Standard 2.6 Aligned to Standards
Standard 2.6: The institution implements a process to ensure the curriculum is aligned to standards and best practices.
Unpacking Standards and Aligning Curriculum
Several departments have been engaged in a multi-year process of unpacking their core standards in order to better align the learning in their classes to those standards. Linked here you will find a sample of this process, this one from the biology teachers. The teachers went through the core standards one at a time, drilling down into the wording, identifying how each standard reflects the three larger themes of the science curriculum, and ultimately creating an "I Can . . .' written objective for each standard. The second artifact here is a scope and sequence document created by the History department. These documents help guide the teachers and students in their learning. But perhaps the most valuable aspect of this process has been the work and discussion required to create the documents, the process.
Professional Learning Communities
PLC Meetings
At PHS we don't just do PLCs, we are a PLC. Every Monday the block of time from 1:45 to 3:00 PM is reserved for meeting in our professional learning communities for collaboration. Teachers group together, mainly within their departments to discuss student needs, align their curricula with each other and with the core standards, improve in their skill through sharing their practice and insights, and resolve miscellaneous concerns. Each department actively takes weekly notes in team meetings via an agenda, which allows teams to keep track of team norms, foster positive relationships among colleagues, and assist students. Here you will find a sample of such an agenda, this one from the English department.
Impact Teams
Over the past three years, Payson High has begun implementing specialized training for faculty teams based on the Impact Team Model which is designed to build team facilitation skills in order to better support student learning. This model focuses on unpacking standards to design effective formative tasks, extensive team analysis of the data gathered from these formative assessments, and redesigning these tasks to more effectively meet student learning needs. With the new school administration this year, no new training has been added for the departments that have started this Impact Team journey, but those teachers continue to apply the model in their PLC meetings.
Student Self-Evaluation Rubrics
Based on the Impact Team Model (see above), faculty teams have worked to develop departmental rubrics based around shared tasks that can be used by collaborative teams to identify students’ levels of understanding on these tasks. Data from these rubrics allows teachers to quickly identify to what degree students are able to demonstrate evidence of learning and which concepts may need further explanation while also allowing students to gauge their own understanding of concepts as they provide feedback to their teachers.
