Curriculum Review for 2019-2020 Call for Committee Members

It is that time of year again, we will be planning and beginning our 18 month curriculum review cycle with a new content focus.  As you can all recall, last year we wrapped up the K-12 ELA review and are still in the process the of piloting ELA materials for K-5.  While continuing to conduct the pilot and make ELA decisions at the K-5 level this year, we will also begin a new review cycle.  This year we will focus our efforts for the curriculum review cycle on the following content areas:

K-5:
Grammar Study
Word Study
Cursive
Social Emotional Learning

6-12:
Math 

Being part of this curriculum review committee entails the following tasks:
-Participating in mapping of the units of study or continuum in the content area
-Vertical articulation meetings with content area job alikes
-Review of teaching tools to support the mapped units of study
-Co-drafting a proposal for funding for the Board of Education

This committee will kick off for the school year on September 30th with an all day meeting K-12 at Meredith.  The schedule for further meetings will be determined at our first meeting with teacher suggestions and input on the planning of the work time.  If you are interested in being a committee member please contact Sarah Mumm for K-5 and Patrick Raleigh for 6-12.  We strive to allow all volunteers to be part of the process, but at times due to difficulties getting subs for the work and trying to balance the allocated funding for paid curriculum hours, we do need to have staff that represent others and are not able to all participate.  Please let us know if you have an interest in this committee by September 9th so we may confirm with staff their participation.  We look forward to a great new year of dialogue and review. 

SIP Goals and Action plans

This year we will be maintaining our focus on proficiency-based progress.  The work we are doing with proficiency tables will help us continue to improve ours and our students’ ability to know what the focus of learning is and what the next steps in the learning process are.  While the proficiency tables do not need to be fully completed by the all-in goal completion date to achieve our goal this year, the work we will undertake to complete them will help us focus our thinking and provide more specific feedback.  As the proficiency tables are completed they will help hone our focus and feedback methods even further.  

We also wanted to maintain our focus on the learner profile this year.  However, we learned last year
that it is difficult to ask staff to fully maintain two goals of this magnitude.  We also learned that we
have some foundational work to do in order to ensure the learner profile is accessible and useful at all
levels.  For that reason, our administrative staff will be taking on this work as part of their
administrative goals. In each building, work will look different as we continue to support this tool and
its implementation in Kaneland.

The pathway for selecting goals this year is as follows (You need at least two growth goals for a
total of 30% of your formal evaluation per state law):

Goal 1:  15 %

Option A:  Select the district all-in goal.  Utilize the district planning and support structures
and adopt the district-wide benchmarks as your growth goals.  Provide as part of your goal
statement how you will individually support the attainment of this goal.  There will be a
mid-year check-in this year to ensure that our initial goals are attainable.

OptionB:  Complete the opt out form first.  Then create your own student growth goal either
as a job-alike team or an individual.

Goal 2:  15%

Option A:  As a job-alike team, align your goal to the work being done with the Learner Profile
by the administrative team.  Utilize the planning and preparation done by the administrative
team and adopt the district-wide benchmarks as your growth goals.  Provide as part of your
goal statement how your team plans to support the attainment of this goal.  There will be a
mid-year check-in this year to ensure that our initial goals are attainable.

Option B:  Create your own student growth goal either as a job-alike team or an individual.

Ed Services Honeycomb

We wanted to take a moment to share our constellation that will be our focus for the year from the Ed Services Department. Please note (as is our philosophy for personalized learning), this is not necessarily your constellation for the year. Our SIP goals and action plans will be discussed in a later post, but looking at our 2 focus cells, we want to continue to provide tailored feedback to our students. And the best way to do so is to have a deep understanding of our learners. Our district's philosophy is to provide opportunities to all of our learners to access information in a manner that is best for them. The professional development our office will be providing this year will focus on each of the yellow cells above. These connect what we know are research-based instructional practices according to John Hattie. Some of the highest indicators of student success are reflected in our work with proficiency tables (ex: teacher clarity- 0.75; feedback- 0.7; learning goals- 0.68). Our Learner Profile goal is supported in his research as well (ex: self-efficacy- 0.92; classroom discussion 0.82; reflection- 0.75; metacognition- 0.6) There is even more research to support our instructional honeycomb cells as well- self-reported grades (1.33) mastery grades (0.57), practice testing (0.54) all tie into our strategic plan and our work for this year!