Annual Conference

Curriculum Mapping on the Edge

When author and consultant Heidi Hayes Jacobs, an expert on curriculum mapping, asked her audience whether they used mapping software, more than one-third of them raised their hands.

Jacobs expressed no surprise at this widespread use of computer software to support curriculum mapping. “This isn’t going away -- any more than e-mail and the Internet are going away,” she said.

Curriculum mapping is the practice of charting -- in detail -- what topics are taught by each teacher during the course of a given school year.  When the maps are combined, it's possible to identify gaps and duplications in what students are being taught.  It's also possible to ensure that the curriculum "builds" appropriately from year to year.  Besides curriculum topics, some maps include assessments, samples of student work, or teachers' professional development plans.

Curriculum mapping makes teachers’ work transparent, Jacobs noted. Each teacher should enter his or her work into a curriculum map, she said, and each teacher should also have access to the map of every other teacher. “Mapping is overt work, not covert activity,” Jacobs said.

Because it reveals so much, mapping is intimate, and it can seem threatening, Jacobs acknowledged. But it also leads to more collegiality among teachers. “Not only do we share each other’s work, we appreciate each other’s work.”

Curriculum mapping also becomes a key tool for sustaining professional learning communities. “Mapping becomes an electronic town square,” Jacobs said.

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ASCD offers several resources to help teacher learn about curriculum mapping. Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping, by Heidi Hayes Jacobs guides the practical implementation of a mapping process. You can read the book’s first chapter here.

Jacobs' Mapping the Big Picture: Integrating Curriculum and Assessment K-12 provides a good introduction to the topic.

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Reporting by Scott Willis, ASCD's director of book acquisitions and development.

Levine Urges Educators to Tap into Brain Power

Dr. Mel Levine, Saturday morning's General Session speaker, confirmed what educators have long understood: Brains don't develop at the same rate in every kid, and teachers had better pay attention lest they lose students who are perfectly capable of learning.

The rapid and dramatic development that happens from age 11 through young adulthood makes learning challenging, but it also makes learning happen. Levine says brain research supports education strategies that:

Avoid labels. Levine said, "The trouble with labels is that they are reductionist--they seek to name a condition and not address it. They are essentially pessimistic. The vast majority of kids who are labeled as having reading comprehension problems are probably having active working memory problems. They need to find ways to hold short-term memory in their minds. Enough with labels."

Use the most appropriate assessments. Timed tests don't have much of a place in Levine's world, nor does memorization. "It's much better to understand where you can go on the rivers of Africa rather than being able to name all the rivers of Africa," Levine said. "Better still is explaining the contributions of Africa's rivers to the people who live there."

Recognize developmental readiness. Fidgety middle-schoolers and bored high school students are behaving in ways that reflect how their brains are growing. "One of the most important things we can teach kids to do is work slowly," Levine said. "As the pre-frontal cortex develops, children are dealing with problems of impulsivity and learning not to jump to the first conclusion they draw or decision they make. What's that mean? To me it means no more timed tests. It's much better to say, 'Take as long as you need, but you can only use two pages' than it is to say 'You have an hour to tell us as much as you can.'"

Builds on strengths. Levine urged educators to match instruction not only to developmental readiness, but also to what students can actually do with their learning. "Imagine hiring an adult. Would you ask them 'How's your rote memory?' Of course not," he said. "That's not generally an important skill. Actually, it's almost irrelevant."

Getting kids to tap into that relevant learning is what education is about. Levine said young brains have a hard time filtering what's important to know.

"Problems with significance detection are probably the most common issue among high school kids," noted Levine. "They're trying to take it all in, and that is difficult to do. Many high school kids just cannot separate what's important from what's not."

He recalled a young Stanford math professor who had a firm grasp of the problem. "I asked him what it was like to teach calculus to college freshmen," Levine recounted. "He said, 'Well, you know how it is. Some of them just get it, and the others you have to teach.'"

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• Explore ASCD's newest video-based staff development program, Teaching the Adolescent Brain.
• Read a chapter from the second edition of Eric Jensen's Teaching with the Brain in Mind.

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Do you have experiences with students developing at different rates? What strategies have been most successful? Share with us using the "Comments" link below.

Photo Credit: Mark Regan

Putting Teachers in Charge of Data

According to Jennifer Morrison, the 2003 ASCD OYEA winner, "Standardized assessment is very sexy in a lot of ways, because it has numbers that can be printed in newspapers and distributed widely, but it comes too late--at the end of the year, not in the moment."

In her session, The Power of Classroom Data, Morrison described how data collected from standardized assessment had been used in her district to evaluate teachers, leading the district to require remedial teacher training for some, particularly those working with low-performing students.

"Teachers should be in charge of their data, not threatened by it," according to Morrison, who also works with low-performing students. "For me, as a teacher, the most important reasons to collect data are to make instructional decisions and design interventions."

Understanding that "vocabulary comes from reading, and without vocabulary, students have difficulty on standardized assessments," she has enjoyed a great deal of success getting students to enjoy reading by using the feedback from the the kids to design intervention. Having identified focus during reading as a problem with her students, Morrison has her students rate their level of focus, using a reading focus rubric. The ratings run from 1 (I was very distracted and had to be timed out) to 5 (I was very focused today and did not allow myself to be distracted even once).

Through this rubric, Morrison has discovered that students who have difficulty focusing don't know that; they believe that they are very focused. This is critical information, because Morrison's experience has taught her that "you can use all the beautiful programs you want, but if the students aren't engaged, if they don't care, it doesn't matter."

To engage students, she has them track their own progress, which helps them improve more quickly, while she uses their feedback to design more effective interventions. The most useful assessment, according to Morrison, is performed by those who are engaged in the learning and teaching. Her students assess themselves on their nightly reading assignments, answering short questions such as

• What kind of material did you read?
• How did you feel about what you read?
• Has your comprehension of your reading improved?
• How do you know?

Knowing what is interesting to her students, and what kind of progress they feel like they are making is important to Morrison, who finds that usually she needs "to try something completely different for students who have been force-fed vocabulary for the last two years." In spite of all the data that educators have from standardized assessment, Morrision has found that educators "don't really know the kids. We don't know enough to create effective interventions."

End of the year standardized assessment, which "can be used to design for next year's students," is not helpful because, as Morrison observed, "next year's students are different."

Taking charge of her data, and including her students in the creation and tracking of assessments, has helped Morrison understand her students' needs better and find effective strategies for each student, from making magazines on rap music available to scheduling periodic dinners with students.

"Data is about informing instruction," Morrison emphasized. Through her assessment strategies, she has been able to design interventions and make instructional decisions that will lead her students to success.

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• ASCD offers a Web Seminar on Using Classroom Data to Guide Instruction, May 10, 2006. Learn more.
• Read a sample chapter from Using Data to Assess Your Reading Program.
• A Visit to a Data-Driven School District explores how one school district uses data to achieve real progress in student achievement and school performance.

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How are you using data to guide your own instruction? What assessment strategies have worked for you? Share your thoughts using the "Comments" link below.

Historical Knowledge: A Challenge to Standardized Testing

If U.S. students perform poorly on tests that measure their grasp of things historical, blame it on the test, says  Marc Turner, a lead teacher at Blythewood High School in Blythewood, South Carolina. Turner, named the 2005 Secondary Teacher of the Year by the National Council for the Social Studies, states that if you "look at 100 years of social studies testing, our kids have scored low," but it’s just the nature of the discipline, he says. Indeed, Turner just isn’t persuaded that a history assessment tells anyone very much about what students know.

Turner came to this realization after reading what Professor Sam Wineburg had to say about how we come to understand history. Wineburg has noted that, because of mediocre tests results, many Americans are convinced that students don’t know history. The truth, Wineburg is quoted as saying, is that students haven’t memorized the lists of facts that test makers have determined are important to know.

So, have students write historical narratives instead of taking tests, says Turner. "We should be promoting history as an interpretive experience," suggests Turner. "There’s nothing wrong when kids reach potentially different conclusions about an event," he observes—historians disagree all the time. What’s more, once students have written their narratives, they can "compare their interpretations to those of other scholars in the field," making for a rich learning experience.

Authentic assessment, such as those Turner recommends, is a hot topic this year at the ASCD Annual Conference—as previous blog entries have shown. You can also find sessions on effective instruction in social studies -- instruction that takes students beyond rote memorization into the realm of critical thinking. Take a look at the following sessions:

#1104 Teaching Social Studies in a Broad, Balanced, and Relevant Curriculum Saturday, April 1, 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. Presented by Ruth Garner, Patricia Bonner and  Michael Fuller, all affiliated with the Newsweek Education Program.

#1133 Understanding History by Design: The Museum Reader and the History Illustrator Saturday, April 1, 8:00 to 9:30 a.m. Presented by Barbara Radner, DePaul University, Chicago; Heidi Moisan, Chicago Historical Society, and Carolyn Hale, Nobel Elementary School, Chicago.

#2164 Challenging History: Essential Questions in the Social Studies Classroom Sunday, April 2, 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. Presented by Heather Lattimer, Michael Paredes, and Rob Meza-Ehlert, Kearny High School, San Diego, Calif.

#3120 Building Background Knowledge for Student Success in Social Studies Monday, April 3, 8:00 to 10:00 a.m. Presented by Dianna Roberge, Capital Region Education Council, Hartford, Conn.

(This post submitted by Kathy Checkley, author of several Professional Development Online courses, and the book, Priorities in Practice: The Essentials of Mathematics K—6.)

The Stakes are High

High-stakes standardized tests can fill the brightest students with dread and frustrate the most dedicated educators. ASCD in 2004 issued a position statement calling high-stakes testing "an inappropriate use of assessment."

The problem: High-stakes testing often fails to adequately measure what students know and are able to do. Even the best standardized tests often return results too late for educators to adapt classroom practices in ways that would help students.

What do you think? This ASCD poll offers a chance for you to weigh in on the effect of high-stakes testing on your schools. We invite you tell us more about your experience with high-stakes tests.

Toward Meaningful Assessment

Understanding by Design expert Grant Wiggins recently had this to say about high-stakes testing: "I'm not saying let's get rid of testing. I'm saying that if the only feedback system you have about how you are doing ... is one test at the end of the year that you don't know the results of until summer, that's a dumb system." Wiggins and other argue for formative assessments--ongoing measures of how students perform against learning standards.

The ASCD Annual Conference offers many sessions on assessment. Here are a few that caught our eye:

Saturday, April 1
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Using Data to Guide Instruction and Improve Student Learning
4:45-5:45 p.m.
Making the Connection: When Assessment Informs Instruction, Everybody Wins!
5:15-6:15 p.m.
How Do We Meet the Challenge of Changing Federal Policy?

Sunday, April 2
8:00-9:00 a.m.
Data-Driven Decision Making: Integration of Curriculum Mapping and Assessment
8:00-9:00 a.m.
Authentic Learning: Performance-Based Assessment in Practice
8:00-9:30 a.m.
ASCD Learning and Assessment Network Forum

Monday, April 3
10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Constructing Assessment Practices to Challenge the Traditions of the Past
10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Technology Tools for Data-Driven Improvement
2:30-3:30 p.m.
Designing Formative Assessments to Measure Individual Students' Learning Trajectory