Join us in St. Louis for a Midwest Regional Mapping Conference

Midwest educators face unique challenges in their schools, and experts at an upcoming regional conference have tools and strategies that will help.

The Missouri Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development (ASCD) and Curriculum Designers have teamed up to plan a St. Louis conference in October that has been tailored to address specific instructional issues facing local educators

Missouri ASCD is co-sponsoring the Curriculum Mapping Workshop Quality Curriculum Design: Mapping the Curriculum for Improved Student Achievement Oct. 21-23, 2009, at St. Louis University. Representatives from the Missouri ASCD began working with Curriculum Designers almost a year ago to plan this Midwest Regional Conference. In preparation for the conference, Amy Youngblood and Jeff White from ASCD, and Ann Johnson from Curriculum Designers worked together to survey a number of educators in Missouri and surrounding states to identify the key areas of focus, which include the following:

• How do we sharpen alignment to increase student achievement?
• How can we use assessment data to improve student performance?
• How do we organize ourselves to effectively address instructional issues?
• How do we create a consensus map to build consistency and provide flexibility for our learners?

During this workshop, Curriculum Designers will work on helping educators build capacity in addressing these issues with a focus on the following: laying the foundation, launching the work, sustaining the process, and advanced alignment and mapping tasks.  Presenters will share specific strategies and processes that can be used by schools and districts to implement mapping to sharpen alignment and increase student achievement on

• state tests in public schools;
• criterion-referenced tests that are often used in your independent schools; and
• formative assessments throughout the school year.

“A guaranteed and viable curriculum is accomplished through curriculum mapping.  Teachers and students know exactly what the learning expectations are and the learning targets within the current calendar-based system,” said Jeff White, Executive Director, Missouri ASCD.

Amy Youngblood, president of Missouri ASCD and interim director of Successlink, feels that this will be an excellent opportunity for educators to learn about the mapping process and how to effectively utilize it to increase student achievement. 

“This is one of the pieces that MSIP (Missouri School Improvement Program) looks for when looking at curriculum is its viability,” she said. “Mapping provides educators with the opportunity to reflect on and analyze what is being taught in the classroom and at what pace.  The data can then be used to drive curriculum, assessment, and instruction decisions.”       

For information on the Midwest conference, visit our website at www.curriculumdesigners.com/midwest.