Digitally dispersed: Crane district populating new curriculum platform

As the Crane School District was populating a digital curriculum platform in the spring of 2016, the quality of the content caught the eye of the company offering it.

Assessment Technology Incorporated/Galileo, a vendor Crane uses for student testing and assessment, introduced a digital platform in January 2016 in which its customers could create and store their own curriculums, and Crane jumped on board, said Assistant Superintendent Dr. Michael Hoffman.

“We started building it last spring,” said Hoffman, who was then the director of curriculum and instruction. “We left the Beyond Textbooks (program) and needed a curriculum for the new teachers beginning in August of 2016.”

Building the in-house project, which the district is calling Dynamic Curriculum Strategies, took a lot of time and effort, Hoffman said, and started around April and March with three teams: one for English Language Arts headed by Judy Munger; a math panel led by Terra Guerrero; and a science and social studies group with Lynette Humphrey leading. The district also added in a digital citizenship component as well.

Any curriculum, Hoffman explained, is like a calendar with scope and sequence for instruction. It is a course to follow with timing and concepts, but it does not tell a teacher how to teach, he said. It is constantly being evaluated, assessed and improved upon, so the project is ongoing. Crane’s curriculum is built upon Arizona’s standards in ELA, math and science.

“The standards tell us what kids need to know and to be able to do,” Hoffman said. For example, he said second-graders are expected to know that numbers can be split into smaller parts (fractions).

The team at ATI/Galileo that was working with the district on populating the platform took an interest in the quality of the material Crane was furnishing, Hoffman said.

“We were doing it for our teachers and our students,” Hoffman said. “Galileo ... contacted us and wanted to form a partnership. With that partnership, they said that we have a quality product that other districts would benefit from and that’s where we’re at right now.”

Once the curriculum was in place online and tested through the fall, the district began marketing it this past summer, and has already had a few districts come onboard, Hoffman said, including Somerton School District, Lake Havasu School District and

Tonto Basin, to name a few.

Accessing the platform cost about $7,500, according to an article in the Lake Havasu News Herald, but Hoffman reiterated that money from the rights to use the platform goes right back into the project to pay teachers who work with the team leads to put together the content.

“One of the misunderstandings even with the Crane teachers is that we’re selling the curriculum and making money off the teachers,” Hoffman said. “That is not true . ... All that money goes back into building the curriculum, which is built by teachers who are earning extra money on time sheets. So we’re not asking the teachers to do work that they aren’t being compensated for. “

The Crane platform has some unique features, Hoffman said, in that it combines the ELA and English Language Learner standards so that ELL students can learn in regular classrooms alongside their non-ELL peers.

Munger’s team of teachers also brought in Individual Language Program standards in an effort to streamline classroom instruction and social structures.

“She (and her team) put them together,” Hoffman said, allowing a bridge between the two groups of kids. “The bridge goes both ways. So the teacher teaching ILP kids, while she teaches the mainstream, she can also bring in those language pieces.”

The platform helps keep the two standards aligned and helps the teacher know what each group needs without tracking students into different classrooms.

“It really helps the teachers teach all the kids differentially across the board,” Hoffman said.