Adapting Scope and Sequence for Remediation

Like many schools, we have students in every grade who start the grade with unfinished learning/misconceptions/gaps in standards that fall under previous grades. We operate with a general policy of trying to remediate through grade level standards—as an eighth grade teacher I am teaching primarily eighth grade content and always using that as the starting point/end goal of any reteaching of prior-grade-level content. However, we have not done very much work to make sure that this happens in a systematic way. I was really excited when the Standards Institute addressed exactly how necessary and challenging this work was and provided a framework for thinking about how to do this type of Tier 1 intervention.

This slide from the Standards Institute (Day 3 powerpoint for all of the math groups) illustrates how students will fall further behind and never be able to catch up if we spend a significant amount of time filling gaps in isolation from the current grade-level content.

As an alternative, they offered these ideas about where and what to remediate. The idea is to make a strategic plan instead of trying to review everything or only reacting after the fact to what you have learned about students’ foundational knowledge.

While this generally matches how I have been trying to remediate, I really appreciate how clearly and intentionally this process is laid out. As someone who is in a department where we don’t use a curriculum and primarily write our own sequencing and pacing, I think that this work is really our next step in building vertical and horizontal coherence. I am extremely excited to take this framework to my team for when we are doing our big-picture planning.

The Standards Institute also introduced me to two amazing tools that will be essential to this work:

1) Zimba Wiring Diagram: One writer of the common core’s interpretation of how the standards connect to each other both between- and within- grades.

2) Coherence Map: This is an interactive map that allows you to “zoom in” on the wiring map. You can choose a standard to start from and then follow it to a connection of your choice.
3) Content Emphases by Cluster: This designates which clusters are major, supporting, or additional standards. Shockingly, I had never seen this before.