Alignment Coaching
We begin working with schools to ensure that school leaders and teachers have a clear roadmap of the skills they need to teach by the end of the year. This includes understanding the content and depth (degree of difficulty) required by the state standards and determining an appropriate pace for instruction.
Our coaching helps schools to:
- Create working drafts of their year-long instructional plans to outline when they will teach all of the standards in the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks.
- Match instruction with the rigor required by the state standards.
- Document a realistic pace for instruction to ensure that the material outlined in the school’s roadmap can be taught during the teaching time available in one school year.
- Analyze these roadmaps at school-wide levels to avoid additional potential gaps between grade-levels.
Field Notes
- Most public schools use off-the-shelf textbooks. These textbooks are designed for a national market and may or may not be aligned with the Massachusetts state standards. In addition, they often do not present concepts to the high degree of difficulty that the state of Massachusetts assesses students at on the end of the year state assessments.
- Since many teachers use these off-the-shelf textbooks, they may not fully understand the details of what it means to master the Massachusetts state standards. For example, one 7th grade math standard states that students must be able to divide fractions. A teacher may give a quiz that asks them to do basic computation such as 16 ÷ 2/3 = X, and the students may do quite well on this quiz. She feels assured that her students know how to divide with fractions. But analysis of the end of the year state assessment (MCAS) questions for this standard reveals that mastery of this standard requires students to divide fractions in the context of a word problem, such as "A tub of popcorn contains 16 cups of popcorn. A single serving size is 2/3 cup. What is the total number of single servings that are in the tub of popcorn?" Mastery of the standard means that students must be able to first decipher from a word problem when a problem requires the operation of dividing with a fraction, and then must be able to compute using division. This degree of difficulty is not necessarily evident from reading the standard, yet is essential in meeting the state requirements.
