Hanover Community School Corporation

Hanover Community School Corporation, Curriculum Department

Curriculum & Instruction

Hanover Community School Corporation is committed to aligning your child’s curriculum with Indiana state standards and ensuring that they have the skills necessary to successfully progress year after year. The Curriculum Department and Assistant Superintendent Deborah Snedden, is charged with the task of helping teachers ‘map’ curriculum and helping students achieve a minimum of 80% proficiency in skills at each grade level. 

An aligned curriculum determines what each student needs to master at each grade level in order to be successful. Without an aligned curriculum in grades K-12, students would be left with splintered skills and gaps in learning.  Invariably, they would enter a grade level and not have the foundation to be successful. An aligned curriculum ensures that skills mastered in first grade provide students with what they need to be successful in second grade, and the alignment continues from one grade level to the next. By understanding what an elementary school student needs to know when they transition to middle school, and what a middle school student needs to know to transition to high school, it helps teachers realize that they are responsible to their peers, and we are all responsible for one common goal, providing the best education possible for Hanover kids.  

The bottom line for the Curriculum Department is simple; “What do we want our students to learn, how do we know they learned it, and what are we going to do if they didn’t? Maps and formative assessments (short tests) are designed by teachers and, ultimately, teachers will determine how well the maps are working by the performance of their students through short assessments and ISTEP testing. Mrs.Snedden will assist the teachers in determining what needs to change on the maps at regular intervals. 

Curriculum mapping doesn’t eliminate the creativity of individual teachers, but rather enhances it.  The magic that teachers work in the classroom is what makes teaching a creative art. How teachers deliver instruction in the classroom may be very different in each classroom, and that creativity is encouraged, but with curriculum mapping the expectations are the same at each grade level, and that is at the heart of the 'science' of teaching.