National Center for Urban School Transformation Enriching Curricula in Urban Schools National Center for Urban School Transformation San Diego State University 2011

National Center for Urban School Transformation Dedicated to identifying, studying, and promoting the best practices of America’s highest achieving urban schools in a manner that supports urban districts in transforming teaching and learning Learn more at the Annual Symposium on High-Performing Urban Schools in San Diego, CA – May 23-25, 2012

High-performing urban schools have challenging, meaningful, focused curricula.

The Curricula in High- Performing Schools Instructional objectives are focused toward high levels of mastery. Students are expected to be able to apply, discuss, debate, analyze, and explain the concepts and skills they are asked to learn. Learning is deep and meaningful.

The Curricula in High- Performing Schools Teachers are more focused upon generating mastery than they are focused upon complying with a pacing chart or a teacher’s manual. Often they cover fewer objectives; however, students are much more likely to master the objectives taught.

The Curricula in High- Performing Schools Students receive a rich, balanced curriculum. Art, music, physical education, and other “non-tested” subjects make learning more interesting and enjoyable.

How Do High-Performing Schools Build and Sustain Strong Curricula? 1. Leaders help educators focus on key academic content. Leaders encourage teachers to teach a few concepts to mastery rather than “cover” everything. Leaders encourage educators to increase rigor and depth. They engage teachers in using assessment data to identify critical content.

How Do High-Performing Schools Build and Sustain Strong Curricula? 2. Leaders structure opportunities for teachers to learn content to greater levels of depth. Leaders create opportunities for teachers to work with each other to learn more about critical content. These opportunities are not structured to promote blame or shame. Instead, these opportunities provide a collegial way to build upon strengths and deepen levels of content understanding.

How Do High-Performing Schools Build and Sustain Strong Curricula? 3. Leaders engage teachers in designing and implementing assessments that provide concrete, common understandings of the levels of mastery students should attain. Common assessments drive attention to deeper levels of understanding. By engaging in assessment design, teachers gain perspective on the levels of understanding students must acquire.

How Do High-Performing Schools Build and Sustain Strong Curricula? 4. Leaders regularly measure and communicate progress toward goals. Goals become real as baseline measures and regular measurements of progress are collected, posted, discussed, disaggregated, acted upon, and celebrated promptly and regularly. Leaders make data accessible and actionable.

How Do High-Performing Schools Build and Sustain Strong Curricula? 5. Educators help parents and students know which key learning objectives students need to master. Parents and students feel empowered when educators regularly share information about the key learning objectives to be taught and strategies they can use to enhance learning.

How Do High-Performing Schools Build and Sustain Strong Curricula? 6. Regularly, leaders engage everyone in evaluating curricula and considering opportunities for improvement The examination of learning results always leads to questions like, “How can we get even better results next time? How can we bring students to deeper levels of understanding? How can we better integrate this with other content we want our students to master?”