Office of Curriculum, Technology, & Assessment

Title II, Part D - Awards 2007-2008

Mitchell School District 17-2

The Mitchell, Bonesteel-Fairfax, Wagner, and Wessington Springs School Districts will enhance their educational programming through their existing technology sources because their current inclusion in the Classroom Connections project

Vision: Schools have been creating curriculum documents since Aristotle. People have been ignoring those curriculum documents the very instant they were memorialized on paper. New computer technologies, in this case Tech Paths may now usher in the living curriculum in the areas of math, science, and reading. This will be one which is used on a daily basis, actually helps to plan the next day’s and week’s and month’s lesson plan; is reviewed, critiqued, enhanced, and revised on a regular basis not by some curriculum director in a central office, but by the very teachers who use it. It will become an ever-changing document, constantly shifted and re-prioritized by teachers. We envision these math, reading and science curricula, tightly fastened to the state standards, as a means of focusing student achievement on the clearly set goals of those standards.

The overall grant project will involve professional development in curriculum mapping, the writing of core units and assessments, and the actual mapping of curriculum. The final product resulting from this project will be the K-12 curriculum maps for each district in the areas of math, reading, and science.

The first outcome result will be teachers who are constantly aware of and involved in the curriculum they teach. The second outcome result will be higher student achievement in these 3 areas. This result will occur because teachers are more focused on the type of instruction necessary to meet state standards, the basis for the achievement testing of our students.