Lisa DiGaudio, Principal New Dawn Charter High School
It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about the Common Core, and I’m sure many of you are sick of hearing about it anyway. It’s a good time now that we’re coming up on the end of the first semester that we take stock on where we are going. I thought it would be good to talk about a few elements of dealing with the Common Core: alignment and units of instruction, creating the Student Learning Objective (SLO), establishing HEDI criteria and how on earth high schools are supposed to find growth just using the Regents exams! I’m sure we can go on and on about SLO’s and HEDI for the next decade, but the focus will be more on how exactly we are going to get this done in high school.
So let’s talk about unit alignment to the Common Core and what that means for training staff. I spent most of the summer with the staff going over the big points of the Common Core, mainly focusing on the shifts that are appropriate to all of my content areas. This included “stretching” reading levels, showing evidence in responses, building lessons that are accessible to all students, and incorporating rigor into all activities for all students. You certainly can’t juggle all of those balls at once, but using the tri-state rubric has been and will continue to be helpful when our peer review sessions get up and running at the start of the New Year. The reason why the Tri-State rubric has been helpful is that it includes all of the elements that our lessons and unit plans should include that ensure rigor is a part of our plans in the classroom. By establishing peer review, we can also work toward incorporating more of the texts that are being recommended by the state and using them in multiple content areas.
Our curriculum mapping system is another component that also allows us to review and reflect on the lesson plans that are being created in response to the scope and sequence we created at the beginning of the school year. As we approach a new semester, we can make changes to lesson plans and use the software as a museum that showcases the best and worst of what we are trying to accomplish within the Common Core. Constant review and reflection, along with training, will be very helpful in attaining our goals to decent curriculum plans that reflect all of the elements of Tri-State rubric and hopefully continue to improve student outcomes.
So how are you all doing establishing student learning objectives? The feedback that I hear from other schools and educators varies in implementation. It seems that some schools are developing SLO's for each student in each subject (which is a tremendous amount of work). Some schools are having each classroom have an SLO that reflects on the growth of the whole class, not individual students, and other schools aren’t doing it at all. To be honest, you can do more of the reading on the EngageNY site, but the guidance for individual schools goes right back to school and district leadership. This is all new, and for many schools a hardship to aptly establish. You should definitely connect with groups of schools that are similar to yours and share best practices if you are able to do that. It is definitely helpful to work with other schools and stay connected to the guidance from the Engage site.
In tandem with setting your SLO’s is establishing HEDI criteria. What does HEDI stand for you ask? High Effective, Effective, Developing, Ineffective as designated by the overall growth a teacher is able to affect from a class of students over the course of a school year. One of the biggest issues with establishing HEDI criteria for high schools in particular is the issue of Value Added. Regents exams cannot show growth. Students take one Regents exam in ELA. How can growth be shown in the assessment when students only take it one time in their high school careers? The issue of growth can be argued in the Math regents exams as well, as Algebra and Geometry test different skills, and the same with Science and Social Studies. Using “approved” alternative assessments like Scantron or TerraNova is expensive, in purchasing and in scoring options. You can see a list of the approved assessments at NYSED.gov.
There is much to be done with Common Core alignment, training, and then finding the right assessments to calculate growth for the RTTT funding. If and when PARCC gets approved and mandated as an assessment, we will be faced with an even greater issue: finding computers and affordable bandwidth to conduct the assessments. We will have many roadblocks in front of us in getting all of these elements right and strengthening our curriculum, and using assessments in an appropriate way to measure growth. Our best bet is to establish groups to talk with and collaborate with on best practices, open the conversations on good teaching and lesson planning and share our tools in forums like this blog. We can get there, meaning get there in raising the rigor bar for all of our students, but it will take time to establish the “right stuff” to be our framework for improving student outcomes that last beyond a state approved test.
The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.
