Discover the Curriculum and Instruction Link from the GPS Website!

Discover the Curriculum and Instruction Link from the GPS Website!

Wondering where the Georgetown School District is with curriculum development? Looking for good information to consider for or incorporate into your child’s IEP, such as the latest learning standards and grade-appropriate assessment tools? Just want to keep up with what your child is learning in class right now?

Check out the Curriculum at GPS website, created by Dr. Kristan Rodriguez, Georgetown’s Director of Curriculum and Instruction. Just go to the Georgetown School District website, click on offices (up top), Curriculum and Instruction, click again, and you are there. Explore the newest curriculum and grade-specific subject-matter that your children are learning about, plus the latest research on effective instruction in a just a few moments. Or, you can just click on this site: http://sites.google.com/site/curriculumatgps/home

Useful topic pages & links include:
Grade Specific Standards, Pre-K-12
Data Home – click for New K-12 Assessment Map & AYP/MCAS Overview
Assessment tools for Staff
Everyday Math
Middle School Math – Strands related to lesson plans, worksheets, quizzes
Parent Resources – Grade level parent guides and MS/HS programs of study
Instructional Technology Plan
Staff Web Pages
DESE Presentation on Alignment Process
New MA ELA & Math Frameworks PPT Presentations
Curriculum Committees
Professional Development
English Language Learners
Kristan’s Blog – 199+ topics, including Georgetown’s Bullying Prevention Curriculum, homework, eliminating early reading failure, Response to Intervention (RTI), technology survey results, grade specific standards and curriculums, the best way to study and remember, Writing IEPs Aligned with the New Standards,

The last page, Kristan’s Blog, is definitely worthy of becoming both a teacher and a parent’s handy guide to best practices in education! Do take time to scroll through the blog, there’s plenty of great information to help our children experience success in school! See one sample blog entry below:

‪Writing IEPs Aligned with the New Standards‬
posted ‪Jan 19, 2011 8:16 AM‬ by Kristan Rodriguez
In this Education Week article, Christina Samuels reports on how some districts are linking Individualized Education Programs to the new Common Core state standards so students with disabilities are moving toward the same outcomes as their regular-education classmates. Here are the steps the California education department has developed to help teachers write grade-level, standards-based goals, geared to a hypothetical fourth grader who has trouble with reading comprehension and written language skills:
- Use the student’s current level of performance. Test results show that this student will do best if teachers concentrate on reading comprehension and writing strategies with an emphasis on organization and focus.
- Choose the standard. In this case, “Identify structural patterns found in informational text (e.g., compare and contrast, cause and effect, sequential or chronological order, proposition, and support) to strengthen comprehension.”
- “Unpack” the standard. The teacher breaks it down: identify compare-and-contrast patterns, identify cause-and-effect patterns, identify the author’s proposition.
- Analyze the subskills. The teacher decides to focus on “list the statements that support the author’s proposition.”
- Develop the goal. By the end of the school year, the student will read grade-level passages and support the author’s proposition with a minimum of six correct statements from each text passage on regularly scheduled, curriculum-based reading comprehension tests.
- Write the short-term objectives and benchmarks. By the middle of the school year, the student will identify the author’s proposition from the text correctly in four out of five attempts, as measured by classroom discussion, daily reading journal entries, and work samples.
- Monitor the goal. At regular reporting periods, monitor and report progress on goals and short-term objectives and benchmarks.

“Special Educators Look to Align IEPs to Common-Core Standards” by Christina Samuels in Education Week, Jan. 12, 2011 (Vol. 30, #15, p. 8-9)