Curriculum Compacting
Curriculum Compacting
What is Curriculum Compacting?
Curriculum Compacting is an instructional technique that is specifically designed to make appropriate curricular adjustments for a variety of students within the same classroom. This involves:
defining the goals and standards covered in a unit
determining which students have already mastered standards within a unit, and
incorporating instructional options that enable a more challenging and productive use of the student’s time.
Depending on how students perform on each standard, they may be placed in a "cluster group" within their class, where they will work with students who have similar mastery.
What will day-to-day instruction look like?
Great question! This is the first year that we will be using this adopting this strategy in 6th grade science. As a result, there will many different ways to experiment with implementing Curriculum Compacting and subsequent cluster grouping. We appreciate your patience and constructive feedback as we working to refine this practice.
What are the benefits?
With curriculum compacting, students get credit for skills and concepts they already know, and therefore have time to work towards appropriate academic challenges that moves their learning forward.
Students and families will develop a better relationship with the learning process. Being smart is often conflated with not making mistakes and getting 100's on everything. This couldn't be further from the truth! ALL students should be making mistakes during the learning process; curriculum compacting ensures that students are given the opportunity to learn content and skills that challenge them and help them grow.
What changes might we see as a family as the result of curriculum compacting?
The families of students who often get 100's will likely see less grades in pupilpath, as well as fewer 100's on enrichment and accelerated work.
How will my child's marking period average (report cards) be affected by curriculum compacting?
Students will not be penalized for doing work that challenges them beyond grade level expectations.
Students will earn credit for mastery on different summative assessments (labs, tests, essays), and those grades will be used to determine marking period averages for the class.
How is there equity and access in this process?
ALL students are candidates for curriculum compacting
Students are evaluated using both formal and informal assessments that may include diagnostic tests, student self assessment, teacher interviews, IEP data, etc. These holistic assessment ensures that economically disadvantaged and linguistically diverse students have the opportunity to show mastery of science content and skills.
Students are evaluated on each standard (or "Performance Expectation") that will be covered in a unit . This means that students are not grouped for a whole unit, but rather have flexibility in what they are working on and who they are working with through the whole unit.
Cluster groups formed as a result of curriculum compacting do not work together everyday; there are many opportunities where all students are completing the same work as a whole class, and thus get to interact and learn alongside all of their peers.
This is NOT tracking! Tracking is the permanent placement of a student based on single criteria or test score. With curriculum compacting and cluster grouping, students of various levels are still in the same class.