Strategic Planning

I have been learning recently about how accreditation aligns with authorization. By accreditation, I am referring to international accreditation organizations such as The Accrediting Commission for Schools, Western Association of Schools and Colleges (ACS WASC), The Council of International Schools (CIS) or New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC).  By authorization, I am referring specifically to The International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO), which provides a curriculum framework for schools which includes the Primary Years Programme (PYP), Middle Year Programme (MYP), Diploma Programme (DP) and Career Related Programme (CP). 

So what is the difference between these two organisations? 

ACS WASC for example will guide the school through a Focus on Learning Process where the school will analyze its effectiveness compared to their research-based standards. The school undertakes an in-depth self-study and looks in particular at the following areas:

• Organization for student learning
• Curriculum, instruction and assessment
• Support for student social-emotional and academic growth
• School culture, child protection and parent/community
• Residential life

The constant question throughout this process is, "How do we know it is effective for all students' learning and well-being?"

The IBO on the other hand provides a curriculum framework. The PYP and MYP should be developed around a vertically aligned set of curriculum standards, however, the DP comes with a prescribed syllabus. The DP is a rigorous program and the PYP and MYP can be, depending on their implementation. The IBO also leads each program through a self-study process where the school develops in the following standards:

• Purpose
• Environment
• Culture
• Learning

So the question is how do these align? For example, ACS WASC will usually leave the school with around five schoolwide goals to work towards in a six-year period. The IB will leave the school with about ten recommendations per program (about 30 total) to be addressed in a five-year period. The answer is through the development of an annual strategic plan. On this plan, a school can break down the goals and recommendations over the five or six-year period into manageable, attainable, and accountable chunks. 

The school leader may then share this document with the school community to inform them of how the school vision will be put into action. I ask the community to keep me accountable to the plan. In our strategic plan each division of the school was supported to develop its own plan, based on the different self-studies. This will be used to support each division leader to implement their plan, thus achieving the school mission. So for example, there is a tab for PYP, MYP, DP, Logistics etc. 

An idea to consider is to put a Gantt chart on the plan to keep track of schoolwide goals over a historical period. This will be particularly useful during staff turnover to see what the school has worked on over the years. Keep learning!

References

ACS WASC Focus on Learning 2020 Edition

IBO Standards and Practices 2020 

Curriculum Mapping of Skills (ATLs)

Curriculum mapping can be daunting and complicated but it does not have to be. In this post, I intend to present a simple process to map skills through a curriculum. What I am documenting here is a half-day off the timetable to get the bulk of the work done. The curriculum coordinator then works with grade-level teams to refine the process as part of an annual program review. Two points to note, in some formal research I undertook in 2013, I documented that in order for professional development to be beneficial it needed to be "built into the schedule rather than tacked on at the end of the day" or weekend. I believe this to be true to this day. The work done here was done during a student-free PD day and the follow-up work by the teaching teams will be done during their 80 minute weekly timetabled collaborative planning time. 

When it comes to curriculum mapping my motto is, "be willing to sacrifice content for the teaching on concepts". This means to me that we aim to cover all the content, however, when this is not possible we should look for power standards or key conceptual understanding over content coverage. Here we mapped all the Approaches to Learning (ATL) skills, however, as the program of inquiry is refined this will change. 

In 2018 the International Baccalaureate released the new Primary Years Programme Principles to Practice. As part of this revision, a new set of ATLs for early years was released in the document The Learner on p. 15. On another document titled Learning and Teaching more ATLs were released for primary grades on p. 26. It is my understanding that these lists are suggested skills and that schools may adopt skills that suit their context. One of our goals is to move from being a 3 program IB school to being a continuum school. In order to make this happen, we decided to implement the new ATLs so that our curriculum would align better with the Middle Years Program. 

To get the ball rolling my secretary created a spreadsheet to work from. I coded all the individual ATLs. The total was 171. I then counted the units in our program which came to be 43. When the number of ATLs was divided by the number of units it came to around 4. We also have 96 single-subject (SS) units. So I asked homeroom teachers to aim for 3 ATLs in one of their units and SS teachers to aim for 3. This way we would cover all of the ATLs at least twice throughout our primary years program. This is the bit I am unsure about and would appreciate feedback from my PLN. As I mentioned above the POI will be refined over time.

Next, we split into three groups. The three early years teams went with our brilliant PYPC, Ms. Maria Zialcita and worked together to map their ATLs into their units. I stayed to work with P6 and P2 together. I made the decision to ask P6 and P2 to stay as they were both extremes of the primary years, the oldest and the youngest. We looked at foundational skills for P2 (Grade 1) and what we felt were the most advanced for P6 (Grade 5). 

After this, we did the same with P3 and P5 before finishing with P4. Our goal was to map the skills developmentally from our three-year-olds up to our eleven-year-olds. What this has given us is a start. What was a daunting task for me has now begun and as I keep mentioning the refining will take place over the coming months and will be further refined each year as the curriculum coordinator leads grade-level teams to make changes to our program of inquiry. As with all of my work, if you would like our ATL map leave your email in the comments, I would be happy to share, "to create a better world through education".