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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I sometimes wonder if any of these Central Office folks have kids in the system, because they don't seem to have any sense of urgency about all of this.

The current curriculum is broken, and kids are losing YEARS because of what? Corruption, greed, and inadequate oversight?

Lang should be ashamed of what he has done, and Discovery should be drummed out of the market. [/quote]

As an employee, I'm so disheartened that we have to do yet ANOTHER year of this curriculum that does not adequately prepare our students for the external measures we are held to - PARCC and MAP. More importantly, without significant supplementing I know it doesn't provide students what they need.  It's hard to stay positive when you know we're doing a disservice to our students. [/quote]

x100 - our required summer reading trainings this summer keep telling us all of these things we should be doing but the curriculum doesn't mention them and our schools aren't equipped with the materials to provide what students need.  When the poor facilitators are asked how to address the hurdles, they shrug their shoulders and say "that's a great question, put it in the bin."  It's going to be a long year.[/quote]

Serious question for the teacher posters -- what can you do to address some of the mandates coming from up above that you know harm students? What are the avenues available to you to push back when your own bosses are creating the problems?[/quote]

Honestly, you nod your head in agreement during staff meetings and then go back to your classrooms, close the doors, and continue to do what you know is right for kids.  I'm lucky in that my administration knows things are a joke right now in the county and trusts that we will do what we need to do for the kids.  I've worked for other principals where you have to follow these mandates to the letter or risk being written up.  I did my summer reading training and now the new message is that guided reading groups are supposed to be an intervention.  Students shouldn't need to be in guided groups everyday on their reading level.  Instead, all students should be reading grade-level text.  While this would be great in theory, I have fifth graders come to me who read on a 2nd grade level.  They won't be able to access a level T text without significant scaffolding and support from me...during small group instruction.  So basically, I'm going to do my best to expose all of my kids to grade-level text this year via read-alouds but I'll still be pulling small, leveled groups.  [/quote]

Does that mean that kids who read ahead of grade level aren’t supposed to get anything but grade level texts?[/quote]

NP who also went to the foundational skills reading training. It's "rich text", not specifically grade level text. The example given in the training was to read excerpts from Charlotte's Web to Kindergarteners. There is no resource like a list of which texts should be read for which grade levels so it seems to be up to the teacher's discretion. The issue is that there aren't all that many resources in schools because the focus has been on leveled readers for so long, so once grade level teams decide which books to read aloud they'll have to share among classrooms. Also, just like pretty much anything else, principals have discretion to override the county's message to switch to this model. [/quote]

NP here - I went to the Grades 3 - 5 reading training and like the pp mentioned, the emphasis was definitely on complex, grade-level text.  Doing a lot of scaffolding for students reading below grade level via close reading.  Like someone just mentioned, there's going to have to be a lot of sharing of materials because of the emphasis on guided reading levels for so long in MCPS. I can already see my teammates and I sharing the same book and sending it down the hall.  Such a PITA.[/quote]

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