Unlock the mysteries of auditing a school curriculum with our special guest, Dr. Carrie Hepburn, from Compass PD. She takes us on a brief, enlightening journey through the process, giving us the lowdown on setting up curriculum cycles, aligning professional development cycles, and the key indicators which help effectively study a curriculum. Dr. Hepburn's approach, starting with assessments, shines a light on the crucial role assessments play in revealing the alignment with standards, levels of mastery, and the real-world relevance of the curriculum.
In the latter part of our chat, Dr. Hepburn delves into activities within each unit and across the academic years. She highlights the importance of scaffolding, complexity, and student engagement, dispelling the myth that a single resource can cover all standards within a content area. She underscores teachers' pivotal role in this process, ensuring they have what they need to teach the standards and provide valuable feedback to students. So, brace yourselves for a whirlwind tour through the complex and critical process of auditing a curriculum with Dr. Hepburn.
Speaker 1:
Dr Kerry Hepburn here from CompassFeedy. I'm excited to talk with you curriculum leaders today about some work that we do in school districts and that's curriculum audits. We help school districts set up like curriculum cycles, professional development cycles that align with that, and through that process, some of the work that we do is a curriculum audit and people ask me all the time what do you do when you're looking at curriculum? I'm not really quite sure what to look at, and so this video today is to help you get started in that work. I'm just going to give you a couple of big key indicators, things that can help you study a curriculum. The first thing that I do and this probably will sound very familiar is I start with the assessments. I look at the assessments within an entire curricula and then I look at them by unit and, as I'm studying these assessments, things that I look for are are the assessments real world, relevant, or do they look similar to what you might see in a high stakes assessment? This gives me a tip into what instruction will look like. As I'm studying assessments, I also look at things like the different levels of mastery the evidence of how well they understand or have mastered a particular concept or a standard I look through to see does the assessment? This is wild, I know, but does the assessment align with the standards? Is it asking students to demonstrate what they should know, understand and be able to do? And as I'm looking through that, I'm able to tell the hard work, the foundational work of standards being unpacked to determine what students need to know, understand and be able to do. It has been done. Those are some things that I look at when I'm looking at the assessment piece. And to get to the assessments, when you think about understanding by design by Wiggins and McTide, that's the second stage and in order to do the second stage well, that means you've done the foundation, the hard work of the first stage, really well. Starting with the assessments gives me a really good indicator of what I'm in for.
Speaker 1:
Then I start to look at the activities for each unit and then across the years, am I seeing the scaffolding from the beginning of a unit to the end of the unit, that it's getting more complex? Are the activities that I'm seeing within a curriculum? Are they engaging to students? Do they help students get prepared for the assessment? So think when I said, a real-world, relevant assessment versus an assessment that looks like a high-stakes assessment. Engaging activities probably aren't going to look much like a high-stakes assessment. I look at the different instructional strategies that are used within the activities. They should look different. You know we're going to have some of the same ones that we're going to use again and again, but every single lesson shouldn't look the same. You want kids, kids to be engaged. They're going to want to have a variety of different strategies that are being used.
Speaker 1:
I look also at what are the resources that are within this particular curricula. Rarely and I've worked with hundreds, hundreds of curricula at all levels Rarely can you use one resource and hit all of the standards within a particular content area. It takes multiple. So that is very much a misconception and we as educators have been sold a story when we've been told that here's your reading program, here's your math program. All you need is this one thing and it's going to do everything. If you actually do the foundational work in stage one, you'll know that fairly quickly, and so we teach people how to go through and, after they've done stage one and stage two of curriculum writing, to choose a variety of resources wisely to make sure that they're going in to notice.
Speaker 1:
Is this truly aligning with what our standards are? Just because somebody says it aligns, it's important for us to do our due diligence and study that and make sure that it truly does. And then, finally, do teachers have what they need to teach the standards? So, as I look through resources, as I look through different instructional strategies, as I look through assessments, how are students being assessed? Do teachers have the information that they need, that they can not only teach it, but that they can get feedback to kids? These are all really important things and just a few of the things that I do when it comes to auditing a curricula. Is it easy? No, is it important? Absolutely. I hope you found this helpful. Have a great day.