RI Education Commissioner visits Cole to talk curriculum

EAST GREENWICH- As part of their goal to create a common curriculum that can be utilized throughout the state, representatives from the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) are visiting schools around Rhode Island to speak with administrators and educators about their challenges and successes in teaching. This week, Education Commissioner Ken Wagner and Deputy Education Commissioner Mary Ann Snider stopped by Cole Middle School to talk about mathematics. 

“We’re trying to figure out what do we think is really strong curriculum, what are its features, and how do we know if we have it,” said Snider. “What are high-quality materials? I think historically we have not taken any stand on providing a perspective on what are high quality or low quality materials, but a lot of work has been done nationally that we want to tap into.”

Wagner and Snider were joined by East Greenwich Superintendent Victor Mercurio, Cole Middle School Principal Alexis Meyer, Math Department Chair Patricia Dulac and middle school math teacher Melissa Brightman for an honest discussion about the math curriculum in East Greenwich.

Dulac, the math department chair for grades six through 12, and a math teacher at the high school level said one of the biggest drawbacks in the district is not having a Curriculum Director, and superintendent Mercurio agreed that he relies heavily on the department heads to manage the curriculum. 

“We have no one here who watches teaching and learning from the top,” said Mercurio. “As superintendent I depend fully on what the department chairs do in terms of their leadership. Thankfully we have great department chairs, and I’m grateful for that but everything that happens here happens at either the departmental level or at the building level because there’s no one overseeing and connecting dots at the district level.”

“What you’re describing is highly dependent on the talent, cohesiveness and level of supervision of your work force,” said Wagner. “What we’re trying to think through is whether we can actually help the work force by building some of that in through curricular coherence that then, can allow the work force to get to a higher level.”

Dulac added that every teacher in the math department is involved in creating the curriculum and they have learned to create some of the best resources for the students themselves, and teach through their own methods and tasks that work best for them and their students. 

“We approach everything through these big transferable ideas,” said Dulac. “Mathematics is not a disparate collection of facts it is a unified body of knowledge.”

“That knowledge is particularly important because quite frankly in this district most of the really great resources come from teachers who write them themselves,” she added. 

Dulac continued to explain that the math teachers do a great amount of sharing their curriculum resources through mostly electronic documents, however; the teachers create their own tasks based on the curriculum catered to their teaching style and the students in their classroom. 

“The teachers work so hard and are so passionate about what they do that they really put a lot into creating the tasks and when you create your own task it’s a lot easier and better to teach it,” said Dulac. “If I give you my task, it might be the greatest task in the world but you have to own it. We do have common instructional tasks and common assessments, but the teachers have the flexibility to not be at the same place as other teachers every day, but meet at the same place at the end of each quarter.” 

Meyer added that a critical component of effective teaching and a coherent curriculum is the use of common planning time between educators at each grade level. Previously, the middle school had four common planning sessions a week, however; currently the schedule has been cut back to the minimum state standard of once a week. 

“The ability for these teachers to engage in that work, in an ongoing manner is really what allowed us to do those interdisciplinary pieces, and gave us the ability to support students who might be struggling,” she said. 

Cole Middle School was the second stop in Wagner and Snider’s tour of schools around the state, and started what will be an ongoing conversation around curriculum in Rhode Island. 

“This is just the conversation that we’re trying to encourage and we want to get out and see what different people are doing so we can learn from that,” said Wagner. 

“We’re never done in education, and overtime we do something different, hopefully it’s building on the learning that we did previously,” said Snider. “We’re always trying to get better at being better.”

The visit ended with a tour through some of the math classes that were currently in session at Cole, allowing Wagner and Snider to see first-hand the many teaching methods at work in the school.