Tight Community and Right Technology: Our Formula to Quality Education

edCircuit note: Kim Shepherd, principal of New Hope Christian Academy, wrote this account in February 2021 about how New Hope, a small K-12 school, plans its curriculum when most grades have a single teacher. Shepherd’s account is unchanged below. After it, an update explains curriculum mapping and vertical alignment in general terms, with current state guidance and research, for schools working with any planning tool.

For more than 20 years, New Hope Christian Academy has provided a safe learning environment with a loving and caring faculty and staff. The school’s emphasis has been one of community with a strong bond between teachers, parents, and students. With attention to Leadership, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (L-STEAM), the school has recently achieved status as a State STEM equivalent designated school. 

I was honored to be appointed principal a few years ago and frankly never expected to be in this particular leadership position. I’ve grown to love and embrace my role that sprouted from an early devotion to teaching. As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to teach, and that enthusiasm fueled my outlook through the years.

Allowing for an emphasis on the individual

At New Hope, we focus on values-building as part of our legacy. A typical school might say, “We want you to go to college and get a good job and make a difference in the world.” But for us, it takes on even greater meaning. It’s something that sets us apart from other schools in our county. There are four excellent public schools in the area, and I was a product of one of them, but the public system sometimes lacks a focus on the individual. New Hope emphasizes mentoring kids and going that extra mile for our students and families. We take the time to teach life skills and social-emotional skills and the things that go far beyond reading and writing.

We’ve also had minimal teacher turnover, which augments the benefit of our small size. But in recent years, the biggest challenge is, do we have one class, or do we have two classes in a particular grade level? And how many teachers do I have in a specific grade level? 

This year, in the elementary, we have one classroom per grade level, and it presents a particular set of challenges. Teachers are without specific counterparts to plan and work on lessons, so a great deal of planning between grade levels is necessary to help with vertical alignment.

Getting a handle on the work

About six years ago, we started using Chalk for curriculum planning, and this has given a boost to our routine―turning our grade-level challenges into simply changes. We had a first-grade teacher at the time who was always going above and beyond the call of duty. She was using the Planboard tool for her lesson planning, a free resource available to teachers, and then she showed it to me, sharing, “I think this is something that would benefit New Hope as a whole.” 

She presented it to the admin team, and we all felt like it was a missing piece for us. We adopted the school-level solution the very next year. It’s helped us in several different ways, including when we have an occasional teacher turnover; it’s nice to be able to hand something to incoming teachers instead of just saying, “Here’s a textbook.”

Instead, we say, “Here are the units that the teacher taught last year, in this particular order. Here are the standards that go with each unit.” Ensuring curriculum is aligned to standards and lessons are in turn aligned to curriculum is an essential process that Chalk makes simple, and the real-time standards-tracking is one of the features we love. Teachers can reference, “Hey, I taught 100 percent of the standards that I needed for each grade level,” and see exactly where students stand in the moment. On the occasions where the number isn’t 100 percent, they know exactly what to go back and cover. In this way, our teachers have the information they need to do their best work in covering all standards.

Another area is the curriculum mapping piece, which we’ve jumped into in the last couple of years. It has allowed us to see the vertical alignment in the grade-to-grade transitions. In some of our PD last year, we sat all the K-12 math teachers down and said, “Okay, tell me about numbers and operations in Kindergarten?” Then we went all the way up through pre-calculus. To see all of that played out has been so beneficial for us, and then to be able to search and identify gaps and fill in those gaps has been tremendous.

Benefits of “being there”

Like so many schools in our county, we went fully remote during much of the COVID shutdown. Luckily, because of our small size, we could get back to full-time by August and remain in that position.

It has been our families’ vision from the get-go to be in school as much as we can. I’m grateful that we’ve been able to be in-person. I’ve seen the benefits both personally and professionally for our students. The advantages of being in-school are numerous, particularly for our students who have special needs.

One such student who stands out was one of our 2020 graduates. He had a tough early life. His father was not in the picture, and his mother, an addict, had died in a car crash. His grandmother desperately wanted him to attend New Hope but didn’t have the money. A sponsor agreed to cover his tuition to educate the boy. It was inspiring to see him graduate, especially knowing the odds and what he overcame to get to his high school diploma.

Belonging to a community

The former example represents the kind of close-knit community we have at New Hope. Everyone from the student to the family to the faculty and staff enjoys a connectedness. It’s a belonging that one rarely finds in a larger public school. The connection recently emerged through a conversation over a student preparing to transfer. The family said, “There has been so much loss this year in our previous school. A going back and forth and not knowing what was going to happen.” They were looking for community.

When I think of all the challenges we’ve been through as a school, I remain thankful for the teachers, families, and students who find a way to rally together to make things happen.

Curriculum mapping and vertical alignment: a practical guide for school leaders

Curriculum mapping is the practice of writing down, unit by unit and grade by grade, what is taught, when it is taught, which standards it serves and how learning is checked. Vertical alignment in education is the part of that work that looks up and down the grades, so that what students learn in one year prepares them for the next. The session Shepherd describes above, in which every math teacher from kindergarten through pre-calculus traced numbers and operations across the grades, is a vertical alignment review in its plainest form. What follows sets out what the terms mean, what current state guidance asks a map to contain, what the evidence does and does not say, and how a school can run a review of its own.

What the terms mean

The Glossary of Education Reform, published by the Great Schools Partnership, gives definitions that are still widely used. A curriculum is vertically coherent when what students learn in one lesson, course or grade prepares them for the next. It is horizontally coherent when two sections of the same course teach matching content and assessments reflect what was actually taught. A school with one class per grade, as Shepherd describes, has little horizontal work to do but carries the whole vertical load on a handful of people, which is why the handoff from one grade to the next matters so much there.

What a current state template asks for

The New York State Education Department’s 2026 PreK-12 math curriculum review guide includes a curriculum mapping template and review tool, prepared with Hanover Research. The template gives each grade-level team one row per unit, with columns for pacing, the standards addressed, learning targets, Depth of Knowledge levels (a scale for how demanding a task is), essential questions, differentiation and accommodations, formative and summative assessment, and interdisciplinary connections. One column is labelled vertical alignment and asks teachers to list prerequisite skills, vocabulary and common scaffolds for each unit.

The review tool then scores a finished map against six criteria: alignment with the state standards, vertical alignment, interdisciplinary coherence, pacing timelines, curricular materials and usability. Under vertical alignment it asks reviewers to confirm a smooth progression of skills within units and across the grade bands PreK-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12. The document is written for math in New York, and it is a planning tool rather than a study, but its structure transfers readily to other subjects and states.

What the evidence says, and its limits

Most published guidance on mapping comes from state agencies and practitioner organizations rather than controlled studies, so leaders should treat it as sound practice rather than a proven intervention. The research that does exist points to why coherence matters. An August 2026 brief from TNTP, The Case for Mathematics Coherence, looked at six districts and found that core curriculum, intervention programs, assessments and digital tools were often not designed to work together, leaving educators to build the connections themselves. It recommends treating these as parts of one instructional system. Six districts is a small base, and the brief describes approaches rather than measuring their effect.

RAND’s 2023 American Instructional Resources Survey adds a second reason. In a report by Sy Doan and Anna Shapiro, three in ten K-12 teachers said the materials their school or district required were too challenging for most of their students, and math teachers who felt this way were less likely to use the materials for most of their teaching time. Teachers whose professional learning helped them adapt materials were less likely to see them as too hard. A map that names the prerequisite skills for each unit gives teachers a practical way to close that distance without abandoning grade-level work. The survey records teachers’ views, not student outcomes.

Running a vertical alignment session

1. Choose one strand or skill progression, such as numbers and operations or argument writing, rather than a whole subject at once.
2. Ask each grade to bring its current map: units in order, standards, time spent and the main assessment for each unit.
3. Walk the strand from the lowest grade upward, as Shepherd’s team did, and mark three things: gaps where a prerequisite is never taught, repetition where a skill is retaught at the same level, and handoffs where one grade assumes what the previous grade did not finish.
4. Check prerequisites against an outside reference. For schools using the Common Core math standards, Achieve the Core’s free Coherence Map shows how each standard connects to others within and across grades and lets a teacher trace a standard back through its prerequisites. States that have revised their standards, New York among them, should check against their own documents.
5. Agree on specific changes, record them in the map with an owner and a date, and revisit the strand the following year.

Small schools and new teachers

Shepherd names two benefits that apply to any school with single-section grades. Without a same-grade partner, the teacher in the grade above or below becomes the most useful planning colleague, and a shared map gives that conversation a common reference. A map also shortens the start for a new teacher, who receives the units, their order and their standards rather than a textbook alone. Leaders can build both uses into the calendar by pairing adjacent grades for planning time and making the map part of every new teacher’s first week.

Choosing a format

A map can live in a shared spreadsheet that follows a state template or in dedicated planning software. Before committing to either, leaders should ask whether the format uses their state’s current standards, whether maps can be exported if the school changes systems, who can see and edit them, and what the cost will be as staff numbers change. The value lies in the conversations the map makes possible, and those depend more on protected time than on the tool.

Further Reading</strong?

1. edCircuit – 5-in-5: Q&A with Teacher Theresa Bruce
2. edCircuit – #SELChat: A Black History Month Reading List
3. edCircuit – Mind the Gap, Episode 16 – Doug Lemov on Why Championship-Level Teaching Is About Passion

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