all right so now let's look at how do we ensure that we have a high quality uh curriculum whether it's teacher-led or digital now you read in one of your articles about the impact uh that covid had on learning or learning loss uh in the state of Utah and there were some kind of surprising things as I tried to stay current and see what is happening here in Utah with learning so I had to go online I had to do some research and so in addition to the reading that you read I went to different websites and I did my own research and I was a little surprised so I put together this next little slide that talks about how Utah was impacted now first think did Utah do better or worse than other states when it comes to learning loss and you'll see here I put in parenthesis math and reading scores were down 30% nationally were we down 30% in Utah the finance might surprise you all right here's what we found in fourth grade it was the same it was down 30% in the state of Utah math and reading scores were in line with the national averages so it was hard in Utah recovering from covid however this was another cool thing that I found in my research the state stood out from the rest of the nation in 8th grade where it was the only state out of 50 states there was one that did not report a statistically significant decline in math that was state of Utah yay so that's really cool that we did really well on that so thinking about learning loss there are some things that Fu identified as being issues uh with curriculum and with keeping things current so learning loss that we just talked about over the summer people are going to forget things over the weekend people are going to forget things over covid which was an extended period of time one that we haven't seen in decades people forgot a lot and so how do we deal with that learning loss um grade appropriate curriculum is not taught to most students and and again this is a national thing that he was looking at but looking at grade appropriate curriculum um are we teaching fifth grade things to fifth graders and what we found there and I think you saw this in the article was just as much as it's a problem that we're not teaching appropriate curriculum it's the reporting of the curriculum that is being taught that we're not being precise with what's being reported um also lack of funds to purchase high quality curriculum so this goes back to the achievement Gap or opportunity Gap thinking about do we have the resources to support learning for all Learners it's hard um if you can't purchase a high quality curriculum you have to develop your own which takes a different kind of capital it takes time um number four lack of collaboration teacher to teer and teachers with administrators I have personally because I've been in so many schools I've seen the the impact that collaboration makes if teachers are all on board with developing a curriculum or implementing a curriculum and the the administration's on board and supporting that things go swimmingly if teachers don't like the curriculum and they're forced to take it by the administrators or if there's just some breakdown of um adop adaptation adoption hard word there if there's a breakdown of adoption if someone doesn't want to do it it becomes hard it becomes difficult um number five lack of teacher professional development that's a universal problem we just don't have enough resources and time for teachers and then number six lack of teaching incentives to actually use the curriculum so if we want to implement an effective curriculum you can probably see it takes time and it takes money and it takes buyin and all three of those things are difficult so what do we do well in the article a few Solutions were proposed and you can even without reading the article you can guess oh we need more time we need more money we need better communication right and so those things were addressed uh in the article um but on top of that as you think about curriculum development you probably have some ideas on how to make things better i' I've mentioned in this lecture some of the things that I try to do with including my students in that process by writing uh lecture Reflections or course preparation Reflections where they're telling me how useful the curriculum was for them having student conferences and talking to your students seeing what they're learning um and then the dayto day right if your students just aren't understanding things and aren't getting it part of it's probably you you're not teaching it very effectively but sometimes the curriculum is inadequate and so if everybody's having a problem if you're on a fifth grade team for example and all the fifth grade teachers let's say there's five of you and all five of you are really struggling with a particular unit or a an entire subject it might be time to consider changing the curriculum or adapting a new curriculum so there's a lot we can do with this obviously there's enough here that we can have a whole class about curriculum and what we'll be doing for the rest of this semester is thinking about developing a curriculum so you're going to have practice and creating lesson plans we're not going to create things from scratch we're not going to come up with a new textbook or anything like that but we're going to take existing state standards to come up with learning objectives to write lesson plans and you're going to practice writing a lot of lesson plans in this class and so you're going to come up with solutions to some of the problems that we talked about it's going to be a lot of fun so I'm I'm anxious to see in your reflection of this lecture what stood out to you what's something that maybe you hadn't considered when it comes to curriculum something that you're concerned about now let me know and I'll talk to you again soon bye