Migration To a Standards-based Curriculum

A proper standards alignment ensures that we are prepared to prepare our students for grade-level learning consistent with the standards that govern them. The most effective alignments are done collaboratively, because teachers the grade-level expectations of their students, and they know how to best facilitate their learning.

In mathematics, alignments facilitate the understanding of connections in content, process, and literacy. These connections are embedded and interwoven through meaningful tasks. In addition, a proper alignment can provide more opportunities to explore math fluency in order to problem solve, and for us to facilitate their problem solving. Thus students perform at higher levels of proficiency.

In language arts, alignment increases base level knowledge, level-upon-level. Such an alignment requires depth of understanding of how curriculum increases I complexity, or scaffolds, across fiction and informational text. Alignment of ELA curriculum provides rife opportunities for multiple other content areas to make important literacy connections.

What are those shifts in proficiency, and what do they mean for curriculum alignment? What are those domains, assessments, and facilities of learning that include literacy across all content areas? Knowing and understanding the answers to these questions will help better equip us to make the alignments we need to make to purely, and truly understand how to align curriculum to the Common Core State Standards.

Before we do anything at all, we must know the curriculum. This requires a full evaluation of instructional materials.

Achieve's EQuIP program (more about Achieve's EQuIP program in Module 7) will evaluate materials submitted to them for a proper CCSS alignment. Below are some of the highlights of what and how they analyze for English Language Arts criteria:

ELA Criteria:

I. Aligning to the Common Core State Standards.
Target a set of grade-level standards?
Include a clear and explicit purpose for instruction?
Choose texts that measure within students’ grade-level band?

II. Reflecting key shifts of the standards.
Require students to read text closely for evidence and deep meaning?
Facilitate rich, rigorous evidence-based discussion and writing through thought-provoking, text-dependent questions?
Expect students to draw evidence from texts to produce clear, coherent writing that informs, explains, or argues?

III. Responding to students’ varied needs for instructional support.
Cultivate student interest and engagement?
Integrate appropriate supports in reading, writing, listening, and speaking for students who read below grade level, are English-learners, or have disabilities?
Provide extensions and/or more advanced text for students who read well above grade level?

IV. Regularly assessing whether students are mastering the content and skills in the lesson/unit.
Elicit direct, observable evidence of degree of mastery?
Provide sufficient guidelines for interpreting student performance?

Adapted from Education Week, 11/2/2014: New Tools Gauge Fidelity of Lessons to the Common Core. A full version of a companion document can be found on the EQuIP website at www.achieve.org/EQuIP.