"A well-aligned curriculum ensures every student is getting the very best possible education."
Award-winning third grade teacher Molly Dunham has been named the new curriculum director for Kingsley Area Schools. In her new role, she will help teachers align the curriculum of K-12 grade to state and national standards.
Mrs. Dunham has already developed a curriculum protocol for Kingsley educators to help document, oversee, improve, and implement the most-effective lesson planning.
"Curriculum has always been a passion of mine," said Mrs. Dunham. "If you don't work on curriculum, the world just passes you by. As we have new staff members come in, it's important that we're all on the same page."
Mrs. Dunham's distinguished background in leadership and curriculum includes helping form the District Curriculum Council and leading the district through several rounds of curriculum alignment, review, and adoption earlier in her career. She also worked with other regional teachers to develop math pacing guides and assessments and was chosen to edit and rewrite third and fourth-grade test questions for the Smarter Balanced Math Assessment, which later became part of the MSTEP state standardized test.
Now, Mrs. Dunham is leveraging that experience to launch a new ELA curriculum that was adopted earlier this year.
"The new program is more rigorous and has a lot more higher-level thinking content" said Mrs. Dunham. "We want our students to be able to think independently and we want to produce better thinkers."
In addition, she will be reviewing materials across all subjects and leading an annual review cycle with teachers.
"My goal for the end of this year is to have every teacher finish some curriculum alignment work in their subject area. I will be cataloging and documenting that so any teacher can access this information in the future," said Mrs. Dunham.
Supporting teachers in curriculum alignment and student engagement are her top priorities for the year. As the longtime coordinator of the New Teacher Mentor program, Mrs. Dunham will now have more time to dedicate to peer coaching and evaluations in her new role.
"I'm going to provide professional development for teams as needed, and I'm really excited about that," said Mrs. Dunham. "I'll be able to watch any teacher, or new teacher, who wants feedback and give them the very best research on student engagement and provide some activities for them to do in their classroom."
For now, this is a one-year position, but curriculum review cycles will continue annually. Mrs. Dunham is thrilled about this new adventure, but she’s also looking forward to returning to her elementary classroom in the future.
"My heart is always with those little students."
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