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What is an "Arc of the Year"?An arc of the year is a teacher and leader development strategy where schools sub-divide the year into 6-to-8 week long units ("arcs") and prioritize the highest-leverage goals during each phase. The "arcs" are designed to be placed at certain points of the year where we can anticipate specific needs for students, teachers and leaders. For each arc, we define the big goals, measure weekly progress towards those goals and align teacher and leader development to those goals.
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What are the benefits of an Arc of the Year?1) Prioritization -- The arc structure drives clarity on what schools and central office teams should prioritize. By prioritizing, we can help simplify the incredibly complex task of running great schools with strong development for teachers and leaders -- all in service of supporting our students. It also allows principals and principal managers to stay focused among the many competing priorities that we all know can distract us from the target of improving teaching and learning.

2) Coherence -- Weekly PD planning is often last minute and the characterized by the "flavor of the week." With arcs, PD is now part of a larger, more coherent, multi-week strategy that involves data collection and coaching. This allows leaders to tell a coherent story about how teachers and leaders will be developed.

3) Collaboration -- When there are multiple schools, it makes planning and implementation more efficient and effective. Schools can share resources, tools and plans. Cohorts can be leveraged more strategically to develop teachers and leaders. And when there is data across schools, we can learn from positive outliers and spread best practices quickly.
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What is a typical Arc of the Year?There are many different ways to structure the arc of the year. A typical arc begins with a Quarter 1 focus on student culture. The purpose is to create positive, safe, consistent and predictable classrooms that are essential for learning to take place. Quarter 2 is then focused on rigor. In this arc, teachers are deepening rigor through their intellectual preparation and students are grappling with challenging texts and tasks. Quarter 3 shifts to a focus on monitoring and feedback. Teachers become proficient at identifying student errors and fixing them quickly. Quarter 4 becomes about "readiness" or planning for the following school year.
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