Special to
L’Observateur

LAPLACE — A team of educators in St. John the Baptist Parish has been working this summer to provide the resources and guidance teachers need to have a successful 2014-15 school year.

Their resulting work — the Scope and Sequence for English/Language Arts and Math — was presented to teachers during a two-day professional development workshop July 21 and 23 at LaPlace Elementary School.

While the district has adopted the Louisiana Department of Education Guidebook as its main core curriculum for English/Language Arts and Eureka Math as its main core curriculum for math in order to align with national standards, those provide a broad overview of what teachers should be teaching. It’s been left to districts to provide their teachers with specifics.

“After we identified our curriculums, we had our curriculum facilitators lead our teacher leaders and teacher facilitators through the curriculum-design process to make it more applicable to our district,” Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum Quentina Timoll said.

That group of educators then focused on curriculum mapping, providing the framework for what should be taught and when and at what point progress should be monitored at the district level.

“What we are doing is unifying the district so that at the nine-week mark, for example, if we say let’s stop and test where all of our students are, then they are at the same point,” Timoll said. “Then depending on the results of those benchmark assessments, we can adapt as a district.”

Timoll expects four to five such assessments during the school year, with teachers testing more often so they know what to reteach.

“So there’s some intervention built in,” she said.

The team also researched to find supplemental material to add to St. John’s OnCourse Curriculum Portal, which began as an online lesson-planning tool and has been expanded to include curriculum resources and tools for instruction, such as videos.

“It’s a one-stop shop for curriculum and instruction,” Timoll said. “We’ve worked with our technology department to find technology to supplement curriculum. It’s everything teachers need in one location.”

St. John’s curriculum team includes three curriculum facilitators, a master teacher for each school, approximately 22 teacher leaders who are the front line to teachers and who were the presenters at the professional development and about 10 teacher facilitators who are the vetting pool for information before it is given to teachers.

“So we have four layers of professional development giving feedback,” Timoll said. “That’s a 40-50 member team of teachers doing summer curriculum work.”

One member of that team is Keila Joseph, who does double duty as a teacher leader and master teacher at Garyville-Mt. Airy Math and Science Magnet School.

“The biggest thing is we wanted teachers to have something on hand, so they didn’t have to take their time to do tons of research themselves,” she said. “At the professional development we are telling them, ‘We know what you need and we went out and found it.’”

Joseph estimated she and her partner teacher dedicated about 15 hours of work plus countless texts and emails to map out the curriculum in one subject for one grade.

“Even though I didn’t have a break, I’m excited to come back to school because I’m so excited to have this for our teachers,” she said.