In Service

As a coordinator for curriculum and staff development, I have the good fortune of working with many data-savvy administrators and teachers. Eager to uncover what the New York State Assessments truly demanded of students, and more importantly, determined to develop a common, deeply aligned curriculum that would produce results, this very group of educators challenged our team to lead the charge. This resulted in the Erie 1 BOCES English Language Arts Deep Curriculum Alignment Project.

The History of the Project

The call for the creation of a deeply aligned, regional English Language Arts curriculum came from various members of the Erie 1 BOCES Instructional Development Advisory Board. This board is compromised of district-level administrators who oversee the development of local curricula and Associate Superintendents for Instruction from across the region. The process itself was conceptualized by Fenwick English and Betty Steffy and illustrated in their book Deep Curriculum Alignment (Scarecrow Education Press, 2001). During the fall of 2005, members of the Instructional Development Advisory Board worked with Dr. Jan Jacob, a former Superintendent of Schools with extensive experience in the process, to better understand the benefits of working toward a deeply aligned curriculum and to define a concrete process for doing so.

Phase I of the Project: Defining and Unwrapping High Frequency Performance Indicators

One of the founding premises of Deep Curriculum Alignment lies in the understanding that written, taught, and tested curricula must be tightly aligned in order to best serve students. During Phase I of the project, approximately 100 teachers from the Erie 1 BOCES region and surrounding areas gathered together to learn more about the New York State English Language Arts assessments and standards. These teachers began by identifying which Performance Indicators were linked to “high frequency” items on the assessments, historically. As they studied the longitudinal trends in testing and uncovered those Performance Indicators that were tested most often, it became apparent that the identified skills were not arbitrary in nature. In fact, it became very clear to the teachers involved that the high frequency Performance Indicators were some of the more vital skills that all good teachers need students to become proficient in. During this phase of the project, teachers were also exposed to Douglas Reeve’s conception of Power Standards and challenged to understand how the high frequency Performance Indicators present on the New York State English Language Arts assessments might begin to help us define what is most vital in our own curriculum….not because it simply shows up on the assessment, but quite possibly because the assessment might actually be testing many of the skills and understandings that everyone agrees are most important.

Once the high frequency Performance Indicators were identified, teachers worked together to revisit and deconstruct the assessment items mapped to these Performance Indicators at grades 4, 8, and 11. At the conclusion of Phase I, teachers had a clearer understanding of the types of text that students were challenged to read (content), the manner in which questions were posed and responses were given (context), and the level of thinking that each item demanded (cognitive load). Most importantly, teachers uncovered a host of embedded literacy and thinking skills that students needed to have at their disposal in order to perform well on these items. In this way, simple Performance Indicators were unwrapped, and the complexity of the items and what they demanded of students was more specifically defined.

Phase II of the Project: Articulating a Scope and Sequence

Phase II of the project challenged teachers to revisit the high frequency Performance Indicators and those embedded literacy and thinking skills uncovered during Phase I. Working groups, compromised of K-12 teachers, defined a clear scope and sequence for these embedded skills, ensuring a type of precision alignment that would provide for effective scaffolding across all grade levels

Phase III of the Project: Creating a Deeply Aligned Curriculum

Phase III of the project will bring teachers back to the table to begin building grade level curriculum that is tightly aligned to the scope and sequence articulated in Phase II. Larry Ainsworth will be working with members of our group and our region as a whole to guide us in the development of common authentic, formative assessments at each grade level. This will provide educators across the region with essential pieces of curriculum that will help students perform well not only on the New York State Assessments, but in the classrooms they are trained in and the world that we will leave to them as well.

This final phase of the project will serve to demonstrate this group’s belief that preparing kids for New York State Assessments has little to do with skill review books and practice testing. Good test preparation looks like good instruction: it is engaging, creative, rigorous, and rich with varied opportunities for success.

Angela Stockman