Academics

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.

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.

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.

INSTRUCTIONAL FRAMEWORK 101 GUIDEBOOK

Learn more about CT Common Core Standards

• CT Science Standards
• NGSS-CT Toolkit for Parents

Learn more about Next Generation Science