This Spring, over 20 schools and districts came together at Quakertown High School for a Curriculum Regional Workshop. Curriculum leaders spent two days in workshops with the Faria and Atlas Team collaboratively defining and moving their curriculum process forward.
At this event, the Faria Team partnered with PASCD, represented by Barb Davis, who joined us to speak about the membership opportunities and benefits within the Pennsylvania chapter of the ASCD. Schools and districts from around the region reviewed and refined their curriculum process and learned about new features and regionally specific updates within Atlas to support their curricular vision and goals. Here are a few of the highlights.
Quakertown Community School District
“Excellent flow to the two days and enthusiastic, knowledgeable presenters.” – Liz Coyle, Elementary ESL Teacher
In addition to hosting the workshop, the Quakertown Community SD team spent the two days working on refreshing their curriculum process. Some of their biggest takeaways were updates to some of their core resources for their curriculum teams:
- Curriculum Guide – this centralized document unpacks their curriculum purpose, goals, and processes, creating a hub for all things curriculum and Atlas.
- Template revision – The team revised their unit template and updated lesson templates to streamline their curriculum experience for both writers and teachers.
- Curriculum Audit spreadsheets – For use in reviewing and revising their curriculum based on success criteria for quality units and on student needs.
- Atlas Professional Learning Playlist – During morning blocks of time dedicated to professional learning and curriculum time, teachers reference this resource for links to blogs and more to either kick start their Atlas learning journey, refresh their Atlas knowledge, and/or introduce themselves to new tools provided in Atlas.
Chester Community Charter School
“The reports session was so helpful! I know this is an underutilized feature and look forward to using it soon!” – Aileen Burr, Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction
The Chester Community Charter team has already begun implementing their take-aways from the workshop and have had great success. Since the Regional Workshop, they have been moving forward with the plan they started, leveraging the features they learned more about!
- The [workshop] schedule was intentionally and efficiently organized to allow for just enough learning and time to explore and plan.
- Learning more about the reports features helped us to schedule when we would like to pull them in order to support instructional leadership and cross-disciplinary and cross-grade level areas of focus.
- Attending as a team allowed us the time to collaborate and discuss in the moment ideas that we would not have been able to discuss in a focused manner, without the demands of the daily school schedule.
- Working with other teams gave us the opportunity to learn from their successes and obstacles.
- The AI tool has already changed how our Science Curriculum Coordinator has been revising HPE and Science curriculum maps. She’s been able to accomplish a lot in a small amount of time, and she is doing a PD for curriculum leads on how she’s utilized the feature to revise maps.
- We have already started using the comment feature to solicit teacher feedback on units in order to prioritize summer revisions.
Eligible Content, Assessment Anchors, and PA Standards
A topic of focus during the workshop was the intentional alignment of Eligible Content, Assessment Anchors, and PA Standards in unit plans and courses. As teams review and revise their curriculum, they focus on integrating these reference points into units and ensuring alignment to the content, skills & assessments within a unit plan. To support this effort, the Atlas team engaged with districts to understand their needs and worked to streamline the process for curriculum writers in Atlas based on these conversations.
Now all the PA standards that have Assessment Anchors and Eligible Content associated with them are clearly marked with an AA flag, so that teams can view analytics on which standards they have or have not yet addressed in their curriculum.
Additionally, now as teams are building the details of their unit plans, they can select the standard and immediately see the associated Assessment Anchors and Eligible Content associated with the standards. This allows curriculum writers to ensure meaningful alignment to the standards, while also having support around developing the associated content, skills and assessments for a unit.
We know that curriculum is a living, breathing document. We want to do our best to support schools and districts in meaningfully streamlining this process wherever possible, so that educators can focus on the most meaningful parts of unit development and curriculum design. Join us at an upcoming Regional Curriculum Workshop!
