Children’s Day School Curriculum Framework: A Guide for Families
Welcome to the CDS Curriculum Guide!
We hope this document helps you understand the what, why, and how of teaching and learning at CDS!
Second Grade Interdisciplinary Unit: English language arts and Science Science Knowledge and Skills: Identify how organisms have adapted to survive in their environment Schoolwide Competencies: Engage Meaningfully in My Community | Nurture My Connection to the Natural World & Investigate with Curiosity | Share My Findings with Others
What’s inside?
What’s inside?
Our Why: The CDS Mission & Learning Beliefs
Our What: Profile of a CDS Graduate
How We Do It: Teaching and Learning @ CDS
Learning for the Future: A Skills Based Curriculum
Teaching Content that Matters
What Does this Look Like in Practice?
A Special Focus on Foundational Content in Two Key Areas
The CDS Approach: 5 Pillars
Pillar 1: Schoolwide Competencies
Pillar 2: A Social Justice Lens
Pillar 3: Essential Teaching Practices
Pillar 4: Inquiry Based Learning Design
Pillar 5: Authentic Assessment
Performance Based Assessments
Curriculum Based Assessments
Benchmark Assessments of Reading, Language, and Math
Got Questions? Want to Learn More?
Subject Specific Overviews
Our Why: The CDS Mission & Learning Beliefs
Our mission drives all that we do at CDS, and the curriculum has been intentionally designed in service of this mission
At Children’s Day School, what you learn and who you become are equally important.
CDS is a welcoming community in the big city, a farm and garden among urban streets, an advocate for responsibility to others as well as individual achievement, an independent school with down-to-earth values, always asking how we can do this better.
We strive for balance so students become both academically successful and grounded. They leave CDS confident, with the humility to listen and the resolve to speak up for what they see as right.
Our beliefs about teaching and learning also inform our curriculum We have 11 of them!
We believe in the wisdom of slowing down and celebrating childhood, adolescence, and lifelong learning.
We believe in having the courage to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from the process in a safe and supportive environment.
We believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential to developing empathy, self-advocacy, and allyship in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.
We believe that nurturing a strong family-school partnership is an essential and shared responsibility.
We believe that curiosity, collaboration, and play drive learning.
We believe that interdisciplinary learning provides real opportunities to understand how the world is interconnected.
We believe that inquiry-based learning leads to deep understanding, action, and reflection.
We believe that assessment should be embedded in the learning process and is most meaningful when it incorporates reflection, feedback, and revision.
We believe in using language, technology, media, and information responsibly to communicate and inquire as critically-engaged global citizens.
We believe that building relationships within and beyond our campus fosters friendships, leadership, and social justice.
We believe that growing food and raising animals cultivates environmental justice and stewardship and makes our connection to the natural world tangible.
Our What: Profile of a CDS Graduate
Our promise to you is that our graduates will demonstrate these core skills and mindsets when they leave us. Together they make up what we call our Profile of a CDS Graduate.
CDS Graduate: Core Skills (Ways of Doing)
Collaboration - I know how to contribute my strengths to a team to achieve a goal and how to lean on and learn from others on the team who bring different perspectives and strengths to the work.
Self-Direction - I know how to manage my time and seek out the resources I need to drive my own learning with independence and agency
Communication - I know how to share my ideas, identities, thoughts, and opinions while respecting and remaining curious and open to the ideas, identities, thoughts, and opinions of others
Researching and Inquiring - I know how to use technology, media, and information responsibly to explore, teach, and learn about topics that interest me
Critical and Creative Thinking - I know how to think about a topic from different perspectives and can think creatively to solve problems and express myself.
CDS Graduate: Core Dispositions (Ways of Being)
Curiosity and Open-Mindedness - I am curious and open to different ideas and perspectives. I keep an open mind and actively look to make meaning and create connections
Resilience and Persistence - I am comfortable making mistakes and willing to engage in productive struggle to achieve my learning goals.
Emotional/Social Intelligence - I am engaged in my community. I seek to manage my emotions and pay attention to what and who is around me, so that I can show up wisely in my relationships with others
Intellectual/Cultural Humility, Reflection, and Responsiveness - I know that my perspective is one of many, and I am able to consider and incorporate the ideas, identities, and beliefs of others into my own thinking to broaden my worldview and build new understandings
Advocacy/Activism/Civic Engagement - I engage actively in my community and the world and recognize, stand up, and act when injustice is present.
Want to learn more about what a graduate profile is and why we have one at CDS? Read: The Graduate Profile: A Focus on Outcomes.
How We Do It: Teaching and Learning @ CDS
Learning for the Future: A Skills-Based Curriculum
Every time you ’ ve ever learned something new, it probably fell into one of two categoriesskills and knowledge.
Maybe you learned what the capital of Nevada is. Or what the different parts of a cell are. Or the differences between utilitarian and consequentialist moral philosophy These are all examples of knowledge, with varying degrees of complexity
Or maybe you learned how to ride a bike Or how to write an argumentative essay These are skills They’re things you learned how to do
The traditional approach to learning that many schools take focuses very heavily on knowledge and, in some cases, very lightly on skills In many schools, learning focuses increasingly on the demonstration of knowledge that has been acquired.
Alternatively, the curriculum at CDS prioritizes skill development in the context of learning content knowledge.
For example, a developing reader might pick up an informational text to learn more about forest habits, while also practicing the literacy strategies of visualizing and drawing connections. There is intention and attention to both skill and knowledge development, in both learning design and the learning experience.
In a science context, a learner might be investigating chemical reactions while also learning about the process of scientific inquiry What’s important here is that the process and the skills that support it are made transparent to learners and that learners have multiple opportunities to learn, practice, and demonstrate it in a variety of novel settings Skill development isn’t left to luck and happenstance
Prioritizing skill development sets learners up for a lifetime of learning Our graduates leave us with a toolbox of durable learning skills that can be applied across new contexts and subjects in high school and beyond to continue to explore and unlock new content and learning.
Want to learn more about why we are prioritizing a skills-based curriculum at CDS?
Read: The Future We Want: The Future of Education and Skills Education 2030 from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
Teaching Content That Matters
While our curriculum prioritizes skill development in the context of learning content knowledge, we believe that content choices matter! The preschool-8th grade curriculum develops content knowledge in all of the traditional school subjects: social studies, science, math, reading, technology, art, music, and more. Our students graduate with a strong foundation of knowledge in all of these subject areas and enter high school ready to take on the next level of learning in each of them.
So, how exactly do we choose what content to teach across the grades and subjects?
When making decisions about content, we begin with national standards for learning; for example, the Common Core State Standards, the Next Generation Science Standards, and the International Society for Technology in Education Standards We then look at these standards through the lens of our mission, beliefs, and values as an institution At CDS, we believe that the curriculum and its content should respect learners’ cultures and lived experiences by reflecting the diverse identities, histories, and experiences of all of our learners, not just the dominant culture of a society or community And we believe that the curriculum should be in service of civic engagement and the principles of justice and inclusion, encouraging intercultural understanding, perspective taking, and critical thinking. This is how we put into practice our mission to graduate students who are confident, with the humility to listen and the resolve to speak up for what they see as right.
What Does This Look Like in Practice?
Often this looks like interdisciplinary and disciplinary units of study that fall within 5 different genres or types that are described below:
Topic-Based Units - These units develop foundational knowledge about a topic; for example, a fourth-grade math unit on division and multiplication.
Theme-Based Units - These units focus on a broad concept like interdependence, justice, or patterns. They support learners to make connections and gain insight into more abstract concepts; for example, a second grade unit How do living things survive in challenging environments? supports learners to explore the concepts of adaptation and survival within the context of studying the California rocky shore and tide pool habitats
Problem-Based Units - These units are about defining a problem and developing a solution; for example, our Middle School students might consider different ways to be active during election season, perhaps creating a voter guide or a podcast to share in the community.
Issue-Based Units - These units explore a complex issue that is meant to be unpacked by exploring multiple viewpoints rather than resolved; for example, eighth-grade humanities students exploring different perspectives on the application and interpretation of the First Amendment in their civics study.
Case Study-Based Units - These units explore a specific case, event, or situation with the goal of arriving at broader implications; for example, our seventh-grade humanities students read and discuss The 57 Bus as they explore the theme of identity in literature across the year
In sum, the content of our curriculum begins with the topics and big ideas that are mapped out by national learning standards, but we make intentional choices about how we frame and
facilitate the exploration of those topics to ensure that they are affirming, relevant, and meaningful to our learners.
A Special Focus on Foundational Content in Two Key Areas
There are two areas of our learning program where we closely follow a curriculum scope and sequence that is aligned to national learning benchmarks and where we assess and track how learners are progressing toward meeting those benchmarks. These are English language arts (i.e., reading, writing, language) and mathematics. Because national proficiency exams and college entrance exams emphasize knowledge in these two subjects, we think it is important to more closely align our scope and sequence to the content standards in those areas. You can learn more about our specific approach to teaching English language arts and mathematics at CDS by referring to the linked resources below.
Want to learn more about the CDS approach to teaching English language arts and Math?
Read: English language arts @ CDS
Read: Early Literacy Learning @ CDS: Understanding the Science of Reading
Read: Middle School Humanities Program
Read: Mathematics @ CDS
Read: Math Learning Goals and Outcomes by Grade Level K - 8
Read: Preschool/TK Learning Goals in Math and Language Arts
Read: Technology and Digital Literacy @ CDS
The CDS Approach: 5 Pillars
Pillar 1: Schoolwide Competencies
As noted above, the curriculum at CDS prioritizes skill development in the context of learning content knowledge In fact, our entire curriculum is designed in service of teaching 9 durable, transdisciplinary learning skills that students can take with them to high school and beyond We call these our schoolwide competencies and they align directly to our profile of a graduate. As you look at the schoolwide competencies and skill map on the right, notice how they translate our mission into concrete skills and learning outcomes that can be taught, practiced, and demonstrated in the classroom. As CDS teachers plan lessons, units and projects, they intentionally align them to teach the skills from our schoolwide competencies. Have a look!
Want to learn more about competency-based learning and why we use it at CDS?
Read: Why did CDS create our own competency framework?
Read: The CDS Learner Profile Competencies: Continuum of Learning
Pillar 2: A Social Justice Lens
Central to our mission is the belief that what you know and who you become are equally important. Our shared purpose is that students apply the knowledge and skills we teach them to build more inclusive and just communities. To accomplish this, our curriculum is intentionally designed to do two things: 1) give kids lots of concrete experience with the principles and practices of inclusion and justice through classroom culture and community routines and 2) explore academic topics and themes through a lens of social justice and diverse perspectives by always asking these key questions:
● Identity: Who am I in this? What is my perspective and why?
● Diversity: Who are others in this? And what are their perspectives?
● Justice: What’s fair? What’s just in this context?
● Action: What agency do I have to make a positive impact?
To inform and guide our work, CDS teachers draw on several curriculum practices and learning standards to ensure that our work with students is developmentally appropriate and that it reflects and affirms the diverse experiences and identities that learners bring to the classroom Some of these include the use of restorative practices as an approach to managing conflict and the Learning for Justice Social Justice Standards framework to guide curriculum
Want to learn more about these core frameworks and learning standards?
Read: What Is Social Justice Education?
Read: Restorative Practices for School Discipline Explained
Pillar 3: Essential Teaching Practices
At CDS, we have identified five essential teaching practices that teachers use to implement our curriculum. These research-informed practices are used at all ages and grade levels, across all disciplines and subjects. They support the kinds of learning that are at the heart of the CDS Learning Beliefs. To learn more about each teaching practice, you can see the descriptions below.
Explicit Skill and Strategy Instruction is when teachers make “invisible” thinking skills and processes visible to students. For example, a teacher might think aloud in front of the class as a way of modeling critical thinking about a topic or they might offer a daily reflection activity for students to use to keep track of their progress
Student-led Inquiry and Problem Solving is when teachers invite students to pose their own questions and solve problems by trying things out and then reflecting on what happens In an inquiry-based classroom, you will see students engaged in learning activities that provide them with choice, agency, and the opportunity to show their understanding in many different creative ways like recording a podcast, designing a presentation, or building a model
Discussion-Based Classrooms are classrooms that prioritize discussion, reasoning, relating, and questioning to advance understanding and meaning-making. In a discussion-based classroom, you will often hear teachers say things like “Why do you think that?” “How do you know?” and “What’s another way to think about this?” You will hear students building on the thinking of the group and learning how to agree and disagree and revise their thinking along the way.
Differentiation and Student-Centered Support is when teachers use small groups to deliver just right teaching, when they use in-the-moment assessments to know how students are making sense of the content, and when they get to know their students well so that they can engage and affirm their diverse interests and experiences
Coaching, Conferencing and Feedback is when teachers give specific and actionable feedback to learners about their learning process and progress Sometimes teachers do this in a 1:1 conference, sometimes they do this through a structure of peer feedback cycles, and sometimes they do this through written feedback on rubrics
Pillar 4: Inquiry-Based Learning Design
At Children’s Day School, our teachers use inquiry-based learning as an approach to planning and assessment Inquiry-based learning is a research-based approach to teaching and learning that promotes active learning It often starts with a teacher posing questions, problems, or scenarios, and then invites learners to explore further, build understanding, and apply their learning to an authentic and meaningful task or
outcome. It contrasts with what many of us refer to as traditional education, which generally relies on a teacher presenting facts and knowledge about a subject and asking learners to reproduce that knowledge on a test. To the right is an image which represents the learning cycle that happens in an inquiry-based classroom. When teachers at CDS plan a lesson or unit, they move it through the stages of the inquiry cycle pictured here. As they do this, students develop the target content knowledge, skills, and understandings that the lesson or unit aims to teach Here’s an example from our 5th Grade Science class:
Schoolwide Competency: Investigate with Curiosity
Science Knowledge: What is an estuary? What is a watershed?
Science Skills: Planning and carrying out investigations, developing and using models, using math and computational thinking
Want to learn more about inquiry-based learning and why we use it at CDS?
Listen: Your Child’s Education Explained: What the heck is inquiry-based learning anyway?
Pillar 5: Authentic Assessment
Performance-Based Assessments
Performance based assessments (PBA) are a primary way teachers gather evidence of learning and growth In performance-based assessments, learners demonstrate their learning through the application of target knowledge and skills to an authentic product with real-world relevance
Learning goals and success criteria for this final product are derived from
subject-specific goals and schoolwide competencies. Students are able to self-assess and receive feedback from their teachers on how they are progressing toward the established learning goals. Teachers have flexibility to differentiate the goals to meet individual learners where they are, providing a more learner-centered approach to assessment and feedback.
Curriculum-Based Assessments
As noted in the previous sections, there are some adopted curriculums that we implement at CDS to teach math and foundational reading, writing, and language skills These curriculums offer unit assessments, as well as other checkpoint assessments that are important indicators of learning and progress You will see these assessments come home periodically, or shared at a learning conference
Benchmark Assessments of Reading, Language, and Math
We use the MAP Growth assessment of Reading, Language, and Math in grades 2 - 8 to assess foundational knowledge and skills in those subjects. These assessments are administered twice each school year and provide a useful, additional data point to triangulate with our classroom and curriculum-based assessments. Considered in the context of our classroom and curriculum-based assessments, this data can help us know where to provide strategic support to either stretch or support learners further in the acquisition of core knowledge It also helps us ensure that our students are performing well in relationship to the national standards which are commonly assessed on standardized assessments for high school and college entrance
Got Questions? Want to Learn More?
The CDS Learning Team is here to help you!
Do you have a question about the curriculum?
Ask our Director of Curriculum and Program Innovation
Lindsay Hershenhorn, lindsayh@cds-sf org - Director of Curriculum and Program Innovation PS - 8
Do you have a question about the classroom experience?
Ask your Division Director
Antonette Greene, antonetteg@cds-sf.org - Early Childhood Program Director (PS - K) Marie Keating, mariek@cds-sf.org - Lower School Director (1 - 4)
Chris Wachsmith, chrisw@cds-sf.org - Middle School Director (5 - 8)
Subject Specific Overviews
Preschool / TK
Preschool/TK Learning Goals in Math and Language Arts
English Language Arts
English language arts @ CDS
Early Literacy Learning @ CDS: Understanding the Science of Reading
English Language Arts Learning Goals and Outcomes by Grade level K -5
Social Studies
Social Studies @ CDS
Middle School Humanities
Learning for Justice Standards K -8
Mathematics
Mathematics @ CDS
Preschool/TK Learning Goals in Math and Language Arts
Math Learning Goals and Outcomes by Grade Level K - 8
Science
Science and Environmental Systems @ CDS
Technology & Digital Literacy
Technology and Digital Literacy @ CDS