Staff Development Guide for the Parallel Curriculum

"This guide provides clear, intelligent support for teachers and administrators to explore the possibilities that the Parallel Curriculum Model brings to educators and students, and to translate those possibilities into action in the classroom."
―Carol Ann Tomlinson, William Clay Parish Jr. Professor of Education
University of Virginia

"In my experience teaching graduate students about the Parallel Curriculum Model, I am always looking for a variety of ways to expose them to the intent of each parallel. This guide is an invaluable resource in helping us talk about and practice the model. The varied examples and practical lessons offer fantastic building blocks to use in my work with teachers!"
―Jennifer Beasley, Educational Consultant
University of Virginia

Extend the abilities of teachers and students alike with focused training on sophisticated curriculum design!

Complementing the best-selling second edition of The Parallel Curriculum, this all-inclusive facilitator′s guide is an indispensable resource for anyone planning, designing, or conducting curriculum development training on the Parallel Curriculum Model.

This easy-to-use workbook offers step-by-step instructions aligned with the content of the core book. Staff developers will learn how to support training sessions to help educators design and implement curriculum along four parallels. Ideal for facilitating book study groups, seminars, and professional development events, the book provides:

• A complete training program of 53 workshops, including 12 workshops per curriculum parallel
• Scripts, agendas, activities, sample classroom scenarios, handouts, and transparencies
• Tools, resources, and strategies for designing curriculum across the four parallels

Staff Development Guide for the Parallel Curriculum is an essential handbook for leading professional training that results in enhanced teacher expertise and a multidimensional, high-quality curriculum that challenges all learners.

Cindy A. Strickland has been a teacher for twenty-five years and has worked with students of all ages, from kindergarten to master’s degree. A member of the ASCD Differentiation Faculty Cadre, Cindy works closely with Carol Ann Tomlinson and has coauthored several books and articles with her. In the past eight years, Cindy’s consulting work has taken her to forty-six states, five provinces, and three continents where she has provided workshops on topics relating to differentiation, the Parallel Curriculum Model (PCM), and gifted education.
Cindy’s publications include Staff Development Guide for the Parallel Curriculum; The Parallel Curriculum Model, 2nd edition; The Parallel Curriculum Model in the Classroom: Applications Across the Content Areas; and In Search of the Dream: Designing Schools and Classrooms That Work for High Potential Students from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds.

Publications in differentiation include Professional Development for Differentiated Instruction: An ASCD Toolkit, Exploring Differentiated Instruction, Tools for High-Quality Differentiated Instruction: An ASCD Toolkit, the ASCD online course Success with Differentiation, the book Differentiation in Practice: A Resource Guide for Differentiating Curriculum, Grades 9–12, and a unit in the book Differentiation in Practice: A Resource Guide for Differentiating Curriculum, Grades 5–9.

Kathy Glass is a former teacher who consults and presents nationally with K-12 teachers and administrators at schools, districts, conferences, and county offices of education. She offers a blend of professional development (PD) topics to target audiences in areas affecting curriculum and instruction. To deliver customized PD, she assists educators with strategic planning to determine objectives. Then she tailors PD based on requested topics such as, but not limited to:

· highlights of the ELA Common Core Standards

· implementation of the ELA Common Core or other standards-based curriculum using a backward design approach

· essential understandings and guiding questions to frame curriculum and instruction

· differentiated tools and instructional strategies

· pre-, formative, summative, and self-assessments

· alignment of six-traits writing instruction and assessment to curriculum goals

· unit and yearlong curriculum maps

· text-dependent questions to facilitate close reading, and more.

To help educators directly translate what she presents into effective classroom practice that impacts students, Kathy can provide a variety of PD opportunities (e.g., presentations, lesson demonstrations and modeling, coaching, collaborative unit design, etc.).

She is the author of six books: Mapping Comprehensive Units to the English Language (ELA) Arts Common Core Standards, 6-12 (May, 2013); Mapping Comprehensive Units to the ELA Common Core Standards, K-5 (© 2012); Lesson Design for Differentiated Instruction, Grades 4-9 (©2009); Staff Development Guide for the Parallel Curriculum (©2009); Curriculum Mapping: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Curriculum Year Overviews (©2007); and Curriculum Design for Writing Instruction: Creating Standards-Based Lesson Plans and Rubrics (©2005). In addition, Glass has served as a reader and reviewer for Reader’s Handbook: A Student Guide for Reading and Learning (2002, Great Source Education Group) and as a contributing writer and consultant for the Heath Middle Level Literature series (1995, DC Heath and Co). Website: www.kathyglassconsulting.com; email: kathy@kathyglassconsulting.com