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Collaborative Professional Development and Curriculum Design for Success
The district's Blueprint for Better High Schools guides the work of Secondary Education. The division is dedicated to continuous collaboration with Saint Paul's high schools on all initiatives at all stages of planning and implementation of our shared efforts to build and sustain first class curriculum and instruction for Saint Paul secondary students. The division's work is characterized by a focus on collaboration, academic needs of students, instructional practice, systems thinking, people development, friendliness to small learning communities, and the establishment of guaranteed and viable standards-based and locally relevant curriculum.
We are pursuing proactive responses to the social, academic, and professional challenges our high schools face. We are striving to create curriculum coherence in a small-learning com- munity environment in a district committed to site-based management while continually focusing attention on issues of teaching and learning at the classroom level.
Secondary Education initiatives include:
- Oversight and guidance for local development of building curriculum scope and sequence plans encompassing the new Minnesota State Academic Standards and specifications of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments
- The completion and implementation of a new K-12 course numbering system
- Development and implementation of relevant high school assessment tools such as Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment practice exams, common course assessments, and the establishment of shared protocols for the examination of student work
- Support and guidance for collaboratively chosen and strategically placed specialty programs such as Read 180, Ramp Up, Renaissance Math, and summer school pilots
- Response to building requests for training and assistance in the areas of high school writing and literacy, curriculum mapping, and classroom management
- The establishment of eSP, the district's stable of online high school course offerings
- Ongoing support and guidance to professional learning communities of teachers in each high school as a core professional development activity
- Building arts-integrated and instructionally engaging demonstration classrooms in our high schools in collaboration with the Safe Space/Arts Literacy Project of Brown University
- Hosting a High School Critical Literacy Chautauqua
- Development and implementation of a secondary Equitable Teaching Framework which includes integration and activation of the Institute for Learning's nine Principles of Learning with a focus on high school instruction
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