I was looking at the CHS plan the other day. Here it is from top down. Each one is designed to inform the one below it.
- District Goals
- CHS Mission and Graduation Expectations
- K-12 Curriculum Guides
- Programs--The Departments at the School
- Overarching Competencies--the ones that are specific to a subject area or department. Like graphing in science.
- Courses
- Course Competencies
As I looked at it for the hundredth time and compared it to books and planning guides and my notes from the past few years I began to think of it differently than I ever had before.
First, I began to realize that in this year of work CHS has literally gone from number 1. right down (or will go) to competencies. Because of the way the year has been organized and because of the pressure from our accrediting body this has been the way we have had to go about it. The thing is--we went about it exactly the right way. Why in the world would you start to think about course competencies before you had thought of the overarching competencies of a subject area? Wouldn't you want to know which competency type things were going to appear in every course? Well we have done the same thing with our whole school. We have identified what we want graduates to look like and are working on seeing how they get there.
Second, I came to see that in designing our process to go over many years what we really are doing is going through the steps from 1-7 and THEN going back to number 1 to revise from the top down again. We will use the data that we have collected this year to inform what we should do, how we should change things to make them better.
Each time I look at it it becomes more clear that we are doing the right thing. How many people believe that? I'm not sure--but I am confident that we are doing the right thing.
