Curriculum

The MathScape: Seeing and Thinking Mathematically Curriculum Center provides support to school districts using the MathScape curriculum. The center offers training institutes and workshops, hosts a Web site offering online support, develops implementation materials, and disseminates information about the curriculum’s effectiveness.

ERO is working with the Death Penalty Information Center to develop a set of case studies for use in college courses to explore issues surrounding the public debate over the death penalty. The materials will include teaching cases designed to promote discussion, accompanying teaching notes, guidelines for investigating relevant data, and bibliographic resources. In Phase I, ERO will create a prototype case and develop a concept paper to seek funding for a full-scale project.

This two-year project, funded by the Japan Foundation’s Center for Global Partnership (CGP), will develop and pilot test curriculum materials that use picture books to expose lower primary (grades 1–3) Japanese school children to present-day American culture and all of its diversity. EDC, in partnership with Iwate University’s Faculty of Education, will create teaching materials based on American picture books and design hands-on, highly experiential activities to complement the books.

EDC works with staff from the Jacob Burns Film Center (JBFC) to conduct evaluation planning for the See Hear Feel Film curriculum, which is designed to provide third grade students with an understanding of film and of themselves as creative beings, and is implemented in both in-school and out-of-school settings. EDC’s work focuses on clarifying student and teacher outcomes and determining indicators to measure change.

EDC will create professional development modules to help middle-grades teachers improve accessibility to the general mathematics curriculum for students with mild to moderate disabilities. At the center of each module will be a DVD that shows classroom footage of accessibility strategies in action. In addition to the videotape, each module will include a facilitator’s guide with professional development activities, handouts, PowerPoint slides, and other resources.

Working under the direction of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, AIM at Middle-Grades Results will work with math accessibility experts at EDC to develop two videos and accompanying professional development materials and an online course. Teachers will learn how to plan lessons and assessments with an accessibility lens. This three year effort is one of four comprehensive school improvement models that will develop, pilot, and disseminate resources.

SmART Schools is a comprehensive, standards-based, arts centered, whole-school redesign program that provides ongoing opportunities for all students to appreciate, develop, and demonstrate skills, knowledge, and understanding in and through arts. SmART Schools’ overall goal is to help every student meet high national, state and/or local standards of performance in the arts and other core academic subjects. The program allows every student to fully embrace and participate in their cultural legacy, and achieve artistic, academic, and social success.

Supported Literacy for Adolescents is a research-based literacy program developed over 10 years by EDC, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education (Office of Special education Programs and Institute of Educational Sciences), Annenberg Foundation, and MetLife Foundation. Its goal is to improve reading, writing, and comprehension among both high risk and typically achieving populations. It is deeply rooted in standards-based curriculum design, and all components of the program are aligned with national reading and writing standards, as well as selected content standards.

At this three-day institute teachers will learn about the science of building structures, how materials and design influence structural stability, and what young children might learn about building strong stable structures. Through hands-on exploration, discussion, and video analysis they will gain new understanding of how to set-up the block area for science learning and how to support children’s scientific inquiry. Participants will all receive Building Structures with Young Children, a guide developed at EDC, to teaching science through block play.

The success of the Teacher Quality Research Project in West Virginia led to this new project. The state Department of Education has contracted with us for LEEP to be taught eight times in parts of the state that have not had the benefit of the Teacher Quality grant. This year EDC’s Ingrid Chalufour will teach LEEP in Wyoming and McDowell counties in southern West Virginia, working with a co-instructor from the WV Department of Education.