Best Practice: Building Capacity, Supporting Quality

Fall 2010 Issue Building Capacity, Supporting Quality

Welcome to a new year of Best Practice. We look forward to sharing stories of powerful staff development this year and begin by highlighting the work that LCI Vice President and consultant, Joanne Picone-Zocchia, has facilitated at PS 85, a large elementary school in the Bronx, NY.

In her feature article, An Efficient and Effective Model for School Wide Improvement, you will learn about the implementation of an LCI professional development model that enabled a school to achieve its 3-year, school wide improvement goal in only 2 years' time, simultaneously building current and future capacity. Jennifer Borgioli's article, What We're Thinking About, outlines some strategies for connecting curriculum mapping with curriculum design and for all of you who are thinking about the Common Core State Standards, we have included an example of how these new standards can be used to inform a student checklist, a rubric, and a report card.

We wish you an invigorating and exhilarating Fall, and look forward to another year of Best Practice in action!

Feature Article

An Efficient and Effective Model for School Wide Improvement
by Joanne Picone-Zocchia

If you are (or know) a homeowner, you have probably heard some version of the observation/warning that home improvements take a third more time and money than estimated.

That is a difficult "reality" to accept, especially when time and money are precious resources. Imagine if, instead of a third more time, the improvement was accomplished in a third less time, and that, as part of the work, selected family members were trained to complete future improvements, so there would be less need for the contractor.

Now, imagine a school, with fixed (or diminishing) resources and time that is taxed by a variety of internal and external requirements, activities and expectations. Add to this a principal with a vision and a sense of urgency that establishes a three-year timeframe for school wide "quality classroom curriculum design." This is the story of such a school, and of a professional development model that enabled achievement of the three-year goal in two years' time, while also developing the capacity of four coaches to address the school's quality curriculum development needs into the future... read more

Consultant Spotlight

Joanne Picone-Zocchia is the Vice President of LCI and also works as a consultant, facilitating the design and implementation of teacher induction programs, portfolio assessment systems and standards-based curriculum and assessment design. In addition, Joanne assists schools, districts and educational organizations with strategic planning, restructuring and organizational development initiatives, connecting systems thinking skills and processes with systemic educational reform and. A teacher herself for twenty-two years, her background includes elementary, secondary and special education.

Joanne is also the Vice-President of Communities for Learning: Leading lasting change, where her work revolves around a framework for sustainable school improvement that assists schools in using stakeholder expertise to identify and address factors influencing their ability to achieve improvement goals.

She is a published curriculum designer, has co-authored an article, "Using Curriculum and Gap Analysis Maps to Assess What Teachers Do" and is the primary author of the book Supporting Mathematical Learning: Effective Instruction, Assessment and Student Activities, K-5, published by Jossey-Bass. Her latest book, Changing the Way You Teach, Improving the Way Students Learn, co-authored with Giselle Martin-Kniep, was published by ASCD in May 2009. To learn more about Joanne's books, please visit her author's page on Amazon.com.

Announcements

LCI is launching a new, blended program series: "School Leadership in the 21st Century." Framed by the questions What is non-negotiable for 21st century schools and their leaders? Who decides? this conference series is unique in both content and format, and is designed specifically to meet the needs of school administrators and leaders as they support their schools into the 21st century.

The experience is bookended by face to face sessions: a Core Session that begins the experience, and a culminating Strategic Planning Workshop.Participants can customize the interim experience by selecting 1) a webinar on Web 2.0 tools in Education, 2) an on-line resource study and/or 3) an Inquiry course using the Moodle platform. This program also marks the inauguration of the LCI hosted Leadership Network of 21st Century Schools, an online community of educators interested in sharing the challenges and innovations of supporting 21st century learners.

November 8 marks the beginning of the first "School Leadership in the 21st Century" series. This presentation is co-sponsored by Putnam/Northern Westchester and Rockland BOCES. For more information and registration, contact PNW BOCES.

New from LCI
LCI is taking Quality Curriculum Design on-line! This year, we are developing a series of six on-line courses in Moodle that will support the development of rigorous and learner-centered curriculum. These courses introduce and help educators to design using the Common Core State Standards, as well as 21st Century Skills and local state standards. They embed the best of LCI's work around designing engaging, relevant and meaningful curriculum. Look for our announcement soon, when our courses go live!

What We're Thinking About

You've mapped your curriculum. Now what?
by Jennifer Borgioli
In recent years, many schools have engaged in a through and in-depth review of what they teach. This process, usually referred to as "curriculum mapping," serves as a messy powerful process, filled with rich conversation and creative design resulting in a living, breathing document that is flexible enough to expand to meet new demands and rigorous enough to prepare students for the 21st century. Completing the mapping process offers a powerful opportunity to reflect on a school's approach to teaching and learning. Below are four strategies that schools can take to improve or capture the degree to which their curriculum maps highlight learner-centered instruction. These activities can be done by a curriculum committee, teachers interested in reflection, an administrative team or, better yet, by a cross-role team. Read more.

Upcoming Appearances

Jennifer Borgioli will present two sessions for middle level educators at the New York State Middle School Association Annual Conference on October 22, 2010 in Rochester, NY. Her first session is titled, Becoming Data Savvy: The Partnership Between the Middle-Level Teacher and Data, enables participants to use formative assessment data to make meaningful decisions about instruction. Her second session, Assessing what counts: exploring the role of rubrics in Middle Level Education explores how and why rubrics are effective learning tools.

Giselle Martin-Kniep will facilitate conversations around learning to learn, strategic learning, formative assessment, effective questioning, and helping students to become critical thinkers at the EARCOS Teacher Conference, March 23 to March 26, 2011 in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia.

Joanne Picone-Zocchia will facilitate a pre-conference session called Engaging, Challenging and Teaching the Adult Learner and Diane Cunningham will present a session on supporting educators as Investigators of Practice at the upcoming ASCD Conference (March 24-25, 2011 in San Francisco, CA).

LCI Resource
Explore LCI's rubric for assessing Engagement, Relevance and Meaningfulness in curriculum, one of the many rubrics we use in our curriculum work.

Look for our Winter 2010 issue: Linking Teacher Learning and Student Learning

Editors: Diane Cunningham Joanne Picone-Zocchia Production: Jennifer Borgioli

LCI: cultivating best practice, inspiring excellence