later),
2. Anticipates performance criteria (this will help when writing assessments for the essential curriculum you have identified), and
3. Anticipates interventions and extensions (this will help when planning for learning activities).

My suggestion is that you begin by working through the attached template, Unpacking Essential Curriculum, for the two units your department has chosen as a focus for this year's departmental curriculum work.  You will do this by answering the following questions:

1. Essential Curriculum: What in the curriculum is essential for students to learn as a part of this unit?
2. Rigor: What does proficient student work look like?
3. Prerequisite Skills: What prerequisite knowledge, skills, and understandings will students need in order to demonstrate proficiency with this standard?
4. Interventions: What will we do when students have not or are not learning what is prerequisite to demonstrating understanding?
5. Extensions: What will we do when students demonstrate that they already understand the essential curriculum?

It is important to unpack curriculum so departments can anticipate exactly what students need to learn in order to master what is essential. Answering the above questions and embedding those answers into unit plans can save time and energy as you re-think units and as you implement them in your classrooms.  Unpacking essential curriculum also creates a context for discussion and collaboration as you support one another with teaching, intervening, and extending on behalf of the essential curriculum you expect all students to learn and understand.
Thinking deeply about high priority standards, endurance, leverage, and readiness, and essential curriculum is to your benefit as a teacher and collaborator.  The process may seem daunting, but please trust the process, yourself, and your colleagues.
Let me know how I can be helpful to you.

Curriculum Audit: Part 2, Identifying Essential Curriculum

Identifying high priority standards for endurance, leverage, and readiness is an excellent way to keep us accountable to expectations beyond the district.  If the standards we identify have endurance, leverage, and readiness then they have the capacity to inform student learning in compelling and lasting ways.  Since we also have an obligation to the district, we must use the standards we have identified as high priority as a kind of code for our curriculum.  We must use this code to choose aspects of the curriculum that are the most engaging, coherent, and purposeful.
Part 2 of the audit is just three steps:

1. Identify high priority standards (see last week's blog),
2. Compare to your curriculum,
3. Organize essential curriculum into units.

To explain further:
If you list the high priority standards in one column, you can use a second column to connect those standards to language in your curriculum.  Click here for a template.  In my experience in Webster so far, I have found that our curricula are not written in a universal format and that many of them rely heavily on the GLEs.  You may find that some of the language is redundant.  Since you also examined common core standards and/or the standards from your professional discipline's organization, you may find that these do not connect with much (or with anything) in the district's curriculum.  This puts us in a difficult position; one that I will discuss with each of department on a case-by-case basis. If you find holes, missing information, or feel strongly as a department that certain things may need to be added, we can discuss this as well.
Once you have completed this exercise, you may wish to go back and code the rest of the curriculum, the curriculum that you did not list as essential, as either important or good to know.  You may find that you need some of this information later.
Finally, grouping essential curriculum into units may be a helpful final step in this process so that you can easily see how what you have chosen fits (or does not fit) together.
Once you have identified essential curriculum, you may want to get feedback.  I would recommend asking for feedback from the other grade-level represented in your discipline, from your currciculum coordinator, and/or from me or one of the other principals.  Sometimes it is good to ask for feedback from colleagues who are not in your same department.  If you are interested in this, I can help facilitate it.
Hopefully, once you have identified what is essential in your curriculum, you will feel like you have more time and/or can prepare better and/or be more flexible