Around the United States, school districts are learning that banding together to write standards-based curriculum and assessments can be a powerful force for change. Although the prospect of coordinating different district staffs might seem to be an invitation for headaches and divisiveness, the standards serve as a unifying force, say educators taking part in collaboration.
Education consultant Jay McTighe, coauthor with Grant Wiggins of the curriculum and assessment design book Understanding by Design, says that districts are turning to each other in an effort to increase the quality of their curriculum through a mutual vetting process.
"In small districts, curriculum might reflect the limited experiences of a few people. Even in large districts, where you may have a deeper pool of experience, curriculum may not necessarily be of the highest quality because it doesn't get a critical review. The feeling in that case is ‘We worked hard on it, it must be good,’" McTighe suggests.
For districts that venture across boundaries, the collaborative process has turned into a high-level professional development tool that brings the top teachers together to reflect on their practice as they help to redefine curriculum in a new era of adherence to standards.
Standards Are the Glue
In Connecticut, fostering collaboration among 35 districts around Hartford began with seed money from the Goals 2000 initiative. After studying other models, that state's Capitol Region Education Council (CREC) Understanding by Design Consortium chose the "backward mapping" model from Understanding by Design, says Diane Ullman, assistant executive director of CREC. This curriculum alignment process first determines the learning priorities found in the standards and assessments and then develops curriculum based on those.
"The standards and the assessments are the glue that hold us together because we are all responsible to them," Ullman says.
As with similar consortiums, Hartford area districts pay an annual membership fee to cover the cost of holding workshops, which take place throughout the year.
Meanwhile, Pattonville School District outside St. Louis, Mo., received a five-year state grant to run an institute to develop performance assessments. During the summer, teachers from districts around the state spent up to 10 days working together on performance assessments for subject areas across the K–12 spectrum. Assessments are then made available on the Internet to the state's 500 school districts.
Known as the Show-Me Classroom Performance Assessment Project, teachers involved in it have one slight advantage: Missouri has boiled all subject area guidelines down to a total of 73 standards, including process standards, such as writing to communicate ideas or mastering steps to an investigation, says Mike Fulton, assistant superintendent for planning and assessment in Pattonville School District.
Districts taking part in the project also tie assessments to Missouri's set of complex reasoning processes, such as induction, deduction, and analyzing perspectives.
The format of the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), which tests elementary and secondary students in various combinations of math, science, social studies, and English, also shapes performance assessments. Pattonville teachers now include MAP-like performance assessment benchmarks twice a year to make sure they're on track with meeting standards.
The result is that teachers are designing curriculum that is more demanding, says Fulton. "Teachers come from very different districts, but all leave having the goal that their students can do higher level work," he says.
DeAun Blumberg agrees. "You have a tendency to have blinders on and think, ‘My kids can only do X.’ When you see what other teachers are doing, you're challenged to set higher goals for your students," says the 7th grade communication arts teacher at Holman Middle School.
High-Level Professional Development
"Curriculum is always better when you have well-intentioned and highly qualified experts working together," observes Virginia Horowitz, a coordinator for San Diego County's Standards in Action Project.
As part of that project, Jennifer Gastauer, a science teacher at Valley Middle School in Carlsbad, Calif., paired up with a science teacher in another district to develop a 7th grade unit on the cell.
For Gastauer, challenges to collaboration included coordinating meeting times and reconciling the differences between textbooks from various districts.
"It was hard to see what information coincided and what information could be thrown out" of science textbooks as she and her partner focused on the main concepts to teach about the cell, Gastauer says.
But the benefits included the chance to exchange resources and talk about opportunities to differentiate lessons, says Gastauer.
Any collaborative work within the district is also shared at the county level, according to Sue Bentley, assistant superintendent for instruction in Carlsbad.
Carlsbad's 6th grade teachers, for example, are setting up their own priority standards based on high school exit standards. Teachers work together to find connections between similar standards at each grade level and derive benchmark assessments from their collective understanding of "basic," "proficient," and "advanced" levels of attaining a standard. Carlsbad teachers who together are attempting to align the curriculum across grade levels and across subject areas bring their experiences to the countywide Standards in Action Project, allowing for greater dissemination of ideas among other districts.
"Collaboration is the highest form of professional development," Bentley says. "Active engagement and reflective peer coaching" are helping teachers construct what's important to learn, even if it means redefining benchmarks, she adds.
Extending Limited Resources
But getting people together to essentially design by committee isn't necessarily an easy task because of time constraints and logistical challenges. But there are ways to encourage school districts to collaborate on curriculum alignment: In Idaho, districts that collaborate are awarded a $2,500 bonus. That by itself may not seem like a lot of money, but when pooled, the total sum can be used more effectively for organizing regional workshops.
"We are appealing to the districts that are out front to become the hub of a consortium in their region and share curriculum with other districts," says Carolyn Mauer, chief of curriculum and accountability for Idaho's Department of Education.
Twenty-three districts representing 34,000 students joined a consortium in the eastern part of the state. The effort was led by the Idaho Falls school district, which won a multimillion-dollar grant to support curriculum alignment.
"Idaho Falls has been aggressive in aligning curriculum and assessment. Having that advantage, we feel it's our obligation to share the information, especially with smaller districts which don't have curriculum development staff and resources," says Craig Ashton, supervisor of curriculum.
Candis Donicht, superintendent for Salmon School District, which serves 1,000 students, believes Idaho Falls has propelled her own district forward in using the Idaho Achievement Standards.
"We have the benefit of all the hours Idaho Falls put into aligning curriculum with the standards," Donicht says. Now her teachers are ready to begin deep alignment as they map out the curriculum for the next school year, she adds.
At the same time, school and district administrators admit the work of curriculum alignment is challenging and ongoing.
"We're very aware of this term called ‘initiative fatigue.’ We're just overwhelmed because we're overhauling the plane as we're flying it," says Donicht. But adding curriculum alignment to all the school reforms of the 1990s, she insists, makes the compounded efforts a worthy endeavor. "Eight years later," says Donicht, "it's all making sense."
Resources
Resources
ASCD's Understanding by Design Exchange
Educators interested in collaborative resources to aid in curriculum and assessment planning can learn more from the Understanding by Design Exchange (http://www.ubdexchange.org), a subscription-based service that builds on the ASCD book Understanding by Design and related publications. The UbD Exchange offers an electronic template for unit design, short tutorials, and self-checks to guide curriculum designers. Curriculum units posted to a searchable database can be reviewed by subscribers and UbD experts, and an interactive forum allows users to send questions to Understanding by Design authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. Check out the Web site for further information, or e-mail Sally Chapman at ASCD, schapman@ascd.org.
