Making curriculum decisions related to students' learning needs is on every administrator's and teacher's mind—both addressing prioritizing standards-based learning and the need for innovation. To discuss your needs and concerns, contact Janet to schedule a free virtual meeting.

Standards Alignment

Prioritizing and aligning standards to learning expectations aid in improving content, instructional, and assessment choices.

Accurate Alignment to Standards

Educators often struggle with developing units of study that are accurately aligned to standards expectations. Common problems include, but are not limited to:

  • Aligning After Development: Sometimes, educators align a developed unit of study to the standards they think best fit, leading to the selection of too many standards.
  • Misalignment Despite Pre-selection: Even when a unit of study is developed with thoughtfully pre-selected standards, there can still be misalignments between the standards’ expectations and the unit’s learning requisites.

Designing standards-based curriculum, assessments, and instruction is a learned art. Here are key steps to achieve accurate alignment:

  1. Standards Literacy: Being able to interpret the explicit and inferred expectations of standards is crucial for accurate interpretation.
  2. Prioritizing Standards: Collaboratively determining prioritized standards across grade levels aids in guiding instructional and assessment choices.
  3. Standards-Resources Gap Analysis: Learning expectations must be clearly stated, explicitly taught with current students in mind, and authentically assessed.

Prioritizing Standards

Larry Ainsworth notes in Power Standards (p.13), “What is necessary is to make the distinction—which standards are critical for student success, and which ones can be given less emphasis.”

Janet has perfected a distinction process called “bullseye prioritizing standards”, which aids educators in systemically identifying critical, need-to-know, and still-need-to-know broken apart standard statements through a step-by-step collaborative process. This prioritization positively influences curriculum design, assessments, and instructional practices.

By analyzing each standard statement individually and then collaboratively through asking questions such as, “Does learning this standard aid our students in lifelong learning or learning readiness?”, educators use a review process to finalize their bullseye standard statement percentages. Teachers then create or revise grade-level or course-specific learning focuses, units of study, and assessments based on their prioritized standard statement results.

Standards-Resources Gap Analysis

Educators are often surprised when they compare their grade-level or course prioritized standard statements to their standards-based resources. The gap between the desired learning and what current resources offer may initially appear small but is often much greater than first perceived.

With the ever-expanding resources available through artificial intelligence (AI), open educational resources (OER), and purchasable resources, educators need to be adept at conducting standards-resources gap analyses.

When there is a collaborative and robust agreement on grade-level or course standards- based learning expectations followed by a standards-resource gap analysis, teachers and students can truly own their resources, rather than the resources owning them!

To contact Janet about your learning organization’s standards alignment needs, 
please call her at 520.241.8797, or email her using this contact form.

Read More About…

Curriculum Standards Overview
Standards Literacy
Standards Gap Analysis

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