Administrators updated the board on Pillar 6 of the district’s KLSD 2030 plan, “Collaborative Educators,” detailing work to expand professional learning communities (PLCs), create curriculum maps, pilot Project Lead The Way pathways and build a sequence of civic-readiness instruction that may qualify for a future high-school seal.
Why it matters: The pillar centers on professional learning and instructional coherence; administrators said the work aims to improve student outcomes by aligning common learning targets, formative assessments and curriculum across grade levels while expanding teacher leadership and targeted professional development.
Julia, a district staff member, described a district guiding coalition that has met throughout the prior year and said building-level coalitions and PLC teams have launched this fall. She reviewed the four guiding PLC questions that frame the work: what students should know and do, how the district will know if students learned it, how the district will respond if students haven’t learned it, and how the district will extend learning for students who have already mastered objectives.
The presentation included examples of instructional innovation: elementary teachers adopting cognitively guided instruction in math, a high-school chemistry teacher awarded a STEM fellowship, and an AP business teacher piloting an AP course in personal finance. Project Lead The Way (PLTW) pathway work is underway: district staff said they have begun training and aligning middle- and high-school courses so students can flow from middle-school exploratory work into high-school engineering and computer-science sequences.
Administrators also described a middle-school civic-readiness unit developed by seventh-grade social-studies teachers that included common texts, rubrics, pre-assessments and experiential activities designed to help students participate in civic processes. Staff said the unit could serve as a qualifying project that would count toward a future high-school civic seal if the district pursues that credential.
The board asked for more detail about PLTW implementation and the civic-readiness pathway. Staff said middle-school coursework will act as a feeder into high-school pathways and that the district is exploring state-level assessment and pathway options as New York shifts away from a regents-only model.
No formal board action was taken; staff said they will continue PLC and curriculum-adoption work and report progress to the board.