The State Board of Education had a meeting this past Thursday to review their process for evaluating CSCOPE lessons. Following that meeting, the CSCOPE Governing Board (the 20 Regional Service Center Executive Directors) made a decision to stop providing lessons as part of the CSCOPE package.

In Wylie ISD, this will not drastically affect our practices because we did not mandate the lessons. We are planning to evaluate to what extent our teachers have used the lessons this year so that we can provide support as needed.

As we understand it, this change will only remove the exemplar lessons (and nothing else) from CSCOPE.

There is no need for alarm because the caliber of our teachers and curriculum staff is exceptional. This year, the lessons developed by our own staff have far exceeded the quality of the CSCOPE exemplar lessons.

Important Points:

• We need CSCOPE to stay current and aligned to the state standards. Tools in CSCOPE provide an in-depth guide to teaching the standards to the depth and complexity needed to ensure student achievement.
• There are currently no math lessons at all, so the change only impacts ELA, science, and social studies.
• We will continue to write our own CSCOPE aligned lessons. We are already doing this work collaboratively with Rockwall ISD and have already completed World History and World Geography.
• We will have access to everything in CSCOPE until the end of August, 2013. Because we know there are resources in the current lessons that some of our teachers like and use, our plans are to vet these resources through our content/curriculum experts. Teachers will have access to them through Wylie’s CSCOPE district resources.
• The WISD practice of 'Wylie-izing' CSCOPE content such as YAGs and IFDs will continue.
• Thankfully, because we have made good decisions, monitored our implementation, and constantly communicated with teachers, we feel confident that high expectations in Wylie ISD will continue. CSCOPE will continue to provide the foundation and our Wylie ISD staff will continue to provide the exceptional instruction our community has come to expect.