Back to school often brings many changes for students and staff alike. Curriculum Trak is often connected to school improvement initiatives which can often get overlooked in the onboarding process of new personnel. Over the last few weeks, we have highlighted some of the steps a school can take to bring new staff members up to speed when it comes to your curriculum maps and plans. Today, we offer the next installment in this series by looking at some tips for reviewing and using the data you have been collecting.
As you slowly complete the bulk of your mapping goals, you may be finding that you are in a place where you would like to begin gaining the valuable insights you have been working so hard to collect. Let’s make this year the year for data-driven curriculum improvement decisions. Today, we would like to offer some practical steps you can take to evaluate and interpret the data you have in your account. Here are a few review tools you can use to reach specific goals:
- Progress Report. This report, found in the Reports icon and available to any user, is great for seeing which courses have been mapped and which may still need more work. The color coding shows how many fields have content in them compared to how many units have been created. This is a great place to get a quick overview of where your school is currently with its mapping goals.
- Scope and Sequence. If your users have been able to provide quite a bit of mapping content, the Scope and Sequence report is a great way to see what order your courses are taught in, and what order concepts are taught within that class. It provides several reporting options which will give you a variety of ways to get a high-level understanding of your overall curriculum.
- Benchmarks Reports (Vertical Alignment). Knowing how your courses align to the state or national standards you have adopted can be very helpful when it comes to conversations among staff, within departments, or with prospective parents. This is also helpful for classroom teachers to review what they have done and where they may need to plan for improvement. Curriculum Trak has a variety of benchmark reports that are designed to pull data in a variety of ways depending on your needs.
- View Curriculum by Template Field. Your staff, depending on their role, may want to drill down to find specific details about your courses. Perhaps it is what literature books are required which year, what specific resources every teacher is using in a specific program area, or how their teaching strategies compares with those of the teacher before or after them. The “View Curriculum by Template Field” report allows you to gather data from a variety of areas into a single report. It is helpful for broadening your own view of what is happening around you or even finding differences in a single program from start to finish. This report is a report worth exploring.
You can find out more about our report options here (scroll to the “Reports” section). We also offer a webinar for your staff related to these report options. If you would like to consider this webinar, you can find more information here. Contact support if you have a specific information you are seeking to collect.
