Yorkville students will be going back to class in about 10 days, but many of their teachers have been working over the summer preparing new curriculum.
Teachers in career and technical education programs reported on their work at last week’s Board of Education meeting.
Jonathan Calder, the chair of the CTE (Career and Technical Education) division, noted the difficulty in getting this curriculum revised since it encompasses 49 classes in subject areas including engineering, foods, accounting, applied technology and computer science.
All of the curriculum is developed to align with national standards, which differ in each subject area.
Computer science teachers planned their curriculum using standards from the World Wide Web Consortium and based on courses developed by faculty at Harvard and MIT.
Calder pointed out that only one in 10 high schools in the United States offers a computer science class, much less the variety offered at YHS.
However, within each subject area teachers worked together. All business teachers, for example, worked to align their courses with other course in that subject, Calder said.
The second course in the Project Lead The Way engineering and applied technology program starts at the high school this fall and a new introductory engineering class will be offered at Yorkville Middle School.
The results of the 12 teachers’ work includes the expansion of business, computer science and engineering classes to the Yorkville Middle School and an overhaul of the Family and Consumer Science program at YMS.
Board member Jason Senffner said he was glad to see the coordination of classes at the middle school with the high school and added he hoped it was a step toward offering dual credit for classes. Board member Dr. Lynn Burks said she would like to see coursework designed so high school students could earn college credit and “walk out of here with an associate’s degree.”
Superintendent Tim Shimp said offering dual credit for classes is difficult unless curriculum at both levels is aligned. “Now it is,” he said.
However, Kelley Gallt, director of teaching and learning, cautioned that it will be another year or two until dual credit is possible. First the teachers need to work with the new curriculum and validate that students are learning what they should.
As the staff begins teaching the revised curriculum, Calder said teachers in the CTE programs will also be writing the new tests and, after they give them to students, validating them.
The district has a long-range curriculum planning calendar that calls for each area of study to be reviewed districtwide every five years. Gallt said some of the steps in that plan may be moved up so teachers can evaluate the newly developed tests before their own performance is evaluated based on student scores. That will begin in the 2016-17 school year.
Moving up the curriculum review schedule will be difficult to do in the area of language arts, she said, because it encompasses so many areas. However, "it would be a smart move on our part,” she said.
Gallt also said the curriculum review plan is arranged so the district isn’t faced with the purchase of a lot of books or other resource material in any one year.