Rigorous Curriculum Design: How to Create Curricular Units of Study that Align Standards, Instruction, and Assessment - Softcover

Ainsworth, Larry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935588052 ISBN 13: 9781935588054

Publisher: Lead & Learn Press, 2011

Synopsis

Overview of Book

This book is divided into four parts. Here is a brief overview of each part:

Part 1, Seeing the Big Picture Connections First, defines curriculum in terms of rigor, provides the background of this model, connects curriculum design to the “big picture” of standards, assessments, instruction, and data practices, previews the step-by-step design sequence, and introduces end-of-chapter reader assignments.

Part 2, Building the Foundation for Designing Curricular Units, explains the five steps that must first be taken to lay the foundation upon which to build the curricular units of study, and provides explicit guidelines for applying each step.

Part 3, Designing the Curricular Unit of Study—From Start to Finish, gives the “nuts and bolts” directions for designing a rigorous curricular unit of study, from beginning to end, and concludes with an overview of how to implement the unit in the classroom or instructional program. Formatively assessing students along the way, educators analyze resulting student data to diagnose student learning needs and then adjust ongoing instruction accordingly.

Part 4, Organizing, Monitoring, and Sustaining Implementation Efforts, addresses the role of administrators in beginning and continuing the work of implementation. These final three chapters provide first-person narra - tives and advice to administrators from administrators who have personally led the implementation and sustainability efforts of curriculum redesign and related practices within their own school systems.

I have endeavored to pull together all of the elements necessary for designing a rigorous curriculum, to position these elements in a sequential order, and to provide a step-by-step approach for constructing each one. My hope is that this road map will not only “show you the way” to design your own curriculum, but also allow you the flexibility of customizing it to fit your own purpose and needs.

As with the realization of any lofty vision, it will take a great deal of time, thought, energy, and collaboration to create and revise a single curriculum, let alone multiple curricula. The best advice I can offer is to regard whatever you produce as a continual “work in progress,” to be accomplished over one, two, or three years, or even longer. As my friend and colleague Robert Kuklis points out, curriculum designers “shape and modify the process as they move through it. It is important that they know this is not a rigid, prescriptive procedure, but rather an opportunity for learning, adapting, and improving. This preserves fidelity to the process, encourages flexibility, and promotes local ownership.”

Whenever people’s spirits need lifting because the work seems so demanding, remind everyone that it is a process, not a one-time event. You are creating something truly significant—a comprehensive body of work that is going to serve your educators, students, and parents for years to come!

About this title

About the Author

Larry Ainsworth is the Executive Director of Professional Development at The Leadership and Learning Center in Englewood, Colorado. He travels nationally and internationally to assist school systems in implementing best practices related to standards, assessment, and accountability across all grades and content areas. He is the author or coauthor of ten published books, including Rigorous Curriculum Design, “Unwrapping” the Standards, Power Standards, Common Formative Assessments, Student Generated Rubrics, and Five Easy Steps to a Balanced Math Program, including three 2006 editions, one each for the primary, upper elementary, and secondary grade spans. His chapter “Common Formative Assessments: The Centerpiece of an Integrated Standards-Based Assessment System” appears in the 2007 assessment anthology Ahead of the Curve: The Power of Assessment to Transform Teaching and Learning, edited by Douglas B. Reeves.

Larry regularly works on site in school systems to assist leaders and educators in understanding and implementing standards-based practices: prioritizing and “unwrapping” the standards, developing common formative assessments, designing authentic performance tasks, and creating rigorous curricular units of study in all content areas, pre-kindergarten through grade 12.

From the Back Cover

Applicable to every grade, course, and content area, you will learn:

What rigorous curriculum is and how to create, sequence, and pace such a curriculum

Why seeing the "big picture" connections first is essential to beginning curriculum design

How to design a grade- or course-specific curricular unit of study, from start to finish

How to use formative assessments and data analysis to guide instruction before, during, and after each unit

How leaders can organize, implement, and sustain this model throughout the school and/or school system

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excert Content: CHAPTER 1
What Is Rigorous Curriculum Design?

Before defining curriculum design in terms of rigor, let’s first start with a fundamental definition of the general term, curriculum. There are varying definitions, all useful for providing an important foundational understanding of the term. Among them are the following:

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, the origin of the word
curriculum is from the Latin curricle, meaning “course, racing chariot,” and currere, “to run.” Loosely interpreted, a curriculum is a course to be run.

Peter Oliva (2005) defines curriculum as:

A number of plans, in written form and of varying scope, that
delineate the desired learning experiences. The curriculum,
therefore, may be a unit, a course, a sequence of courses, the school’s
entire program of studies . . . (p. 7).

W. James Popham offers two related explanations of curriculum:

By curriculum, I mean the outcomes that educators hope to achieve
with their students. The three most common kinds of outcomes
sought are students’ acquisition of cognitive skills, bodies of
knowledge, and their affect (such as particular attitudes, interests, or
values) (2003b, pp. 16–17).

In this time-honored definition, a curriculum represents
educational ends. Educators hope, of course, that such ends will be
attained as a consequence of instructional activities which serve as
the means of promoting the curricular ends (2004, p. 30).

Douglas B. Reeves (2001) writes:

An effective standards-based curriculum is planned “with the end in
mind.” The selection of a standards-based curriculum implies focus,
discernment, and the clear exclusion of many things that are now in
textbooks, lesson plans, and curricula (p. 13).

Apart from these clear and compatible definitions of the word, many broad
synonyms for curriculum, often used interchangeably, include: standards, lesson plans, textbooks, scope and sequence, learning activities, and prescribed courses of study provided by the state, province, district, school division, or professional content area organizations. The result is a rather nebulous understanding of the term whenever educators use it in dialogues and discussions.

For purposes of this book, I am defining curriculum as the high-quality delivery system for ensuring that all students achieve the desired end—the attainment of their designated grade- or course-specific standards. My vision for designing such a curriculum is founded upon the intentional alignment between standards, instruction, and assessment.

The Current Need to Update and Redesign Curricula

School systems have been working hard over the past several years to get the means for achieving this desired end firmly in place and accepted within their professional culture. These “means” include, but are not limited to, the effective use of standards, differentiated instructional practices, formative assessments, and corresponding data analysis.

Today, educators and leaders are well aware of the need to update and redesign their existing curricula—particularly in the U.S., where forty-three states and the District of Columbia have adopted the rigorous Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics. Equally rigorous curricula aligned to these new standards must be created to help educators prepare their students for the national assessments that will be first administered in 2014–15. In addition, stronger links are needed between curricula and the many professional best practices being implemented. Not only have curricula not kept pace with the updated versions of state or provincial standards and assessments, often the established curricula are
reflective of only the more traditional components:

• A general listing of content and performance standards (student learning
outcomes or objectives) for each content area
• A yearlong scope and sequence of what to teach and in what order
• A pacing calendar of when to teach it and how long to take in doing so
• A list of related learning activities
• A suggestion of assessments to use
• A list of required or recommended materials and resources

All of these traditional components are, of course, necessary to retain, but they need to be further clarified. In addition, other important components should be added. We must broaden our view of what we want our curricula to be and do.

Curricular architects must acknowledge that the function of a rigorous cur -
riculum is to raise the level of teaching so that students are prepared for the 21st century with skills that “drive knowledge economies: innovation, creativity, teamwork, problem solving, flexibility, adaptability, and a commitment to continuous learning” (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009).

Think about the following blend of both traditional and new components for an updated and redesigned comprehensive curriculum:

• Specific learning outcomes students are to achieve from pre-kindergarten
through grade 12 in all content areas
• Vertical representation of those learning outcomes (grade-to-grade, course-to-
course) in curricular frameworks
• Units of study—topical (literary devices, character traits, narrative writing);
skills-based (making text-to-text connections, simplifying fractions); thematic
(patterns, ecology, composition and creativity, personal rights)
• Emphasis on standards-based skills and content knowledge
• Academic vocabulary specific to each discipline and pertinent to each unit of
study
• Explicit linkages to state or provincial assessments and to college and career
readiness
• 21st-century learning skills
• Higher-level thinking skills
• Interdisciplinary connections
• Authentic, student-centered performance tasks that engage learners in
applying concepts and skills to the real world
• Ongoing assessments to gauge student understanding
• Sequencing of “learning progressions” (Popham, 2008), the conceptual and
skill-based building blocks of instruction
• Research-based effective teaching strategies
• Differentiation, intervention, special education, and English Language
Learner strategies to meet the needs of all students
• A common lexicon of terminology (curriculum glossary) to promote
consistency of understanding
• Embedded use of resources and multimedia technology
• A parent communication and involvement component
• A curriculum philosophy that is compatible with or a part of the school
system’s mission statement

Another factor—this one external—that is driving the need to update and
redesign curricula is the curriculum audit. In some school systems where low
student performance on standardized tests has identified the system as being in need of improvement, a curriculum audit administered by an outside agency examines a particular content area curriculum to evaluate its strengths and point out its omissions. Although an external audit may initially seem disciplinary, it can, upon further consideration, be looked upon as a helpful diagnostic. The findings and recommendations of the audit report can provide a specific focal point for beginning needed revision efforts.

Rigor for the 21st Century

There are many definitions of the noun rigor, most of them related to some form of physical or mental rigidity or severity. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary definition of logical rigor—“strict precision or exactness”—seems at least relevant to the educational context. The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English defines the related adjective rigorous as “extremely thorough.” Yet neither of these definitions satisfactorily conveys the intent behind the word. To me, rigor refers not only to a level of difficulty and the ways in which students apply their knowledge through higher-order thinking skills; it also implies the reaching for a higher level of quality in both effort and outcome.

In many U.S. communities, the public perceives a decline and loss of rigor in
their schools. School systems with a majority of underachieving students are facing very real external accountability pressures to perform well on state assessments. The response to these pressures in some, though certainly not all, school districts has been to lower expectations of what their students should learn and be able to do. This “lowering of the bar” has resulted in a loss of instruction and learning rigor for all students in those systems. Conversely, in other school systems with a majority of high-performing students, the comfortable status quo—as related to rigor—may need a healthy “bump up” in terms of redefining what rigor ought to mean and look like in both instruction and student work.

School systems preparing for a partial or complete overhaul of their existing
curricula to emphasize increased rigor may find support in these insightful words of Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallik (2010): “We must ask ourselves, are we educating students for a life of tests or for the tests of life?” (p. 225).

In his article “Rigor Redefined,” Tony Wagner (2008) names seven 21st-century “survival” skills students today need to “master [in order] to thrive in the new world of work: (1) critical thinking and problem solving; (2) collaboration and leadership; (3) agility and adaptability; (4) initiative and entrepreneurialism; (5) effective oral and written communication; (6) accessing and analyzing information; and (7) curiosity and imagination” (pp. 21–22).

Wagner extols an exemplary algebra II teacher he observed who carefully
structured a lesson so that his students learned the academic content while simultaneously using all seven of these skills. In contrast, Wagner laments what he has seen in hundreds of U.S. classroom observations: the reduction of curriculum down to only one component—test preparation. He concludes, “It’s time to hold ourselves and all of our students to a new and higher standard of rigor, defined according to 21st-century criteria” (p. 24).

Rigorous Curriculum Defined

My own definition of rigor as applied to standards, instruction, and assessment began with a focus limited primarily to the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001).

In the process of “unwrapping” or deconstructing standards that I have con -
tinued to refine, educators match the skills (verbs) in the standards statements to one of the six cognitive processes in the revised taxonomy: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. They then design assessment questions to reflect the approximate levels of the corresponding thinking skills (e.g., analyze: analysis question; interpret: interpretation question). Corresponding instruction intentionally provides students with opportunities to exercise each targeted skill at the appropriate level of rigor so they are prepared to answer the related assessment questions.

This was—and continues to be—a good starting place for making more
rigorous, parallel connections between standards, assessment, and instruction.

However, when applied to curriculum design, I believe a broader definition of
“rigor” must also include the intentional inclusion of and alignment between all necessary components within that curriculum. To design a comprehensive curriculum that intentionally aligns standards, formal and informal assessments, engaging student learning experiences, related instruction that includes a variety of strategies, higher-order thinking skills, 21st-century life skills, data analysis, and so on, is to indeed design a rigorous curriculum

Edition details

• Publisher: Lead & Learn Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1935588052
• ISBN 13: 9781935588054
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360