Overview
As a curriculum leader or instructional coach, it is important to foster an environment where teachers can collaborate across grade levels or content areas. By creating these opportunities, educators can share best practices, innovative strategies, and diverse perspectives that enrich the curriculum and enhance student learning outcomes. Highlighting the vertical and horizontal alignment of standards can help identify and bridge gaps in instructional approaches.
To wrap up the school year and to begin thinking ahead to the following year, you are planning the last teacher in-service day. You are organizing a gallery walk for each grade level or content area to share their work with colleagues across the entire school to increase vertical and horizontal curricular alignment and share new ideas.
Using a free online tool, such as Canva, create a two-page digital handout that will be sent to teachers to inform them of this event and the expectations for their involvement. Include the following:
- The purpose of the gallery walk.
- A description of why curriculum alignment and knowledge of grade level and/or content area standards outside of the teachers’ normal roles is important and can support their own planning and instruction.
- Explanation and justification of the artifacts that should be shared by each grade level/content area (i.e., vertical and horizontal curriculum maps, sample lesson plans, scaffolded standards, assessments that are used for benchmarking, progress monitoring, and other curriculum examples, signature assignments, professional sources such as curriculum guides, books, manipulatives).
- At least two suggestions explaining how the information can be displayed.
Note: You may choose to add this assignment to the “Examples of Coursework” section of your Digital Portfolio from EDU-527.
Support your work with 2-3 scholarly resources.
Submit a link to your digital handout and scholarly resources as a single document. Ensure the link can be viewed by others prior to submitting.
The digital handout should include graphics that are relevant to the content, visually appealing, and use space appropriately.
While APA Style is not required for the body of this assignment, solid academic writing is expected, and documentation of sources should be presented using APA formatting guidelines, which can be found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.