Academics & Strategic Initiatives

Teacher watching what student is doing on the computer

Curriculum is the cornerstone of a school district’s instructional focus and its beliefs in what students need to know and will be able to do to succeed in work and advanced education. A quality curriculum depends on the strength of its development and construction of its individual components and how they are designed and blended in a strong comprehensive program which meets the needs of all learners.

Student Learning Goals
Professional Learning Goals

Student Learning Goals

All Norwich Public Schools students will be challenged to develop, embrace and attain learning goals that encapsulate the following essential elements as a means to prepare them to be independent thinkers and collaborative team players invested in building a better future.

Inquiry: Students show intellectual curiosity and wonder about the world. Students ask thoughtful questions, and seek out answers.
Expression: Students communicate what they know and what they need to know. Students construct arguments with evidence and critique the reasoning of others.
Critical Thinking: Students analyze, synthesize, and draw conclusions from information. Students generate solutions to problems using both creative and critical thought. Students keep an open mind to different viewpoints.
Collaboration: Students contribute to the overall effort of the group. Students work well with diverse individuals in various situations. Students initiate and cultivate community partnerships.
Organization: Students sift through ideas and data, arranging them wisely and make sense of them. Students set manageable goals, plan, and monitor time to achieve them.
Attentiveness: Students focus on the task at hand and focus on details of their work.
Perseverance: Students demonstrate tenacity in tackling tasks despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.
Reflection: Students review and think about their actions and work with the purpose of learning more about themselves.

Professional Learning Goals

As a professional learning community we will ask thoughtful questions to analyze and draw conclusions while remaining curious about diverse student needs. The learning community fosters high expectations, effective communication, strong relationships and ownership of learning through engaged collaboration and inquiry.

Inquiry: We observe and are curious about our students and their interests. We value quantitative and qualitative data, ask hard questions and collectively create solutions. We are in a constant state of inquiry about our own practice as educators modeling lifelong learning.
Expression: We communicate our professional learning needs as they relate to district goals and as part of creating a structure of support for our development of a unified mindset.
Critical Thinking: We analyze, synthesize, and draw conclusions from multiple sources; utilizing this data to generate solutions to problems, rooted in best practice, through both creative and critical thought.
Collaboration: We contribute to the overall effort of the group working well with diverse individuals in various situations. We initiate and cultivate partnerships between and amongst buildings and departments and the greater Norwich community.
Attentiveness: We stay focused on the task at hand and on the details of our work while keeping clear of the greater district goals.
Perseverance: We demonstrate, and model for our students, tenacity in tackling tasks despite difficulty or delay in achieving success, and recognizing the learning opportunities inherent in mistakes and the value of taking risks.
Reflection: We review and think about our actions and work with the purpose of learning more about ourselves.

NPS Instructional Framework

The Instructional Framework developed by NPS staff sets the structure of how our educators teach students in the classroom.

It is organized through the task, student, teacher tripod view of instruction presented by Richard Elmore as the Instructional Core. This has become the way we talk about instruction in Norwich. Like a tripod, if you change one element in the Instructional Core, you must change the others to keep everything balanced. Elmore’s book, Instructional Rounds in Education is a great resource to learn more about the Instructional Core.

Classroom Environment

Tasks are Student Centered

Tasks are aligned to grade level standards, inspire wonder and curiosity, target content misconceptions, showcase student thinking, include meaningful discourse, and require students to defend their conclusions using evidence.

My Favorite No: Learning from Mistakes

Teachers Believe in their Students

Teachers make strong connections with their students, provide predictable routines and safe environments, intentionally plan instruction and provide actionable feedback for each student.

Every Student Needs a Champion

Students Work Together

Students take academic risks, actively engage each other in the learning process, freely ask and pose questions, reflect on their own and the work of others, respectfully challenge opposing viewpoints and actions, and persevere through the learning process while cheering on the learning community.

Austin's Butterfly

Activate

Activate is the part of our lessons where students connect to prior knowledge/skills recognizing that retrieval is key to long term memory (Brown et al., 2014). The task should be connected to where students have been, where students will be today, and where students are going.

Task

Assess prior knowledge/achievement
Make connections (recall information)
Demonstrate previous learned skills
Analyze work for mistakes
Predict misconceptions

Teacher

Assessing/checking for understanding for the specific task
Sharing student work
Facilitating discourse
Asking questions

Student

Following routines
Asking questions
Engaging in discourse
Making connections (recalling information)
Solving problems

Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel
Peter Brown is writer and novelist who worked with Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, both professors of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, on their book Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. This book has the practitioner in mind as it is easy to read, presents the research on how we store and remember information, and includes practical and easy to implement suggestions for teaching and learning.

Share Out

Share is the part of the lesson where students consolidate their learning. Consolidation is the process of transferring knowledge and skills from short term memory to long term memory. For consolidation to take place students must make connections between that day’s learning, previous learning and forecasting where learning goes next (Levine, 2002).

Task

Make connections to previous learning and independent practice or work outside of the classroom
Share thinking work or strategies
Analyze work for mistakes
Evaluating work against a rubric or exemplar
Accountable talk
Celebrate perseverance, grit and content learning

Teacher

Reinforcing transfer, agency and independence
Restating lesson objective or teaching point
Asking questions
Check-in on goal setting
Reflecting on next steps, future lesson
Facilitating (minimize teacher talk) accountable talk using stems, prompts, questions
Fostering connections to previous learning, independent practice, next steps

Student

Asking questions of and providing feedback to their peers
Actively listens to peers
Engaging in discourse (i.e. turn and talk, partner share, whole class conversation)
Sharing their work and learning from others
Explains steps, obstacles, outcomes and thinking
Evaluating their own work against a rubric or exemplar
Reflecting on their learning (i.e. recording their thoughts on post-its, journal entry, discourse)
Self assess to set new goals
Planning for the work of the next day, based on the work of today (i.e. setting goals for book clubs)

Mel Levine
Dr. Mel Levine is a professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School and the director of the university’s Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning. In his book, A Mind at a Time, Levine presents the neuroscience of how brains function and focuses on how different “minds” learn differently. The science is presented thoroughly, not making for a quick read, but also includes practical tips for teachers and parents to work to bypass obstacles for children to be successful at home and in the classroom.

Mini Lesson

Mini Lessons are a brief part of the entire lesson that follow a predictable structure. During the mini lesson teachers communicate a clear student learning objective, teach a strategy or process using one of several teaching methods. Teachers provide students with an opportunity to apply the strategy or clarify the process expectations, restate what the students have learned as students transition to the guided practice/inquiry portion of the lesson. (Calkins, 2015)

Task

Communicate objective
Establish criteria for success
Set expectations
Set a purpose for learning
Demonstrate a strategy (teacher and student)
Ask an inquiry question
Predict an outcome

Teacher

Communicating a clear learning objective
Establishing criteria for success
Facilitating discourse
Monitoring for understanding and providing feedback
Modeling a strategy or process
Posing an inquiry question

Student

Listening
Responding to and asking questions
Engaging in discourse
Predicting
Thinking about their thinking (meta-cognition)
Applying a strategy
Making connections

Lucy Calkins
Lucy Calkins is the Founding Director of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Her work has influenced literacy instruction around the globe. Calkins is one of the original architects of the ‘workshop’ approach to teaching reading and writing; with her work built on the core belief all children can learn to read and write at high levels. She has authored more than 20 books, including Pathways to the Common Core and Reading and Units of Study in Reading & Writing, which are “widely regarded as foundational to language arts education throughout the world”.

Guided Practice & Inquiry

Guided practice is part of the lesson where the students are the workers of the content. Students practice the skill, strategy or concept presented during the minilesson with the goal of transfer. Teaching for transfer means that learners are given the opportunities to apply their learning to new situations and receive timely feedback on their performance (Wiggins & McTighe, 2011).

Task

Partner work
Cooperative Learning
Performance Tasks
Inquiry Based Learning Task
Write for a variety of purposes, including writing about reading
Solve real world problems
Create and/or perform
Apply lessons from the past to current and future events and issues
Make approximations, make meaning, acquire skill, transfer

Teacher

Assessing to match learner to task and set goals
Monitoring for understanding and transfer
Providing specific feedback
Differentiating instruction and practice
Facilitating small groups
Coaching students with prompts and questions
Providing rubrics and exemplars
Thinking aloud
Conferring with individuals
Choosing student work to highlight that can apply to all the learners

Student

Listening to peers
Setting goals
Engaging in discourse
Tracking thinking
Using tools to reflect on progress
Reflecting
Monitoring progress toward goals
Solving problems
Applying strategy, process, or approximating
Taking Notes
Small groups - cooperative learning
Making errors

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe
Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe are the writing team that have brought us the Understand by Design (UbD) curriculum framework used all over the world. This is the curriculum framework that is at the heart of curriculum unit design in Norwich. Their book The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units is an excellent resource for all teachers, curriculum developers, and educational leaders.

Curriculum Standards

These standards define the knowledge and skills students strive to acquire throughout their k-12 education in English Language Arts, Math and Science.

Common Core
Next Generation Science