ALLENTOWN — Students and their parents will soon have access to teachers’ curriculum plans through the school district’s website.
Under the direction of Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Stephen Cochrane, Upper Freehold Regional School District teachers started hundreds of hours of work over the summer on Rubicon Atlas Curriculum Mapping.
Rubicon is an international company that helps school districts map their curriculum using a web-based management tool called Atlas. The resulting maps showcase the planned curriculum to teachers, administrators, students, parents and other interested community members. By sharing the curriculum, the Upper Freehold Regional School District hopes to better understand why students perform the way they do on standardized tests; track gaps and repetition in instruction, align curriculum to benchmarks and standards; encourage more partnerships within the school community; facilitate the sharing of ideas and communication across subject areas, grade levels and school buildings; and share requirements with students and their parents, according to Cochrane.
Cochrane said the maps help educators look at students’ learning experience on a macro level in order to build on what they have learned in previous years to prepare them for future classes and achievements. He said the maps will also help parents get a better view of what their children are experiencing in the classroom and the requirements they need to excel. Board of Education members and other community leaders can also use the maps to see how the schools are planning students’ educational careers and what support they could provide to ensure success.
Cochrane said 164 teachers started working on the mapping process for every grade level this past summer. Teachers worked as individuals and in teams, paid for their efforts with funding from the federal economic stimulus package.
The Board of Education has been charged with approving the proposed curriculum for the nine core content areas that the state has standards for. As part of the New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum, the board must approve the content for language arts literacy, mathematics, science, visual and performing arts, health and physical education, technology, 21st century life and careers, word languages and social studies before Nov. 2.
Cochrane told the board that there are three stages to understanding curriculum, which are desired results, assessment evidence and learning activities. The desired results are what the school district wants students to know and be able to do. The assessment evidence is how the school district knows students know and can do what the district expects of them. The learning activities are experiences and instruction that help students know and do what the district expects of them.
The board’s role in curriculum mapping is to focus on the desired results and how they tie in with state standards.
“What are the most important ideas we want kids to learn?” Cochrane asked board members. “We don’t want curriculum to be like a cemetery where things go in and nothing comes out.”
Cochrane asked the board to review all of the curriculum maps, but to focus on those provided for the nine core content areas. He told board members to make sure the curriculum adheres to state standards and to review the importance of each topic, the major goals for each lesson, and the practices teachers plan to use.
Board of Education President Joseph Stampe said he looked through the mapping and noted that he would like to see some subject areas populated with more information. While the curriculum for the nine core content areas must be approved by November, curriculum mapping for these and all subject areas will be an ongoing process, according to Cochrane.
“This process will require constant monitoring, reflection and improvement,” he said. Stampe said, “While there will always be room to criticize things, at least we have something to criticize. We have to improve the level of detail in some areas, but having dates and calendars for when things will be taught will be good for parents to look at.”
The curriculum maps will eventually be made available to students and their parents through the school district’s website.
The district introduced Edline, software that provides students and their parents with a portal to assignments, grades and schedules a few years ago. However, this year the state Department of Education mandated every school district make its software compatible with New Jersey Standards Measurement and Resource for Teaching (NJSMART), which is a comprehensive data warehouse, student level data reporting and statewide identification system.
Edline was not compatible with NJSMART. The school district offered the manufacturer its resources to help make Edline compatible with NJSMART in order to provide a working model to market to other New Jersey school districts, according to Superintendent of Schools Dick Fitzpatrick.
“They didn’t have any interest, so we created our own version of Edline,” Fitzpatrick said. The school made the transition to Realtime, which can be accessed through www.ufrsd.net.