School Improvement Plan

Over the next few years, I think one of our school goals is to make our curriculum more align. That means, the transitioning is smoother for kids. You see, with private school, teachers have more freedom in their lesson planning which can be a HUGE positive. There is much more room to implement creative learning. However, a negative is that sometimes the curriculum does not align. For example, one teacher might teach English or Writing in a very specific way, and the other teacher might use a completely different format. They may even use different textbooks with contradictory methods. To ease this problem, we are having more meetings. For example, 1st and 2nd grade meet. Then 2nd and 3rd grade meet, and so on. Then when all come together for one "big" meeting to make sure students are where they need to be by middle school and teachers don't have 100 kids with 4 different ways of solving problems or have hugely different levels of exposure to certain areas. This hurts us is all subject areas. Think about one class doing a unit on space, then another class did a unit on animals instead. Well, what is next years teacher supposed to do? We are collected data based on surveys and feedback from our meetings. We are also making our lesson plans and curricular aims available online so we can all share what we are doing to make sure our students are equally prepared for the next year. Making our lessons available online for the entire faculty to see really helps us as teachers, and the administrators. It also helps when we receive our standardized test scores back, we can look online and see where there is a "hole" in the curriculum and how and what grade we need to fix it. We are starting to realize that it all begins in Kindergarten, and as we continue to build on those foundations, we must stay aligned. Teaching in different methods is great, but we need to have use the same curriculum guide to follow to make it easier on students and teachers. I think all our future assessments will be greatly improved by sharing lessons online with each other and using standardized tests to help measure our success and recognize our weaknesses.