The vertical progression guides are so critical to educators, not just language arts and mathematics, but they're critical to everyone because they show the levels of the students at each grade level within the same benchmark standard Indicator. Whatever you want to call them, they show differentiation. That's one of the key things is making sure that your classroom is differentiated and that you're showing and growth and you're showing improvement at all levels within your room with all your students. These vertical progression guys allow you to know where students are. Your target may be at this level but you have students below that and it gives you an opportunity to see “well where do I back down to what should they have known before they got to me and how can I make sure that they learn that information?”

On the other side of that, for our enrichment students are students who already know the information we know where they're going next and we can look at the far the progression guide and see what comes after the standard that I'm responsible for. We can move them further and further so that way we're meeting the needs of all the students in our classroom. I also think with the language arts vertical progression guide. It does show the speaking and listening standards and the literacy in reading and writing for technological subjects, history, social studies, and science and that's key for our other core subjects: to know how they're responsible for implementing and integrating literacy within the classroom. And it gives them a nice, organized way to find out what the responsibilities are. And again the differentiation levels of taking it one step further or backing down for those students who need the core, the foundation, before they move forward. When we got the vertical progression guide we took it back to our district. My curriculum coach and I met with teachers and they literally went through as they're breaking down the Common Core, they went through each standard and looked at what needed to be done or what the students needed to know coming into them with their grade level. I think it allowed them to see the expectations of before and after when they leave them. I believe that it allowed them to see the differentiation. You know we don't always target our highest-level kids and this allows them to see what is expected past their own classroom door. A s we continue to work with them with the new evaluation model, hopefully those teachers will be able to use those also when they create their SLO s and their pre and post assessments. And it will be a resource to them. That is something that we will be working on this year. It's very organized it's easy to follow, it's easy to read, it's all in one place. And it's an extremely valuable tool for any educator whether they're teaching language arts, science, social studies, math, it doesn't matter. It still focuses on those things they really need to make sure that their students are at the level they need to achieve.

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