A Week in the Life of a Curriculum Coordinator: Monday

Back in 2007 when I worked for Round Rock ISD as a 4th grade teacher, I didn’t even know the district had Curriculum Coordinators, much less what their jobs entailed. Fast forward to 2014 and I rejoined the district as the Curriculum Coordinator for Elementary Mathematics. In the past year and a half I’ve learned quite a lot about what Curriculum Coordinators do, and now I’d like to share that with you in case you’re wondering like I was once upon a time. You’ll get to walk a week in my shoes to get a peek into what life is like as a Curriculum Coordinator. Let’s begin!

Monday

In many ways today was not a typical day which is why I’m glad I’m writing about a whole week. On the other hand, I’m not sure there is such a thing as a typical day in my job, so today might be just as representative as any other day I could write about.

The first hour of my day I spent reviewing, editing, and finalizing a presentation I’m giving to all of our elementary principals tomorrow. I have about 50 minutes to do an overview session about the state math test (STAAR) and give some tips and advice for how teachers and students should spend time between now and then.

The rest of the day I prepared for a PD session I’m leading on Wednesday. This year I received funding from our superintendent — a huge thanks to Dr. Flores! — to purchase multiple copies of the books Beyond Pizzas and Pies and Beyond Invert and Multiply for our intermediate elementary teachers. In addition, I also received funding to provide a full day of PD to one grade 3 teacher from every campus and one grade 4 teacher from every campus.

There’s a lot of information in the books, so my partner Regina and I opted to do two half-day sessions for each grade level. Back in December we facilitated part 1 for each grade and this Wednesday we’re facilitating part 2. We didn’t forget about grade 5! We’re hosting a 2-hour session for them on an early release day in February.

Normally I have a lot of different tasks to jump between each day, but somehow I only managed to schedule PD prep today, and I sure needed the time! Regina is handling the grade 3 session which left me with the grade 4 session. I had to figure out what I was going to cover from the 3 chapters I chose for this session. Then I had to make slides, plan out activities — specifically modifications I wanted to make to the activities shared in the book — and get copies made of all the materials teachers will use.

All in all I’m happy with how the session has shaped up, and I look forward to working with the teachers on Wednesday. Now I just have to hope we can get through everything I planned! That’s one area I’m still learning with regard to PD planning. I feel pretty good about the amount of content in my sessions, but I find that I always tend to put just one too many things in every session. Here’s hoping I hit the sweet spot this week!

I also did some odds and ends throughout the day whenever I needed a short break from PD planning:

• I shared a reminder about this week’s open planning sessions on our grade-level Google communities. Once a month, Regina and I host two open planning sessions after school — one for K-2 teachers and one for 3–5 teachers. All teachers from the district are invited to come and collaborate together on upcoming math units. Regina and I are there to help answer questions and take part in the process. This year is the first time we’ve offered this. The sessions aren’t attended by a ton of folks, but the teachers who do come let us know how valuable they think the time is. I actually just got an email this afternoon from an AP who shared some feedback a teacher gave her during a pre-observation conference: “Going to open planning was the best decision we’ve ever made. It helps us understand the TEKS and pace our unit.” Hooray!
• I emailed a vendor to get a quote for some books I’m going to purchase for our K-2 teachers. For each campus we’re purchasing multiple copies of books 1–3 in the Developing Number Concepts series by Kathy Richardson — another big thanks to our superintendent, Dr. Flores! Regina and I will be leading a full day PD session on those books for K-2 teachers in February.
• Speaking of, I emailed back and forth with a couple principals who are hoping to get a few more teachers signed up for the February PD session I just mentioned. Win!
• And finally, I watched an Ignite talk that one of our instructional coaches shared with me. Gradual release of responsibility has come up somewhat frequently recently and we’re still trying to wrap our heads around what it should/could mean in math. My fear is similar to what’s shown in the video, that it becomes all about what the teacher is thinking and then getting students to merely reflect/parrot that. I’m going to be giving this a lot of thought for a while.

And that’s a wrap for Monday!

Continue to Tuesday.