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03/16/2016 08:30 AMOverseeing what Old Saybrook teachers teach and to what depth, grade by grade and topic by topic, is Amity Goss’s focus in her new role as district director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment. The Board of Education voted last month to make her interim status as director permanent.
“Curriculum is a road map for teachers that helps them help students achieve the standards. The standards are the core,” Amity explains. “For each group of standards, we map the questions we will ask students at each grade level in each subject. We also identify the assessment that will determine their level of mastery of that standard.”
It’s often a tricky job. Each public school district in Connecticut must follow academic standards adopted by the Connecticut State Board of Education (BOE) as interpreted by the State Department of Education guidance documents. For the subjects of English-language arts and math, the State BOE in 2011 adopted the Common Core standards. For social studies, districts follow the Connecticut Social Studies Standards, and for science, the national NextGen science standards adopted by the state BOE in November 2015.
Then there are the state’s Technology/Engineering standards for wood, metal, and auto shop. These older standards, however, conflict with newer national standards for these subjects that stress the value of integration of engineering and design as a process.
“We aspire to the national standards for technology and engineering, but are beholden to the state standards,” Amity explains. “We know that learning happens when students integrate the entire process from design to product.”
The Old Saybrook BOE this month considered approval of a new course at Old Saybrook High School called “Transportation Technology.” In this new class, students will start by designing a vehicle product such as a submarine or an electronic vehicle, and then will create a prototype based on their design.
“I have a passion for curriculum. I have always been fascinated with the ways we as adults can help children learn: [it’s about recognizing] that every child is an individual, then imagining how to develop systems that make learning possible for every student,” says Amity. “We recognize that any one child will have multiple styles of learning. We also know that when students of any age grapple with a problem and experience confusion, they’re better able to make order of that and truly learn something.”
That’s why integrating real-world problems and applications into the classroom and school day is so important—it leads to more student learning, she says.
“When we do this, we notice immediate feedback from students. They talk about being more engaged and more interested in what is going on in class and that assessments they’re given are easier because they understand the material,” Amity says. “We have to re-invent education to make it more relevant to students now.”
Amity credits her decision to pursue an education career with the inspiration she got from several wonderful teachers she had in her life.
“I still keep in touch with my 1st-grade teacher. She’s the person who taught me it was OK not to be perfect and also encouraged me to grow. She would always put up another challenge. It taught me that perseverance made me a better learner,” says Amity.
Her career began when she earned a Kindergarten-6th Grade certification and began her teaching career at Goodwin Elementary School in Old Saybrook. In 2003, she was one of the first teachers in Connecticut to pursue and earn a National Teacher’s Certification. Spurred to learn more about how to teach reading to young students, she returned to school to get a remedial reading graduate degree.
At this point, she changed school districts, moving to Colchester to become a literacy specialist.
“That job was my bridge to teaching teachers, something I found I really enjoyed,” says Amity.
Following this assignment, she was named assistant principal in that Colchester Elementary School, a post in which she served for seven years before her promotion to elementary school principal. It was from that post that she returned to Old Saybrook in July 2015 as interim director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment.
“My favorite current book is Most Likely to Succeed by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith. It talks about redefining schools to be relevant to today’s learners,” says Amity. “My goal is to cultivate the professional learning community to empower educators and parents to define what our schools should look like. My vision for this future includes personalized learning and real-world learning based on experience.”
Although the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) results for the Old Saybrook district confirmed that much of the district’s curriculum was aligned with the core standards on which the SBAC is based, it did reveal some disconnects in the math curriculum.
“We’re looking at math program improvements like providing more research-based math curriculum materials and a standards-aligned scope and sequence of topics with a common vocabulary across grade levels from kindergarten through 8th grade,” says Amity. “Teachers are teaching common skills, but not using the same terms across grade levels to describe the process. Having a common math resource to draw upon will help unify the presentation of the material. We’re reviewing several options and will pilot two of them in math classes next year.”
To help with this initiative, the Old Saybrook BOE for the second year is seeking funding in the budget to hire a certified math coach/coordinator to support teachers as they plan and implement math programs and lessons in the classroom (the funding request was denied for this year).
“We need to build capacity to strengthen and make consistent our math instruction across grade levels,” says Amity.