Integrated services to improve your education system
We have more than a decade's experience helping districts and states across the nation build capacity to meet high academic standards.
Our services to support your successful CCSS implementation include expert in-district, on-site support, as well as ongoing professional development and technical assistance.
We strongly believe that effective systems improvement strategies must include both leadership strands and teacher strands that are coherent, connected, and focused on the outcomes to be accomplished.
Thus, we work with you to understand your needs so we can tailor a response to address your specific issues or concerns.
Examples of our available tools and sessions include the following.
Changing Their Minds: Improving Achievement by Transforming Academic Identities
Through the classroom culture they foster, teachers and leaders play an important role in shaping how students think about learning and academic achievement. In this session, participants explore new research and innovative strategies that can positively influence students' academic identities. More information about Changing Their Minds.
Assessing and Advancing the Implementation of the Common Core State Standards
Using this new tool, key leaders, representing all levels of the district system and including district and campus administration and lead teachers, will engage in structured collaborative conversations about the implementation of the standards.
After identifying the current state of district structures and practices, this representative group will craft recommendations to district decisionmakers for ways to advance districtwide implementation of the Common Core State Standards for mathematics and for English language arts—and of the emerging new standards for science.
Building a Strong Foundation: Developing a Standards-Aligned Instructional Program.
Using a coherent set of Dana Center protocols, representative writing teams of teachers for a given core content area K–12—organized by content and grade-level bands—will first engage in the foundational work of gaining a common depth of understanding and fluency with the standards.
After that study of the standards, the teacher teams will engage in a process to develop, implement, and refine a District Curriculum Framework (consisting of a Scope and Sequence document and a set of aligned Units of Study) in their core content area.
Subcomponent sessions of this sequence include the following.
- A Study of the Common Core State Standards
Historically, the Dana Center has offered this professional development as a 1-day face-to-face session. Coming in fall 2012, we will also offer it as a multiweek online professional development program.
In this professional development, representative teachers and leaders will work toward a deep level of understanding of the purpose, intent, depth, and clarity of the standards.
This work is also designed to foster among teachers and leaders a sense of urgency and commitment to engage in an ongoing study of the standards on campuses and throughout the district.
Teachers and leaders will practice using both horizontal and vertical alignment tools that can be leveraged among groups of teachers to build a common understanding of the standards and to strengthen capacity systemwide for continuing study of—and alignment to—the standards.
- Extending Our Study: The Professional Teaching Model
Teachers in representative teams will study the standards to develop their understanding of the vertical and horizontal alignment of the student expectations and to plan lessons that address implications for classroom practice.
This study and lesson development will focus on areas within the standards in which content shifts significantly and for which there are potential challenges to classroom implementation.
By using diagnostic, goal setting, mapping, and monitoring tools, these teachers will initiate or strengthen professional learning communities among their colleagues.
- District Curriculum Frameworks: Development, Implementation, and Refinement
This professional development series includes workshops on developing a Scope and Sequence as well as Units of Study, and includes support for Implementation, Instructional Materials Analysis and Selection, and Curriculum Framework Refinement. More information about District Curriculum Frameworks.