To prepare all students for postsecondary success in the 21st century, Conard High School’s college and career readiness program provides personalized, student-centered learning opportunities that incorporate student interests, aspirations, and goals. Presenters will use multimedia to illustrate a wide range of interactive, real-world activities and outside-of-the-box strategies that have helped our school strengthen student transitions and increase postsecondary attainment, including exemplars of community partnerships and how they are utilized to enrich school-based and off-site learning experiences. Participants will also learn how parents, teachers, and district leaders at all levels promote a college-going and career-confident culture; how our school’s systemic accountability, support, and intervention program was implemented for all students while retaining a focus on underrepresented student subgroups; and how research-based models and resources were used to engage students and parents in early and ongoing exposure to college and career experiences that have a direct correlation to academic preparation.

For schools with increasingly diverse student populations, finding the right educational program that will meet the needs of all learners can be an ongoing challenge. Faced with increasing demands to reduce dropout rates and prepare all students for postsecondary success, E.O. Smith High School is expanding its educational programming options and stretching traditional expectations of what a comprehensive high school can or should be. After becoming a Positive Behavioral Intervention Support school in 2006, our school has been working to create multiple pathways to success for all students. In this presentation, participants will learn about our school’s dynamic programs and gain insight into the thought process that helped our faculty engage students in new ways and address factors that contribute to social and academic failure. Whether you are looking to design a dropout-prevention program, a Big Picture learning environment, an 18-21 program for developmentally disabled students, or in-school interventions, this presentation will provide an overview of our strategies and a road-tested formula for their development, implementation, and evaluation.

In July 2010, Connecticut adopted the Common Core State Standards. At that time, the Consolidated School District of New Britain, an urban district of 10,000 students in central Connecticut, decided to embark upon a systemic curriculum-development initiative aligned to the Common Core. At New Britain High School, this ambitious project has not only led to the creation of meaningful, rigorous curricula that will challenge 21st century learners, but it has also reshaped and revitalized our professional teaching culture. Participants will learn how our school found creative ways to schedule time for content-based Instructional Data Team meetings each week (to develop and manage curricula); how to demystify the process of connecting subject-area content to the Common Core; how student work demonstrating mastery of learning standards can be embedded in electronic portfolios; and how organizational strategies, developed by school leaders, can aid the process of curriculum revision as the nation moves toward next-generation assessment systems aligned to the Common Core.