Waterford school board to get curriculum update

Waterford - The Board of Education in a special meeting on Monday will hear a presentation on the district's progress toward shifting to Common Core State Standards.

Schools across the country are adopting Common Core State Standards in an effort to provide consistent educational skills and opportunities to students. According to the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices - one of the organizations responsible for promoting the shift - the standards communicate what is expected of students at each grade level.

Currently, only the district's mathematics curriculum is aligned with the Common Core standards, Superintendent of Schools Jerome Belair said Friday.

The district also is working to shift its entire English and Language Arts curriculum by spring 2014.

"These standards will really transfer across all subject areas, not just math, English and language arts," Belair said on Friday. "Teachers will be working to bring the standards to life in reading, writing, speaking, listening, critical thinking, problem solving … When they design a test for the kids, they want to hit as many of those standards as possible."

According to the Governors Association website, the standards "allow our teachers to be better equipped to know exactly what they need to help students learn and establish individualized benchmarks for them," the organization's website states."

Belair said that students will notice the shift in the types of work they'll be asked to do.

"Students should notice that the learning experience is going to be more rigorous, that it will cause them to really stretch, cause them to do more of the work," Belair said. "It will be a more reflective learning experience and they will analyze and assess how to approach the task at hand."

The Board of Education meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. in Town Hall.

j.hanckel@theday.com