This new federal Middle School disciplinary literacy grant fully aligns with NYCDOE’s recently-launched New York Reads. Indeed, the grant creates a great opportunity for your teachers and students to engage preliminarily with rigorous standards-driven curricula and disciplinary performance writing assessment tasks embedded in your existing curricula (Wit & Wisdom; HMH; EL). Not just for ELA teachers, the grant provides an opportunity for science and social studies teachers to reinforce New York Reads through teaching disciplinary writing tasks. The UbD backwards-designed tasks explicitly scaffold the literacy and disciplinary content standards (CCSS, NGSS, C3) providing a “predictable format so that students understand the goal of each lesson” building “college and career readiness” that scaffolds “daily independent reading and writing” with explicit “additional support” for students with special needs. LDC has also recently been awarded an additional federal grant to design and support instruction that is “culturally diverse and motivating” — another goal of New York Reads.
LDC partners with you in determining a Problem of Practice that will engage your instructional leadership team and teachers for the coming year. Together we will set a baseline understanding of how well the school system is at ensuring grade-level rigor in all classrooms, and your ILT team will suppport the teacher PLCs as they embed in their curriculum standards-aligned, disciplinary reading-and-writing tasks validated by the Stanford Center for Assessment Learning and Equity (SCALE). During the first and second semesters, it would be expected that your ELA, Science, and Social Studies teachers would instruct the curriculum embedded performance writing tasks.
The performance tasks that your teachers would implement — as well as the backwards-designed instructional plans that accompany them — are built based upon LDC’s curriculum audit and other feedback we receive from schools.
To see a limited set of examples of existing LDC modules, please click here.
School instructional leadership teams (ILTs) would be supported in bi-monthly learning experiences with a host of resources that would enable ILTs to drive LDC’s systems approach to support instruction coherently across curricula, assessment, and educator professional learning:
LDC’s instructional systems model implements Dick Elmore’s Instructional Core through SCALE-validated, curriculum embedded writing performance tasks supported by weekly teacher PLC and ILT learning. The school’s existing curricula (ELA/Sci/SS) will be augmented by embedding Dylan Wiliam-style, SCALE-validated curriculum writing performance task assessments. LDC reviews a school’s ELA, Science, and Social Studies -– including curricular texts –- and provides writing performance task assessments that schools strategically embed in their existing curricula using existing curricular texts. SCALE has validated these writing performance tasks to measure CAASPP and California science and social studies standards (among others).
Nationally-calibrated student work analysis (using SCALE’s grade-level student rubrics [ELA/Sci/SS]) is conducted at least monthly to highlight student progress over time. Teachers learn through both synchronous and online asynchronous PD every week in their PLCs. LDC simultaneously trains the school’s ILT twice a month to build the internal school capacity in one year to monitor and support deep student learning post grant.
LDC uses user-centered design to ensure that its curriculum, professional learning, and online platform are all teacher-driven. LDC began as a community of educators determined to eliminate achievement gaps by providing all students with the same rigorous writing assignments that privileged kids already receive. Today, LDC creates assignments for most K-12 major content areas. LDC also provides professional support to help teachers adapt their practices and inject more rigor in their everyday classroom instruction. As a result, students who complete LDC assignments are up to 9 months ahead in their learning compared to students who do not have access to LDC Real Works Modules.
LDC’s work under a previous federal grant generated results proving its impact and also earned LDC the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s 2019 Spotlight Award as one of three organizations in the world leading effective Continuous Improvement School Networks.
Links to Relevant Resources:
