CPS Instructional Core Vision
To educate for equity, the CPS Instructional Core centers on identity, community, and relationships.
Students must experience core instruction that is responsive to and sustaining of who they are and what they bring, and empowers them to connect, to imagine, and to act as ethical, critical actors that shape the world.
Planning through an Inner Core lens will help us:
To accomplish this vision we must operate with commitment to continuous learning to improve our ability to enact this vision, and to continuously strengthen our shared vision.
CPS Instructional Core Focus Areas
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Students have access to high-quality curriculum across all content areas that is grade level appropriate and standards-aligned, meaningful, and responsive to their communities and identities.
Schools implement a balanced assessment system that includes universal screening and benchmark assessments as well as curriculum-embedded assessments designed to inform instructional decision-making.
Teachers facilitate instruction that honors students’ identities, prioritizes relationships, and fosters community to facilitate deep engagement.
Students are supported in engaging with and meeting grade-level standards through strategic acceleration practices that recognize their strengths and build on those through just-in-time supports.
Students access tiered academic and social-emotional interventions to supplement core instruction when needed to facilitate their success with grade-level standards.
CURRICULUM
ASSESSMENT
INSTRUCTION
ACCELERATION PRACTICES
ACADEMIC & SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL INTERVENTIONS
Every Day in All CPS Classrooms:
STUDENTS’ identity is nurtured, honored, and reflected within the instructional experience. In classrooms, students’ social emotional and academic growth is fostered through participation in building a strong community that develops meaningful relationships with their peers, promotes a sense of belonging, and positions them as learners and leaders. Students do the thinking through daily learning experiences designed to build curiosity, agency, criticality, and a confident academic identity. Authentic, intellectual learning experiences ensure deep engagement as students act as real world problem-solvers and engage in elaborated communication through various mediums. Students experience success through just-in-time supports and interventions, regular reflection on their own learning, goal-setting, and agency in advocating for their own learning needs and interests.
CONTENT is challenging (grade level appropriate and standards-aligned), meaningful, and responsive to the communities and identities of students. It is designed to allow for in-depth understanding and disciplined inquiry, providing access to multiple perspectives so that students can critique or construct. It is connected to authentic assessments that measure what is truly important in student learning. Designed to be accessible to all students, content is inclusive and reflective of students cultural and linguistic diversity, marrying academic content with social emotional skills. Students and communities contribute to content, and their own funds of knowledge, expertise, and lived experiences are leveraged across subject areas. The content serves as a bridge to build meaningful and productive relationships between students and the teacher and the larger community, by possessing value beyond school.
TEACHERS hold high expectations for students and truly believe they can meet grade level-standards. Teachers cultivate inspired, challenging, and affirming classroom communities that position them as co-constructors of knowledge with students. Teachers marry their knowledge of the content, their students and effective instructional practice in order to serve as thoughtful facilitators of learning. Teachers provide just in time supports and interventions to ensure all learners experience success. They recognize that their identity informs their choices, actions, and their relationship to content and students, and they reflect on their own identity and examine biases regularly. Teachers strive every day to learn more about their students' identity and their relationship to learning, and position students as leaders and problem-solvers in the classroom and in the greater community.
Culturally Responsive Education
A pedagogical method “that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural references to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes.” Culturally responsive education “uses the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning more relevant and effective”
(Ladson-Billings, 1994; Gay, 2010).