Secondary Learning Walks - Painting a picture of secondary English classrooms

During the month of February, the Humanities team, along with a few secondary administrators and instructional coaches, had the opportunity to make visits to a sampling of 6-12th grade ELA classrooms across the district.  Every campus was visited, and teachers from every grade volunteered to show us how they were implementing our SpringBoard curriculum in classrooms.  This curriculum, adopted nearly 5 years ago, has had a big role in transforming the way ELA classrooms operate.  Every grade's curriculum is comprised of 5 units that are designed according to theme.  Reading and writing skills are taught within each unit using texts and writing assignments that stretch students to think deeply, collaborate, and consider a variety of sources in their learning.

SpringBoard is a curriculum that is published by The College Board and is very rigorous in nature. One of the things that was most exciting to see was the way in which teachers were using the resources creatively with learners at all levels of skill. Teachers have definitely refined their practices with the curriculum to stretch far beyond the "workbook" that contains the basic materials.  Very creative word walls adorned rooms, students worked in groups to compose arguments, and a plethora of digital and print resources were used to help students in their learning.

As a curriculum director, perhaps the most affirming part of my learning walk experience was to see the way teachers have begun "owning" the process and the content of our adopted resources.  They see value in the vertical alignment of the skills/materials, and they have contributed to the "GCISDification" of our SpringBoard implementation.  Students' skills are becoming stronger with every teacher who builds on the foundation of prior learning.

In addition to seeing many positive things during our campus walks, our team also found ideas that we need to share across campuses (so that ALL kids have the benefit of them!) and a few areas that we need to hone and more consistently implement.  Overall, however, the visits were a great success, and they affirmed many of the great things we had suspected were going on in classrooms.