Students in Natrona County start school again on Jan. 12, but teachers and other staff members have spent the past week in various professional development trainings.

On Thursday, teachers at Grant Elementary were deep into Natrona County School District's Essential Curriculum, a guiding document of what students should know before moving up a grade level.

Teachers and schools were asked to complete a worksheet to learn more about the curriculum, and to align their January lesson plans with it.

Destiny Hildebrand and Jennifer Lien, both third-grade teachers, carefully made notes on each lesson that fulfilled an essential curriculum requirement. Response questions after a reading met a compare-and-contrast requirement, for example.

"This is just a baseline of what they must know when they leave third grade," Lien said.

"It's reassuring," Hildebrand said. "It's letting us know that we're doing what we should be doing."

District staff and teachers worked for two years to create the curriculum maps Lien and Hildebrand used on Thursday to make sure their lessons matched up with what students should know.

Vicki Foster, director of curriculum and instruction, said the Essential Curriculum was developed after the district missed Adequate Yearly Progress a second time under standards set by the federal No Child Left Behind act.

Research shows a key way to improve achievement is using a guaranteed and viable curriculum, she continued. Guaranteed means making sure students learn the material, and viable means making sure teachers have adequate time to teach.

The Proficiency Assessment of Wyoming Students was the main resource in creating the curriculum, Foster said. If it's on the test, teachers will find it on the curriculum map.

"Excelling schools have been doing this for a long time before the district," Foster said. "We know that it works.

The curriculum also ensures all students will leave their grade with similar knowledge, Foster said. Natrona County schools have a variety of math and reading curriculums that differ from each other, which can create a gap in learning should a student switch schools.

"If we look at it from a student perspective, it creates a much smoother system," Foster said.

And while teachers are expected to align with the Essential Curriculum, they don't necessarily have to change everything they're doing, Foster said.

"We're not telling them how to teach," she said. "We're telling them what to teach."

Reach education reporter Jasa Santos at (307) 266-0593 or at Jasa.Santos@trib.com. Read her blog at my.trib.com/jasasantos.