The Power of Standards-Driven Units
Across the nation, districts are working to align the systems of curriculum, instruction, and assessment with supporting resources. The academic challenge for all districts rests in determining if curriculum is truly aligned to the state standards.
According to an EdNet Research survey of over 16,000 teachers and 1,500 school leaders, there’s a big difference between good intentions and actual outcomes when it comes to a shift to the new standards.1
72% of teachers believe their school is prepared to shift to the new standards.
Only 33% of teachers observed demonstrated even some of the shifts.
Results of a 2008 study on the Empirical Benchmarks for Interpreting Effect Sizes in Research reveal that an aligned curriculum has a larger impact on student achievement than the influence of a student’s home and a student’s school.
A Standards-Driven Curriculum
for Equity and Access
To solve today’s curriculum challenges, LSI has developed a comprehensive initiative to help districts across the nation to align, develop, and implement standards-driven curriculum.
We start by helping your district better understand its current state of curriculum, core teacher actions, and standards. We partner with your district to put new measures into practice and perform recurring checks to ensure successful implementation of the curriculum.
When these actions are realized, all students are provided equity and access to learning. Social and emotional learning is integrated into the learning process.
Seeing is Believing
The School District of Lancaster partnered with LSI to solve their curriculum challenges and create better alignment with their state standards. Once they began unpacking the standards, they knew their actions would improve their curriculum for years to come.
“I believe the work that we’re doing and the impact it will have on future years really is limitless.”
-- Dr. Carol Powell, Assistant Superintendent, Lancaster, PA
Training, Coaching, and Professional Development
Select a stakeholder group below to review workshops, training and coaching options.
Curriculum Needs Assessment
LSI will consult with district curriculum staff to analyze the current alignment of curriculum and resources to the non-negotiables from the research behind the College and Career Readiness Standards.
Standards Mapping
This session spans two days and allows the District Office Curriculum Team to work with LSI to map the content curriculum in preparation for Creating Standards-Driven Units.
The Development Team focuses on a district’s or school’s most critical needs first. This includes two PD sessions for the Development Team and School Leader Team and one PD session for the District Office Curriculum Team. Sessions are described in detail on the following pages.
3 Math Actions to Raise Student Achievement
This session focuses on the demands of math classroom actions and practices for State Standards. Participants learn strategies to ensure lesson plans and instructional techniques guide students to meet the full intent and rigor of the standards.
3 ELA Actions to Raise Student Achievement
This session focuses on the demands of ELA/Literacy classroom actions and practices for College and Career Readiness Standards Participants learn strategies to ensure lesson plans and instructional techniques guide students to meet the full intent and rigor of the standards.
Building Routines
This session explores how the 3 Core Actions require teaching and learning to transform and determine the non-negotiable instructional approaches for a classroom to build new routines for students to become successful.
Creating Standards-Based Units
These 3 day work sessions provides participants with training and support to build standards-driven units designed around the ELA or Math Core Actions, State Standards and newly established routines from previous training. Participants tie together their learning from previous sessions and co-develop a model curriculum unit that’s designed to fully address curriculum and learning gaps.
Reflection and Data Review
After teachers have implemented the newly developed pilot units, the Development Team reviews student evidence to reflect on unit implementation and outcomes. This includes successes, reflections based on evidence and areas for improving the developed units. Participants engage and receive structures and protocols to use when examining student work and results that can be replicated within Professional Learning Communities.
After a unit is developed, teachers can pilot units of instruction while the Development Team and School Leader Team are supported through coaching sessions to ensure teacher implementation.
Coaching Core Actions
This is an on-site coaching session led by an LSI staff developer to build the capacity of teacher leaders. Coaches will learn to recognize quality implementation and provide feedback on the Core Actions using LSI Growth Tracker. Teacher Leaders strengthen implementation through classroom visits and teacher feedback focused on the Core Actions. Data will be collected and shared with the school leadership team along with follow-up actions. Multiple Coaching for Implementation sessions are suggested for each PD day, with additional sessions available based on need.
Leading Core Actions
This session provides the vision and overall design of the curriculum alignment and development project. In this workshop, school leaders will learn how to support teachers, provide feedback on content, and practice during planned implementation of pilot classrooms.
Target and Task Alignment
In this workshop, leaders explore ways to provide content-specific feedback to support teachers in aligning student expectations with student evidence. They examine classroom examples, scenarios and artifacts to hone their skills in guiding standards-driven instruction.
Curriculum Diagnostic
School leaders conduct a Curriculum Diagnostic with LSI to observe instruction using the Core Actions and standards-based learning targets to task alignment as their guide. They determine the impact that implementation of standards-driven lessons and units have on instructional practice and provide opportunities for leaders to increase their ability to identify the instructional core practices and provide actionable feedback to participants of the piloted units.
Achieve your vision of student success.
Contact us to learn more about Creating Standards-Driven Units.
