Curriculum and Instruction
Director of Curriculum and Instruction - Bill Newton
The HRCSD Professional Development Mission Statement is to increase student learning by providing: standards-based instruction with higher levels of Rigor and Relevance, and improved strategies for formative and summative assessments.
Rigorous instruction requires students to demonstrate learning using higher order thinking skills – creating, evaluating and analyzing. To facilitate increased rigor, teachers will be provided professional development and peer collaboration time in order to:
- Identify important enduring understandings/big ideas/core standards
- Identify how students will demonstrate their learning
- Create common performance assessments
- Define common rubrics that assess student learning.
Relevant instruction provides students with opportunities to apply their understanding in more complex settings: across disciplines, in real-world predictable contexts, and in real-world, unpredictable situations. Relevance allows students to connect what they are learning in the classroom to other learning and to participate in directing their own learning.
Performance assessments aimed at Rigor & Relevance provide ongoing opportunities for students to use higher order thinking skills and knowledge from multiple disciplines across various contexts.
Formative Assessment is assessment that occurs during instruction and that is designed to help students and teachers to understand how learning is progressing. This type of assessment is also referred to as Assessment for Learning.
Summative Assessment is assessment that occurs after instruction and that is designed to determine how much the student has learned. This type of assessment is also referred to as Assessment of Learning.