District 181 Philosophy of Teaching & Learning

Who We Teach and Where They Learn
Community Consolidated School District 181 embraces a vision of being a school district where all children experience success and grow in excellence. Our students come to school with shared and unique experiences, strengths, interests, and learning profiles. They learn from and with one another in safe, caring, and supportive learning environments that respect and celebrate individual differences, foster creativity and critical thinking, encourage intellectual risk-taking, and provide opportunities for collaboration.

High-Quality Curriculum & Instruction for All Students
D181 is committed to providing all students with the highest quality curriculum and instruction. This quality is a hallmark of every class, subject, grade level, and school. The District works to ensure that all students experience learning goals, content, and materials that are, at minimum, authentic to the discipline being studied, framed by concepts and important ideas, cognitively and affectively engaging, thought-provoking and relevant to their lives. [1] All students must learn to persist in the face of challenge by engaging with meaningful tasks that set high, yet achievable expectations. Instruction provides opportunities for students to strengthen high-skill and high-interest areas, develop areas of relative weakness, practice metacognition and self-assessment, and apply learning to new situations. [2]

As part of carrying out our mission to educate each child in an environment of excellence that provides a foundation for contributing to a complex global society, District 181 is committed to fostering the academic, social, and emotional growth of every learner. All learning environments include students who vary greatly in their experiences, readiness, motivation, and learning profiles. These differences are assets to student learning and to developing productive, empathetic, and ethical citizens who can thrive in an ever-changing global society.

Classroom teachers and specialists work individually and collaboratively to proactively differentiate instruction for the full range of student readiness, interests, and learning profiles that are present in every instructional setting. Differentiated instruction involves establishing clear learning goals, planning from ongoing assessment, using flexible grouping, and designing tasks to adjust what students learn (content), how they learn it (process), and how they demonstrate what they have learned (products). [3]

Commitment to Student Growth
District 181 empowers all students to make continuous progress toward and beyond grade-level proficiency. Through a culture that promotes a growth mindset [4] about teaching and learning, District 181 provides a broad range of opportunities, provisions, and services for developing the academic talents of all students through Response to Intervention (RtI) and a continuum of services for all students.  District 181 believes that at any given time a student may benefit from a support or service to meet an instructional need.

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[1] Based on an analysis in Hockett (2009)
[2] Based on Bransford, Brown, & Cocking (2000)
[3] Based on Tomlinson (1999; 2003)
[4] Based on Dweck (1999; 2006)

Board Approval May 29, 2012

District 181 Provisions for Advanced Learning

Mission
To provide ongoing support and opportunities for students to work and think like practitioners, professionals, and experts in the real world through the delivery of advanced content, the development of increasingly sophisticated skills, and the creation of authentic products.

Definition of Advanced Learning Needs
District 181 recognizes that there are students for whom the general education program may not consistently support the development of their academic performance. In these cases, a student may benefit from curricula, instruction, or learning experiences that replace or supplement those that are provided as a matter of course.

Through an ongoing process of using classroom-based assessments and universal screenings that are specific to the particular provision or service, the District recognizes several kinds of particular advanced learning needs:

• Students with high performance in an academic subject(s). [5] These are students who demonstrate significantly advanced knowledge, conceptual understanding, and skills in an academic subject, such that the general education program may not be able to consistently support the development of their academic performance in one or more content areas. These students may demonstrate the capacity to move through previously unknown material more quickly, or with greater interest, passion, or insight than age-mates.
  
  
• Students with high potential in an academic subject(s). These are students who may not currently display significantly advanced knowledge, conceptual understanding, and skills in an academic subject or across subject areas, but who may display high performance, given the necessary opportunities, resources, and encouragement. This may include students whose abilities are masked by learning challenges or disabilities, students from low socio-economic or culturally diverse groups, or students whose first or at-home language is not English.

Provisions for Advanced Learning Needs
I. In the general education classroom
Differentiated instruction for advanced learning is foundational to the educational experience of every child in District 181. Best practice and research across education [6] inform the ways teachers create tasks, instructional activities, and assessments that develop more advanced understanding, knowledge, and/or skills within a discipline.

This kind of differentiation for advanced learning can involve:

• Addressing authentic problems and audiences
• Working and producing in increasingly expert-like ways
• Delving into content in greater depth
• Exploring content in greater breadth
• Moving at a quicker or slower pace
• Grappling with concepts, problems, issues, or outcomes that are ambiguous or abstract
• Creating products or solving problems that are transformational (i.e., that try to change people’s minds, provoke change, reveal new or unusual insights)
• Working more independently or needing less support
• Examining ideas behind the ideas (e.g., philosophical underpinnings, conflicting or supporting theoretical/research evidence)
• Detecting increasingly patterns or connections within and across disciplines
• Analyzing and formulating rules, ethics, or governing principles
• Pursuing “known” and “unknown” unanswered questions
• Engaging in problem-solving innovation through inquiry-based learning

Instructional teams use a variety of informal and formal classroom assessment tools to gauge student readiness for and interest in tasks that are differentiated for advanced learning. Throughout the school year, all students will work with such tasks as they grow and learn.

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[5] Descriptions of high-performance and high-potential drawn from Callahan & Miller (2005), Lohman (2005), & Tomlinson & Hockett (2008)
[6] Drawn from Bransford, et al (1998), Hockett (2009), Kaplan (1994), Maker (1982), Passow (1982), Renzulli, Leppien, & Hays (2000), Tomlinson (1997), Tomlinson (2005), and Wiggins & McTighe (2008

Board Approval May 29, 2012

References