While the summer months provide a welcome change of pace for students and teachers, many Bedford educators renew themselves over the summer by engaging in collaborative reflection on their practice with an eye toward improving some area of their curriculum or instruction. In our experience, collaborative work on curriculum over the summer is one of the most effective ways to advance our work as professionals. For that reason, Bedford now commits about half of its professional development budget to these efforts.
The summer of 2017 saw extensive training and curriculum development for our co-teaching teams in all four buildings. This year the training was led by our own experienced teachers, rather than by consultants, with very good results. While we needed consultants to help us get the training underway, we have now developed enough capacity to deepen the work using teacher leaders and coaches. Co-teaching teams will also have release and common planning time during the school year to continue developing and refining their work with students. Co-teaching will be presented to school committee by participating trainers and teachers in early December.
Several projects were devoted to integration of higher order thinking skills as part of out literacy implementation in 17-18: Second grade teachers continued to deepen their work on integrated learning that encourages critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity; elementary math and science coordinators and teachers developed more authentic and integrated performance tasks; JGMS social studies teachers strengthened the literacy skills sequence and training within their curricula; grade 8 ELA teachers strengthened the thematic unity of their course, incorporating a culminating project that knits their course together.
Equity and diversity continue as priorities, with work being done on the Teaching Tolerance curriculum at Davis, as well as extensive work increasing access to and student engagement in advanced courses at the secondary level. Educators continued development of the un-levelled courses in senior English, African-American Studies and Asian-American Studies. Both courses have nearly doubled their enrollment for the 17-18 school year.
The summer curriculum work was presented to school committee earlier this month and is linked below.
2017 Summer Curriculum Development
