Kentucky and Colorado Teachers Collaborate to Create Units of Study with LDC Modules Embedded Within

Seattle, Washington

From Seattle to Colorado to right here in Kentucky the collaborative spirit has been an important  productive struggle for teachers and partners participating in the Common Assignment Study (CAS). In the CAS, Kentucky and Colorado teachers continue to lead the way with the implementation of new standards in both states.  For the past year, teachers from Kentucky and Colorado have been collaborating to create units of study containing embedded Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) modules.  Hundreds of students in each state have been impacted by these high quality units, and dozens of teachers have learned from one another about what makes an effective unit and what quality student work looks like.

This summer we expanded our participation from 24 Kentucky teachers to 64 from five different Kentucky districts. Colorado has similar numbers of teachers from multiple districts participating in the study. To launch the expansion, The Fund for Transforming Education in Kentucky hosted Colorado educators and all our CAS partners twice this summer. We held the first session in northern Kentucky at Dixie Heights High School in late June. High School English Language Arts teachers and middle school history teachers joined forces to revise the units they implemented in 2013-2014 based on the results of student work they analyzed together using CAS partner created protocols. Joining us at this work session were school and district leaders from participating sites because we continue to learn the importance of school and district leadership with ensuring successful implementation. The leaders need to hear from teachers about what they need (time is always a big one) for collaborating with colleagues.

My son running XC on beautiful day in Lexington, KY

Our second session, in mid-July, was held in Lexington at Edith J. Hayes Middle School, and included a larger group of high school social studies, middle school English language arts, and both middle and high school science. Following the same protocols used at the June convening, teachers again worked to refine lessons and collaborate with teachers experienced in the CAS project and teachers joining new for the first time this year. This intentional design allowed teachers new to the project this year to work collaboratively with teachers who created the initial units last summer. This approach, though not easy, encouraged the newly joining teachers to take equal ownership of the units they will teach in 2014-2015.

As The Fund's Initiative Director for this project, one of my favorite parts is the equal focus on process and product. Yes, we're working to create units, rubrics, and protocols, but we are also experimenting with collaborative processes across school, district, and state lines. I'm not alone in thinking collaboration is a valuable part of our Common Assignment Study.  When asked what they liked about the collaborative process at the summer convenings, here's what we heard from some of the teachers...

"collaborative efforts of a lot of great minds"

"I liked that we came from different backgrounds"

"multiple perspectives"

"Collaboration was streamlined, and everyone was more comfortable speaking up"

"Again, collaboration with like minded experts always leads to new and productive ideas.  I always get better with my craft when surrounded by comrades."

Loveland, Colorado

______________
Other posts about this project by me & by others

Common Assignment Study Gears Up for Second Year

Online Tools for Collaborating Across States

Common Assignment Study Post 1

Bridging the Digital Divide in Classrooms by Brison Harvey

Introducing Common Assignment Study  A three part post by Brison Harvey

A Storify all about the HS English Spring Unit by Colorado Teacher, Danny Holloweg

Only a Day and Two Nights in San Francisco

When we were informed our Common Assignment Research Study would be having a meeting for all the partners in San Francisco, I was immediately excited at the possibility of finally seeing City Lights Bookellers in person. I, like many other twenty-one year old students, was inspired by the Beat Generation while I was in college.  Specifically, I remember writing a paper on the San Francisco Renaissance poets (and I had never been to San Francisco).  Jack Kerouac's traveling experiences were alive in my head as I made my travel reservations.

It was a relatively short work meeting, with just one evening dinner meeting (II Fornaio) and then a full day meeting on Friday. I purposefully scheduled the earliest flight I could get out of snowy Lexington on Thursday, even though our dinner wasn't until 6pm PST.  With the time change heading west, I landed in SFO by 10:30 am, and after a short stop at a popular food truck Bacon Bacon on the San Francisco State campus, my colleague (who just moved to Kentucky  from San Francisco) drove me to City Lights and left me to explore while she lunched with friends.  Two glorious hours in this historical bookstore were an English teacher's dream.  I sat upstairs in the poetry room and read for about 30 minutes, and I browsed the vast assortment of poetry collections from every generation, and naturally with a special section dedicated to the Beat Generation.

I also browsed fiction and nonfiction on the other floors of the bookstore, and each time I moved from section to section, I thought about the great authors of an earlier generation who shook up the city and the country with their counterculture movement.  The history of this generation was well represented, not only with their great works of literature, but also with the posters, pictures, and postcards that adorned the walls.

Leaving the bookstore, I walked again by Jack Kerouac Alley before making my way across the Broadway/Columbia inersection to The Beat Museum.  Here I found artifacts and memorabilia like a shirt Kerouac wore, Ginsberg's typewriter and organ and loads of photographs and books from the era.

Since I live on the eastern side of the USA, traveling home Friday night would have required me to take the red eye, and I just wasn't up for that experience.  With only a few free hours on this work trip, my only big goal personally was so see City Lights,  so when I also was able to hear live jazz on Friday night, I felt my San Francisco trip was complete. It was serendipitous because I was stuck at the hotel on my own since others in the group had planned better than I did for a Friday evening out and about  (or they lived locally--our Stanford partners) and went home to their families.  

Determined to make the best of the situation, I went to the hotel restaurant for dinner (Brussels sprouts with bacon crumbles & an Ahi burger). While I was dining, several musicians came in to setup equipment.  I didn't have high hopes for what I would hear, given that I was at a hotel restaurant near the airport.  However, when I asked my waiter what he knew about the music to come, I wasn't disappointed when he told me old school jazz.  Indeed it was old school jazz with three local musicians and all improvisation since they did even know one another before they played together. Three hours of lively jazz music and conversations with locals.  On their break, the musicians talked to me and asked if I had any requests, but they laughed when I asked for Coltrane's Giant Steps or Gillespie's Salt Peanuts. Bebop was clearly not high on their list of usual requests.  Not long later, though, they looked at me and said..."you asked for bebop, so we're going to play some for you," and they played KoKo.

A woman from the San Francisco Bay Area came over to talk to me and to share that she was there at the airport hotel to hear jazz and celebrate her 89th (!) birthday. What a joy she was! The band even played a jazzed up happy birthday in her honor, and she stood up to dance in her sparkly pants and leopard print top.  She was there with her daughters who looked to be my mom's age, and I loved that they brought their mom to hear jazz on her birthday.

All told my day and two nights in San Francisco was the perfect work trip with a splash of personal fun thrown into the mix.  We accomplished our work goals, and I saw City Lights and heard live jazz. Can't get much better than that.

EQUIP: Educators Evaluating Quality Instructional Products

The Opportunity
 Since leaving the high school classroom a few years ago,  I have worked in jobs where I have been facilitating workgroups and convening people for the creation of collaborative products and/or processes, so when I learned of an opportunity to be part of a workgroup myself, I decided to apply. A few months ago, Achieve's EQuIP initiative placed a national call for reviewers to serve on a panel that would review Common Core aligned lessons and units.  I decided to apply and am certainly glad I spent the time and brain power to do so.  The application process required me to use EQuIP's rubrics to review CCSS lessons and units and provide feedback to the unit developers.  I submitted my review and feedback which was then double-blind scored for effectiveness and accuracy according to previously established norms.  A few weeks later, I received an invitation to sit on the Educators Evaluating Quality Instructional Products Peer Review Panel.

Last week I left the snow and frigid temperatures of Lexington, Kentucky and flew to Washington National Airport where it was actually just slightly warmer than it was when I left Lexington.  I headed to the Westin Arlington Gateway and an evening reception where I met some of the educators from across the country with whom I would work for the next two days.  I met classroom teachers as well as other people like me who support teachers (my day job) and teach teachers (my adjunct gig).

The Process   

Our meeting objectives

• Norm the use of the EQuIP Rubrics and Quality Review Process 
• Deepen the ability of peer reviewers to write constructive and criterion-based feedback
• Calibrate overall ratings among peer reviewers in each content area grade-band cohort
• Review CCSS aligned instructional materials

We began working toward these objectives early on the first full day, and we engaged in rich and meaningful conversations about the Common Core and constructive feedback.  For those of us familiar with providing this type of feedback to students, the feedback Achieve was seeking for us to provide on the unit reviews made complete sense.  After these conversations, we reviewed a common unit and used the EQuIP rubrics and feedback forms to evaluate the unit and practice providing constructive feedback. 

Prior to attending the meeting we each used the tools and rubrics to evaluate a unit.  When we came together, we then calibrated ourselves with our table groups and the whole group to ensure norming as well as deep understanding of the rubric. This led to robust conversations about how we understand the rubrics.  We practiced again on two additional units; each time the conversations after our individual evaluations were essential to the overall process.

The Achieve team formatively assessed our progress and adjusted the meeting goals as the two days progressed.  By the time we left at the end of the second day, I felt extremely confident in the forthcoming work.  We will work individually to evaluate and provide feedback on units that are sent to us in the coming months, and then we will conference call with a small group to discuss our evaluations and work toward a collective feedback form.  Therefore, anyone receiving feedback on units will know their work has been reviewed using a highly calibrated model by multiple individuals collectively.

The Tools

We used the EQuIP rubrics and learned about training materials available if we wish to use them in our own states, districts, and schools.  The rubrics and the feedback forms are organized around four dimensions.

I.     Alignment to the Depth of the CCSS
II.    Key Shifts in the CCSS
III.   Instructional Supports
IV.   Assessment

 

The Takeaways

The tools, processes and experiences will be useful to me in my day job leading the Common Assignment Study for Kentucky as well as in my work with future English teachers from our local university.  I see us using these tools to engage in discussion and to make professional judgments about the products we create.

Two intense days of conversation were a good reminder of how teachers I support might feel when they are working collaboratively with other educators from across the country.  We certainly all have Core standards in common as well as an understanding of Key Instructional Shifts that came with the CCSS, but we also all have our own professional judgment and expertise.  I was pleased to hear our Achieve facilitators say "This is not scientific; it requires professional judgment."  I appreciate this statement because I feel it honors teachers as professionals, especially when teachers are the ones developing units or lessons. 

Kentucky Educators Collaborating with Colorado Educators to Implement Common Core

After an amazing week in Colorado, I can honestly say I'm completely grateful for my job and the opportunities I have to work with educators in Kentucky and across the country.  Each morning last week as I drove to the beautiful Thompson School District Training facility, I drove toward the Rocky Mountains and past a beautiful lake.  The scenery wasn't the only amazing aspect of the week, I worked with excellent educators who all desire the same thing for all students--an equitable opportunity to learn and grow.

This meeting was exceptional because after one face-to-face workshop last summer and a full semester of virtual collaboration on the creation of a unit, teachers were again face-to-face to create new units for the spring semester.  They are creating common units around common content standards, but not scripted step-by step standardized units.  Each teacher contributes to the lessons and makes appropriate adjustments to meet the needs of individual learners in each class.  Teachers are encouraged to think beyond multiple choice tests and toward performance based assessments that will measure deeper learning.   Importantly, teachers lead the unit design and make decisions about the units; their work is facilitated by content experts from Stanford's Center for Assessment Learning and Equity. 

The groups begin by creating Enduring Understandings as learned in our work over the years with Understanding by Design.  These guiding questions serve as a driving force for the the unit of study.  The focus on larger concepts, principles, and ideas keeps us away from a focus on discrete skills alone and helps us consider ideas that will be more engaging to students.  For example, the high school English Language Arts group is looking at the impact of social media on language, and the high school science group is thinking about how humans affect biodiversity. 

Within these larger units of study Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) modules are embedded.  LDC offers an instructional ladder (with mini tasks developed by teachers) designed to help students attain and surpass the demands of the Common Core literacy standards in each subject area.  Effective implementation is vital with both LDC and larger units for teaching the Common Core State Standards.   That's why our Common Assignment Study is exciting.  We have selected top notch teachers who know how to meet the needs of their students and who are always seeking to grow as learners and professionals.

As a former teacher, I know I would have enjoyed an experience like this, so to be there in a support and leadership capacity, was interesting and invigorating in a new way.  I collaborated as a leader because leaders also have to be willing to work together to create the systems and structures we need in schools, districts, and states to support the work of teachers and the learning of students.