Teachers go to college to learn to be teachers. They are trained to be instructional specialists, who are often not trained to design curriculum from a unit of study or course viewpoint. Yet, when educators are given the time and guidance to design units of study using alignment protocols, it often leads to profound insights and positively impacts learning and instruction. When undertaking the creation of, or improvement in, a school’s, district’s, or higher-ed’s curriculum alignment, it’s important to determine the intent and purposes for the protocols you ask teachers to use to create a well-aligned curriculum. It is also critical for a leadership team–once they have watched the video and participated in discussions based on the conversation starter document*–to pose and answer these questions:

• what can be done now?
• what can be done later?
• who will be responsible for training and providing feedback once we initiate our new (or upgraded) alignment protocols?

*To connect to the Curriculum Spark blog post that includes the conversation starter document: click here.

The goals of this Part 2 webinar are to:

• Understand the difference between common, formative, and summative assessments
• Explore the difference between an assessment that’s measuring skills and an assessment that’s measuring standards
• Evaluate where your common assessment creation process should begin.

Also included is the “follow-up” conversation with Sari Weltmann and Debbie Lutchkus from American Heritiage School in Florida, who were my meaningful-alignment upgrade volunteers. I met with them virtually prior to the webinar to coach them on improving their unit alignment based on insights shared in The Benefits of an Aligned Curriculum – Part 1 webinar.

When teachers begin the mapping process and are asked to write map units that include skill statements, often times teachers write a skill as an activity. This may be in part due to writing daily lesson plans, which focus heavily on “how the learning will take place” (teaching) rather than on articulating the detailed specifics of the learning expectations.

This video addresses the design concept that standards are not “the” curriculum; rather standards are guidelines or proficiency targets that educators align to when developing an articulated curriculum, both horizontally and vertically.

We are going to define the various types of curriculum maps, as well as the purpose of each type.

It is important to remember that curriculum mapping is a verb representing ongoing collegial and personal processes. Curriculum maps are by-products of the processes. Curriculum maps should be seen as living, breathing documents that represent educators’ continuous curriculum work (focused on both learning and teaching).

When establishing curriculum mapping, it is worthwhile to consider curriculum from a systemic point of view–similar to an aspen grove with an interdependent root system.

There is often confusion between assessment and evaluation. Janet explains the difference between the two in this vlog.