Maine Course Pathways Project
Project Summary
Guaranteeing all Maine students the opportunity to learn the knowledge and skills essential for the future, including the workplace, postsecondary education, and citizenship.
The Maine Department of Education (DOE) has partnered with the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) to develop a system to determine that high school students are given fair opportunity to learn all of the standards of Maine’s Learning Results: Parameters for Essential Instruction (MLR: PEI). The goal is to help schools validate curriculum and academic programs, and maintain local control over the content of courses.
To accomplish this goal, teachers use the SyllabusMaker software to create and submit syllabi. Once submitted, a minimum of two trained experts from each content area review syllabi for evidence of standards and performance indicators identified by the teacher. Trained, expert reviewers use rubrics, called Scoring Guides, to assess the evidence within each syllabus. Reviewers from each content area will review syllabi for evidence of the standards identified by the teacher. Developed collaboratively by MDOE and EPIC, these Scoring Guides break each standard into components, which allow for a standard to be covered over multiple courses.
After reviewers confirm a school’s syllabi, the school’s pathways will be analyzed to determine the possible course sequences that will provide students a fair opportunity to meet Maine’s Learning Results: Parameters for Essential Instruction (MLR:PEI) in a given content area.
The Benefits of Ensuring High Quality Syllabi
Maine Course Pathways offers tremendous value beyond meeting State graduation requirements. Course syllabi are powerful information-sharing and learning tools. EPIC has conducted years of research on the content of college and high school course syllabi. Although syllabi are more frequently used in college courses, EPIC’s research has shown that comprehensive syllabi are beneficial in the secondary school setting. Creating syllabi for the Maine Course Pathways project will have the following benefits for Maine high schools:
- Working together on a common syllabus for each course gives teachers, school administrators and curriculum coordinators the opportunity to improve curricula alignment.
- Teachers receive non-prescriptive external feedback from experts in their fields.
- Students and parents have a clear, written document that outlines the actions and behaviors required to succeed in each course, as well as in the MLR: PEI addressed in each course.
- Students become familiar with a document that is important in post-secondary courses.