Good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to our Tuesday,
October 12th Curriculum Council meeting.
I'm excited to welcome everybody and our new
citizen advisors.
It's we're very, very happy to have you here with us.
And we'll start out with a with a roll call and introduction.
If everyone could say your name and who you are, and
if you're a teacher, please say what you teach and what building you teach in.
And we'll start with the folks here in person.
I'm Stacey Windsor, the superintendent at Derry Township School
District.
I am Erin Shuman.
I'm assistant to the superintendent at Derry Township School District.
I serve as a
mike.
Sorry, Mike Rizzo.
I am a board member. Thank you.
Kip Shore, School Board member.
Donna Cronin.
School board member and parent of a current sophomore.
Thank you.
And Dr. Cronin is our co-chair. For
the school board.
And so, again, if we could
begin with our Linda,
you are one of our new citizen advisors, if you could begin.
And then I'll just call out your names as I go across,
because I know that everybody shows up in a different order on everyone's screen.
Sure.
My name is Lindsey Cook and I am a new citizen advisor.
So thank you. It's nice to be here.
Thank you. We're happy to have you.
Laura.
Hi. I'm Laura Alexander.
I'm a third grade teacher over the elementary school.
Thank you. And, Jordan, welcome.
Hi, everybody.
Jordan Yeagley along with Lindsey.
I'm the new citizen advisor.
Nice to see you.
Wonderful to have you here. Thank you.
Mr. Valentin.
Hi. I'm Eric Fountain, the middle school principal.
Thank you.
And Christine.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Christine Hicks, and I'm a fifth grade teacher at the elementary school.
Thank you.
Jessica.
There's some funky going on there.
That is Jessica and Cherry.
And she. Is.
Is head teacher and health teacher at the high school.
I don't know why we can't hear you,
Mr. Knowles.
Greg Knowles, Middle School, Spanish.
Thank you.
And Sheri.
I'm Sherri Stuckey.
I teach high school English, and I'm the English department chair.
Thank you.
And Mrs. Funk,
Jennifer Kim, the elementary principal.
Thank you.
And Mrs.
Landry.
Hi. My name is Tracy Landry,
and I'm the director of Professional Learning and Innovation.
Thank you.
And Lisa,
as far.
You're able to unmute
or she can't hear me.
One of our student representatives is Lisa Wong,
and she is a
senior, I believe this year.
I'm not sure what's happening there.
And Hanna.
I'm Hannah Goldman,
the city representative, and I'm a junior this year.
Thank you.
And Mrs.
Gogol. Hi, everybody. I'm Anika.
Well, I'm one of the elementary assistant principals.
And Mrs.
Moreland.
Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Sun Mullins, and I'm a citizen advisor.
I've been an advisor since 2020 and I am a parent of a junior
in high school.
Thank you so much, everyone.
Very happy to have you all here.
We do have our agenda isn't super long,
but it does have several items that
we're going to work through together.
And the first piece is our
need for curriculum.
And I wanted to go through this presentation today because we are
we're welcoming new citizen advisors.
We're welcoming Dr.
Schuman as the new leader of curriculum Council
and wanted to take the opportunity to walk us through
what curriculum is and
why it's important and how we
how we address it here in Derry Township.
So I'm going to go up to this microphone and let you
And just so you're all aware,
this is also a presentation that we do with all brand new teachers
as we introduce our processes
here at the District.
So, Dr. Shuman.
If you could move us forward.
Stacy, just I'm sorry
that Kathy Seger is in the chat.
She's saying that she is here, She has a school board member.
And just to announce for the board minutes.
So wonderful. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Mrs. Seger, I apologize.
Is there anyone else?
That's okay. Thanks.
Thank you.
So the first question we always ask is, do we need curriculum
that all teachers teach to?
And when
we're considering that question, the next. One.
We ask ourselves and we think about these pieces.
If it doesn't make any difference whether children learn or not,
or if any learning is an acceptable measure of learning,
then you do not need a written set of curriculum.
Student objectives.
However,
if is it expected that all children will learn, and here
at Derry Township, that is the expectation and that there is a standard
for what is to be learned, which we also know is the case.
Then a written curriculum is absolutely needed
and there are significant parts to what curriculum must do in schools.
The first is to focus,
and that's identifying what is essential and significant.
This is the major work of our policy groups
and our teachers when they're working in their collaborative teams to make sure
that everybody is agreeing upon what is essential and significant.
And the reason that that is so important
is because it the state gives us so many standards
that is impossible to cover all of them
with a great level of depth and clarity.
And so we do not want individuals deciding
what is important and what is not important.
We have to agree on what is essential and significant together so that children
are going through our system, having the same educational opportunities.
It is
also to connect, to reinforce complex learning, leading to mastery
within and across grade levels and schools.
And finally, it is for equity to ensure
that every student has access to the curriculum, which is their right
when they walk through our doors in a public school institution.
So there are pieces in our system that are tightly held, meaning
that they are systems based and directed from the district level.
The ends, our mission,
the goals, standards and priorities,
student objectives and student assessment assessments are all tightly held.
These are systems based pieces
that are essential to curriculum development
and that teachers don't get to decide all by themselves.
They are part of the decision making process,
but it is not hang out a shingle.
And you know, I have an independent thing going on here in my classroom.
Things that are loosely held are the means.
So what tools are you using?
You're using whiteboards for this today?
Are you using what are you using for instruction?
The strategies groupings, staffing school based is
is staffing the processes and the resources.
We do have resources
that are district approved and board approved.
However, teachers also have a wide range of resources that are available
to them to bring in and use for students that are in front of them.
So these pieces are loosely held.
They can be more individual and that's where teachers bring in their art.
So the rationale for deep curriculum alignment
is to change the opportunity structure that consistently favors
a certain cultural subset of students and schools.
And by changing that opportunity structure,
a level playing field is created so that all children can succeed.
And the default
factors of race, gender and socioeconomic
status are eroded and are raised as predictors of achievement.
This is a huge piece of what we do.
It is what brought me into curriculum work
to begin with many, many, many, many years ago.
It's what spoke to my heart for what kids need
and for why we're here at schools doing what we do in public
education.
There are three components of curriculum.
Here are three components that we're working with. Whenever
we're planning, there's the curriculum, which is the plan for the work.
There's the instruction, which is the work itself,
and there's the assessment, which is the measure of the work.
Whenever you're looking at those components,
what you're looking at is or looking for is alignment.
You can go ahead and forward.
So when when there is no alignment,
you often get structures that look like this
where you might have a written curriculum that is taught with fidelity,
but then something completely different is being assessed.
And when the pieces first came out in the mid-nineties, that's what was happening.
It was curriculum was written, teachers were teaching to it.
And then this assessment came out of nowhere
that students were supposed to be doing well, and
nobody had ever seen it before, didn't know what it was.
Kids bombed it all over the place,
but it was because that alignment was not there.
Sometimes you have a beautifully written curriculum that sits on a shelf
and people just teach to the assessment,
some bad to teach to the assessment.
But you're missing
a whole lot of opportunities if that's the only thing that you're doing.
And then sometimes you have a very well aligned
written curriculum or an assessment,
but then someone's over here left field
teaching dinosaurs, which has nothing to do
with the written or assessed curriculum.
And it's when someone kind of goes rogue
with whatever it is that they're teaching, they you really have equity issues.
Also, you know, someone just doesn't like fractions in third grade and they decide.
There's. Skimp on that part.
You've just really wrecked
the learning experience for that whole group of students and
and that's wrong and that's what written curriculum works to avoid.
So what we want to see instead
is this type of curriculum alignment
where you will never, ever, ever be able to assess everything that it's taught.
So you're assessing what you have agreed upon as essential.
Your written curriculum
is what you have all agreed you will teach.
And we work on a 180 rule whenever we're designing curriculum.
And that means that everybody agrees that they will teach 100%
of the written curriculum.
But you only write it to take 80% of the time,
because there will always be interruptions, there
will always be fire drills, there will always be something unexpected.
And there's also always going to be teachable moments.
And you want to have the opportunity for that.
You might want to have the opportunity
for Genius Hour to let students explore a topic of interest.
So you want to make sure that you're hitting that written curriculum
while leaving some time for some of those extras.
And. For the disruptions.
Because it's both.
And you will always hopefully teach
more than is written or assessed.
And that is because you have a room full of young humans in front of you
that come in and ask you questions
and that you might want to expand upon and that you might want to talk about.
Or there could be a current event that you want
to bring into your classroom discussion.
So hopefully you will always be teaching or at least a little bit more
than what is written and assessed
without alignment.
Student and community demographics
will continue to be the largest predictors of student test results.
We've known this for a very long time.
This this sentence is from research
from Edward Thorndike in 1951
and some additional pieces of
of research.
Robinson and Brandon in 1994
coined the term cultural capital for variables that predict
student achievement, education of the parents, number of parents at home,
the type of community and the poverty rate in that community.
These things
all, like I said, are called cultural capital, which refers
to the uneven distribution of selected cultural content and linguistic patterns.
Vocabulary, which identifies social classes across our country.
Cultural capital is an expression
of the educational level of parents and the community
and schools have a tendency to center or value some cultural capital
while centering or marginalizing others, and children
with little of the cultural capital, the culturally or sometimes penalized
for the differences, and are often identified for special education services.
Not because they're not able, but because they come to schools
with less background knowledge.
That is something that here in Hershey we really have to watch out for.
We're used to students
coming to us with an extensive amount of background knowledge and
that is not always the case when students are coming from a demographic that is
on the lower socioeconomic level.
So we have to be careful not to categorize that as ability.
They're very different things.
And there's a great story that I that I love from the
the person that I am kind of consider my guru as far as curriculum is concerned.
His name is done with English.
He has written several books with his wife, Betty Stuffy.
They began publishing on curriculum in the seventies
and he tells a story
of taking his family,
children, grandchildren to NASA in Houston,
getting there.
And turns out at the time it was like $15 a person to get in
and they thought it was free when they went.
And he looked at his wife, Betty, and was like.
Well.
What are we going to do?
And she was like, You're going to get out your credit card
and take your family to NASA like you said you were going to.
And I love that story because they were able to do that.
And when those grandchildren get to see that kind of science
close up, that creates all kinds of
cognitive connections that some other family
who might have gone and been like, oh, now we can't go,
we can't afford this.
And I will tell you that when I was a young mother
and I learned about cultural capital,
I made sure that I dragged my kids to every museum I could get them to
because it matters.
But as a school district,
we cannot rely on cultural capital for our kids education.
We have to make sure that everybody has an equal opportunity to learn from us.
And that cultural capital is not the thing that is determining
whether or not a student is successful.
It's just some additional research
telling us the same things
because one
that was specifically focused on race.
The next one is my favorite.
Last question about that, of course.
So how do you how do you deal with that?
Because you can't keep people from gaining some social capital.
But the school can't also
provide a lot of that.
So how do you.
So one of the things that we do that I think is
really, really important is we still do field trips
and not all children get to go on field trips or go
to see the places that we take kids to if if we weren't doing it.
So that's one way.
This is my favorite piece of research that actually addresses that question.
So whenever you have a well aligned curriculum,
it erases
those differences.
So making sure that all students had
equitable access to the curriculum, that nobody was skipping anything,
that nobody was, you know,
not taking the time to make sure that kids were reaching mastery,
making sure that all kids had access to the curriculum, eliminated
the socioeconomic status, race, gender
and school size differences.
But that's just the educational component.
It's not the cultural capital component, because that.
Cultural capital leads to differences.
Here in education, We don't want cultural capital to be
the thing that determines whether or not you get an A, B, C, or D in class.
We want what we are delivering as instruction
and in that curriculum to be the thing that determines your success.
So that makes sense.
Yes, but I'm just trying to figure out how you get there.
Is that because you are assessing people based on what we teach you,
not what you learn here on the outside for you mean okay.
Correct. Exactly.
Making people you're not relying on outside.
Exactly.
Experiences to exact students. Exactly.
That's
exactly.
And in her summary, Ms..
Mitchell said there were desirable gains despite the traditional predictors of poor
student achievement, which is low socioeconomic status,
being black, being male and learning in a school with over 800 children,
curriculum line alignment is a flagship of hope
as it emerges as the instructional equalizer.
So there are four essential questions that we ask ourselves when we're
designing curriculum or when we're working with curriculum and reviewing it.
The first is design.
Do we have it? Does it even exist?
And many of us here in the room and online remember days
in the early 2000, late 1990s, we didn't have it.
Every your textbook was the curriculum.
And that created a boatload of inequities because teachers had way too much
individual determination of what was happening and not happening in classrooms.
And I know
when I first came into my leadership role as a social studies coordinator
that getting elementary teachers
to stop teaching pilgrims over and over
and over and over again was one of my most difficult tasks.
Not that learning about the Pilgrims isn't fun and like part of history, but
they were spending massive amounts of time on it and skipping, you know, geography.
These are the.
Seven continents and the oceans around the world weren't getting to those things
because pilgrims were fun.
So moving beyond fun
to essential was always a task.
And design helped us to start getting those pieces in place.
Analysis is the next part.
Is it any good?
Do people follow it?
Is it is it usable or is it just sitting on a shelf gathering dust
delivery?
Are we using it?
If it's not any good, we're not going to use it.
What I see is that our teachers do use our curriculum regularly
and I'm able to monitor that through our curriculum management system.
Dr. Shuman is now able to monitor that
through our curriculum management system.
And then did it make a difference?
Is it actually helping students to achieve?
And I always like to say it's all about curriculum.
This is what we do.
This is the work of a school district.
This is this is the learning.
This is what's happening in classrooms.
It impacts professional learning.
Our professional learning is provided to impact student achievement.
It's not just for
personal growth and development, which hopefully it's also doing that.
But the idea is that what we're doing impacts student achievement
and it's done by providing better access to the curriculum.
For example, literacy skills.
And then assessment
is evaluation of whether or not our methods are working.
So if we get a whole bunch of assessments back
and our students are not mastering the concepts on those assessments,
that they're not demonstrating mastery, we know we need to make adjustments
either in what it is that we're teaching or how it is that we're teaching it.
And those are really
essential parts of what we do all the time.
The question a quick question on the assessments.
Are you doing internal assessments or just relying on external assessments?
We do both. Both. We do both.
We have we have a
teacher created curriculum based assessments,
and then we also have external assessments,
some that are from the state, some that are things like a cadence Star math.
We have lots of different pieces
so that we are not relying just on one variable or one piece of data.
So multiple pieces of data.
Can you go back.
To the slide that listed the four previous predictors, some academic success
that we've been able to reverse or converse?
Okay, over a large school?
Okay, that was it.
So there we go.
Other questions.
Are there any questions from our folks that are attending virtually?
Is that what you were looking for?
Yep. Perfect.
Thank you.
Any other questions from here in the room?
Okay.
Thank you for your attention on that.
Something I care deeply about.
And is the heart of what we do.
It's the heart of the work that we do with students.
Bring it up,
feedback.
Always like to share.
Every fall, the amount of work that has been completed
with curriculum over the summertime
and you can see
we've got 43 pages here in this database
of the types of curriculum work that teachers did.
All summer long.
Kind of.
Run through some of the pieces that are here.
And you can see it's all different grade levels,
scripts down here a little bit.
And school
people have it on their computers to.
And this is some really important work
this summer with our new math interventionists
working on what.
Math is. Going to look like.
So we came. Into this year.
All the work is important.
How is that.
Since this is part of the agenda, is this present?
Is this accessible to the community?
Yeah.
Sure. As
some side seeing what's included,
you can also see what's not included.
Thank you.
So lots and lots of.
Lots and lots of work here.
And then the last thing that I wanted to share
today was where to find. The.
Curriculum on our web page for parents
and so if you go to the curriculum tab and then to subjects and courses,
it will take you to this page.
And when you're here, you click on Rubicon Atlas.
And then at the top there is a tab
that says all curriculum
on Browse
and all of our and curriculum will show up.
So let's.
Counselors.
For example, and there's a calculus curriculum map
so it includes units topic, essential questions,
standards, concepts and skills
for each unit.
So you scroll through here
are all there.
You won't go through.
Unless there's something in particular that you want to see.
I won't go through many of them.
I just want to make sure that you knew where they are.
And I also wanted to show you a new piece that we have
put up here that Michael Powell has been working on,
and that is including our major works for literature.
So anything that is in bold
is board approved,
and then they're already.
Found out under English,
under ELA.
Under English Language Arts,
and then right underneath it, our literature major works.
And our school.
Is for major works, high.
School.
And what you'll see is there
there's a sampling here of things that are used,
short stories, fables,
excerpts generally are not board
approved just because they can change based on
they have a large list of things that they draw from based on the students
that they're working. With.
And the concepts that they're going through.
But then you can also see like seventh grade does have some
some board approved pieces that they pull from.
Or the bolded ones, the ones that everyone reads and the other ones are.
The but.
The bolded ones are ones that are board approved.
Oh, okay.
So from a board approved anthology.
Okay, So
for English nine, for example, Knight is the primary approved one.
Then there's a few other ones that they get one.
Exactly. Yeah.
And that's just a sampling of the short stories and and pieces
that they would use
the speech.
And thank you for that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I was really pleased with the way it turned out.
I wasn't quite sure how she was going to display it, and it came out very,
very nicely.
So I just wanted you to know where to find those things.
There is there is proposed legislation about having curriculum
displayed on a on a public website and and having materials available.
And we're kind of I mean, we've done that for years.
Our our material or text or
literature pieces were not displayed this way previously.
They were available
if anybody asked, but they were, they were not displayed like this.
So it's nice to be able to have. It.
Very easily accessible.
And we do not have any new business or old business yet.
But just for the sake of our our new members, I'll I'll explain quickly
how that will work when we do.
There is a pretty detailed process for. How.
Courses and materials are approved.
If there is, for example, a new course
being requested, the Department chair or the teacher
who would be presenting that course would come to curriculum counsel
would have a proposal that we would be given ahead of time.
We'd do a presentation on why they believe the course is important.
The curriculum Council would have the opportunity to ask questions
and then there would be a 30 day. Review.
Where.
It could be if.
There's materials.
They usually go out in the district office lobby so that they're accessible
to anybody who wants to see them, or we provide links online,
depending on what type of material it is.
Courses would be available to look at online through our our agenda.
And then after 30 days, it would come to us as old business,
at which point we would have a vote on a second read.
And if it is approved for a second read, that means it goes
to the full board for full board approval.
And just so everybody knows how curriculum council works, also,
whenever we ask for emotion and curriculum council
only members of the school board can make and second motions.
However, all of the members of school board are voting members.
So once the motions are made, everybody has the opportunity to vote yay or nay.
So we don't we don't have any of those items yet.
But when we do, that is how that will work.
And at this time we do have the opportunity for public comment.
I don't know if we have any public here or not.
It looks like we do.
Maybe not.
We don't have any we don't have any attendees other than our panelists.
No, I do not see anything. That's too bad.
We did the last time.
I should have known it when last.
Dr. Winslow, Mike Rizzo here.
So just for the Citizen Advisors,
I'm working with Lindsay to set up a date for training.
Great.
So that material has been provided to me now and or has been provided to me,
and I will be reviewing and making sure that we set up a date for
for those new members and for anyone that hasn't had training.
Wonderful. Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
Is that for all new citizen advisors or just our Security Council all doing.
It together, All new citizens? Advisors? Yes.
Thank you.
And with that.
Our next meeting is November 8th at 4 p.m..
And at this point, that will be assuming that we have some new business.
If we if we do not.
Every once in a while
this meeting does get canceled if there's nothing on the agenda.
So assuming that we have some new business,
we will meet on November 8th at 4:00
and may I have a motion to adjourn.
So move. Donna Cronan.
Second, Mike Rizzo.
Thank you very much. We are adjourned at 434.