Project Kyosei helps Galt align classroom curriculum

By Julie Z. Giese
News-Sentinel staff writer

In the last few years, Galt educators have worked to align curriculum to state academic standards.

Teachers have compared their daily lessons to the standards, in effect detailed goals of what state officials believe students should learn.

Karen Schauer

“We’re making progress,” said Karen Schauer, Galt elementary school district curriculum director. “It’s about being strategic with time used to maximize student learning.”

The Galt educators, like other teachers throughout the state, are trying to sort out exactly what should be taught. But the district took part in a three-year project which helped get the district moving ahead in standards-based practice.

The elementary school district worked with Western Assessment Collaborative at West Ed, a San Francisco-based educational research and development firm.

The Galt district was one of several to participate in the unique partnership called Project Kyosei to support standards-based teaching.

In Japanese, the word Kyosei means cooperation. The intent of the project was to develop ways schools can put standard-based teaching into practice, according to the group.

“What standards-based reform did was really to ask people to think differently about teaching,” said Kate Jamentz, WAC director.

The project began four years ago when the state was ushering in academic standards.

“For too long, we’ve had schools that didn’t have agreement on what students should know,” Jamentz said.

Standards-based reform efforts forced schools to look at ways of holding all students accountable for high achievement, she said.

“It really comes down to an equity issue. We believe all kids should be successful,” she said.

Through the project, teachers worked to answer three questions:

• What should students know?

• How do we know if the students know it?

• What do we do if they don’t know it?

The Galt educators created district standards, chose tests to measure progress and learned how to use testing data to raise student achievement, Schauer said. Throughout the process, they shared their results with the other school districts.

Lodi Unified School District officials are also working to align curriculum with state standards.

The district just drafted lists of standards for language arts and math which will be the priorities for classroom teaching, said Barbara Johnston, Lodi Unified’s curriculum, instruction and assessment administrative director.

“The next piece is to begin aligning textbook materials and assessments with standards,” she said.

Johnston said the alignment process and teacher training will be completed within the next three years.

Some Galt educators say the West Ed partnership has propelled the process.

Cheryl Trujillo, a second-grade teacher at Valley Oaks Elementary School, said the standards have transformed the craft of teaching.

In the past, teachers were given curriculum, presented their lessons and then tested whether students learned the information, Trujillo said.

The new focus was on developing tests and lessons expressly around the standards.

“It was really a different way at looking at things,” she said. “We are using assessments to drive instruction rather than simply testing how students did.”

Trujillo sees the change in her classroom daily in higher achievement. “The kids are doing a lot better,” she said.

In the last year, teachers have also worked on backwards curriculum mapping — where they look at their daily lessons and track where they’re teaching the standards — to improve teaching in language arts and math.

Cleo Del Torio-Angulano, a Greer Middle School assistant principal, said the educators have spent hundreds of hours on the curriculum mapping.

“It took a while for us to see why we were doing it and where this is going,” she said. “Now it’s making sense.”

The goal of the mapping is to insure curriculum is aligned with standards and to find weak areas.

Despite the challenges, Del Torio-Angulano said it would have been more difficult without their partners.

“If it hadn’t been for West Ed, it would have been really hard to look at the whole picture,” she said.

One year after the project ended, WAC leaders are cautiously optimistic that their work is helping to raise student achievement.

“It takes a lot to change a school,” Jamentz said. “We’ve seen some very promising results, but it takes the kind of commitment that Galt has shown to make a difference.”