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Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ Quick Links
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Why
was the Aligned·By·Design Model developed?
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Is
Aligned·By·Design prescriptive?
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What makes the Aligned·By·Design Model a
unifying solution?
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Where can we find aligned ‘model’ curriculum?
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Why
should educators develop high-definition content
standards?
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Why is the Aligned·By·Design Model
’Knowledge-Centric?’
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What are the classroom challenges the Aligned·By·Design
Model solves?
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How can we eliminate ‘teaching to the test’ practices?
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What does
‘alignment’ really mean?
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How does Aligned·By·Design improve alignment?
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How Does the Aligned·By·Design Model improve
sequencing?
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What’s makes Aligned·By·Design so unique?
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Why was the
Aligned·By·Design
Model developed?
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First, to
solve education’s systemic and related systemic
problems and close the institutional gap separating
state standards from the classroom
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Second, to
empower teachers and support student achievement by
enabling quality best practices in
our school systems and ensuring that the individual instructional needs of each
student can be effectively and efficiently met in every classroom
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Third, to
transform our nation’s vision of
high-performance classroom achievement into reality and cost-effectively fulfill the promise of standards-based reform for teachers,
parents and all students
Is
Aligned·By·Design
prescriptive?
No, the
Aligned·By·Design
Model is focused on specifying the ‘what to teach.’ not
the ‘how to teach.’
What the model
does not
do is equally important as what it does do.
Aligned·By·Design
does not
change teaching methods.
It does not change the teaching content, only the
completeness of the content standards and their guaranteed
alignment with instructional curriculum and assessments.
Aligned·By·Design
does not
employ technology as a teacher replacement, but uses
technology to automate, grow and sustain the classroom
and system processes.
What makes the
Aligned·By·Design
model a unifying
solution?
Aligned·By·Design
is a
ground-breaking addition to the resources available to
national, state and local educators and teachers.
It is a ‘unifying solution’ because it combines
the education efforts systemically, at all levels, to
improve student outcomes while respecting the inherent
autonomy of each.
Aligned·By·Design recognizes, respects and allows
for individual ideas and teaching methods. The question
asked by teachers – “What am I supposed to teach?” – is
answered by the system at many levels, from giving
teachers the input needed to design their own lesson
plans to providing subject matter curriculum models
complete enough to be used in the classroom.
Where can we find aligned ‘model’ curriculum?
With the
Aligned·By·Design
Model, complete instructional curriculum models can be developed
at the state level and promulgated to schools districts
and teachers for direct adoption and use, or adaptation
and use, or simply for use as a reference model of
perfectly aligned, classroom usable materials.
At the same time, the model functionality extends beyond
the state and
offers district curriculum developers and teachers the tools and processes necessary to develop their own completely
aligned instructional curriculum, independently or based
on the state or other model curriculum.
Why should educators develop high-definition
content standards?
Educational
experts agree that content standards should be presented
in a way that is useful for teaching and the measurement
of learning and that today’s standards need to be
translated into much more detailed, structured elements
that:
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Are true
specifications of the knowledge, skills and concepts
to be taught for proficiency and the cognitive level
expected at each grade level;
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Allow
curriculum to be developed that is truly aligned to
the standards;
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Allow
assessment to be designed that precisely track
curriculum and standards; and
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Allow
schools to meet state education objectives without
additional translation.
Only knowledge-referenced,
high-definition content standards, meet these criteria
for teachable and measurable standards.
Why is the
Aligned·By·Design
model ’Knowledge-Centric?’
The Aligned·By·Design Model includes
process tools and library system for specifically
designed education. It is a knowledge-centric system,
meaning that all materials map or link to knowledge to
eliminate the serious problems of content gaps and
content ambiguity. The availability of knowledge also
provides support for less experienced teachers, students
who need on-point reference materials, and parents who
are often called upon to help, but need access to the
knowledge content of the curriculum.
The models common knowledge library, accessed by
both the assessment developer and curriculum developers,
assures teachers that their lesson plans and
instructional materials are aligned with the content
covered by the end-of-year assessment.
What are the classroom challenges the
Aligned·By·Design
model solves?
The specification and design of the
Aligned·By·Design
Model, began in the classroom and
the critical need to solve issues, such as:
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Teachers, students and parents need a clear
understanding of what students should learn for
proficiency each year, and those goals should be
reasonable and rigorous;
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Teachers
and administrators need to know whether students are
reaching those targets, and to do so, a consistent way
of measuring progress in real-time is needed;
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Because it matters
that students reach the goals, school systems should
connect incentives and supports with results.
The Aligned·By·Design Model enables the promulgation of
standards that leave no doubt or question as to
what needs to be learned and what is going to be
assessed by end-of-year tests.
It answers the pressing question facing teachers:
“What am I really supposed to teach?”
With
Aligned·By·Design,
everything is defined.
It is fully descriptive without being
prescriptive, focusing on the delivery of knowledge and
skills, not the generalized concepts currently presented
to teachers as "state content standards."
How can we eliminate ‘teaching to the test’
practices?
Educational
experts have found that state standards largely are
devoid of real content, lack specificity, and
inadequately define the skills, concepts and knowledge
underpinning them.
Lacking specificity and content, standards are
not directly usable by school districts, teachers or
assessment developers.
But, since assessments have been given ultimate
importance in our classrooms, assessments developed get
specific and significant funding.
Consequently, there is far more useful
information on ‘what to teach’ available from released
assessment materials, than provided by the standards.
As a result, teachers develop curriculum based on
the assessment and “teach to the test.”
The
Aligned·By·Design Model facilitates centralized
standards build-out and the development of an
instructional curriculum model that provides the details
of where and how the curriculum aligns to standards.
The model provides the educational community a
complete standards framework, and a complete
instructional curriculum guaranteed to align with the
standards framework. By using
Aligned·By·Design
unique technology to automate, grow and sustain the
end-to-end educational process, the model enables a
high-quality classroom environment that provides
teachers with directly usable, guaranteed aligned
materials.
These benefits eliminate ‘teaching to the test’
practices and allow teachers to focus on their time on
instruction and improved student achievement.
What
does ‘alignment’ really mean?
The concept of ‘alignment’ is almost universally
endorsed by educators.
The term ‘alignment’ is used by them to imply
that the content knowledge and skills detailed by state
standards is identical to the knowledge and skills in
the curriculum and assessments.
However, the lack of
concise detail in the standards has rendered ‘alignment’
a deceptive term, and it is being misused, and as
used, is misleading teachers, parents and students.
Most of the
content standards in use today are devoid of detailed
content.
Because they are vague, their ‘alignment’ with
curriculum and assessments is equally vague, and
teachers, not the standards, define “what to teach.” The
classroom curriculum is
related to
standards, but not really aligned.
Unfortunately, the same is
true of assessments. And therefore, the likelihood of
true alignment between classroom curriculum and
high-stakes end-of-year tests is very low, and that
makes achieving high scores unrealistic.
Furthermore, the data from the testing is simply
a test score and cannot represent a measure of the
classroom achievement.
The unified
Aligned·By·Design Model allows national, state and local educators to define
standards very concisely, creating high-definition
standards.
The individual teachers benefits from using the system
because it retains all the process step results which
can be reused, refined, shared and forwarded for
approval. The
collaborative nature of the technology, with its integrated communications, allows the education
community to make large, previously out-of-reach
advances in the development of truly aligned standards,
curriculum and assessments.
How does
Aligned·By·Design
improve alignment?
The
Aligned·By·Design system
uses knowledge and skills as the fundamental content
element denomination. By utilizing this clear content
definition of what to teach, true alignment between
standards, curriculum, and assessments can be designed
and maintained.
Using
Aligned·By·Design to
develop or build out standards results in educators
defining a scope of knowledge and skills. When lesson
plans and assessment items are developed,
Aligned·By·Design
tracks their actual knowledge and skills scope with
planned scope for a course or assessment and provides a
mapping to show any uncovered requirements or content
that is out of scope. Using this common denominator
method, true alignment can be achieved.
The
Aligned·By·Design Model provides an accepted method for aligning standards,
curriculum, instruction, and assessments, all done by
detail comparison of the knowledge scopes.
It restores credibility to the term ‘alignment’
and its true meaning that the objects being compared are
finely detailed and identical at that level.
How Does the
Aligned·By·Design
Model improve sequencing?
The sequence of learning
knowledge and skills is critical to the success of
transferring the knowledge and skills to students. But,
today’s standards and course frameworks don’t provide
sequencing lower than the course level. Most standards
explicitly tell teachers that the sequence of the
standards should not be construed as the recommended
teaching sequence. Leaving teachers to determine content
sequence adds additional work to the process of
developing classroom curriculum. And, for content, the
test materials provide no help. Teachers rely on their
own understandings and use references like text books to
define the sequence for their classroom materials.
The
Aligned·By·Design Model provides
all the tools needed to define high definition,
knowledge-referenced standards.
Using the system’s well-detailed knowledge and
skills library, the content standards definitions shape
a logical sequencing.
The system will flag sequences that violate
prerequisite rules as content items are reviewed and
sequenced.
The system goes beyond these
important processes and also provides the bridge between
standards and curriculum, called curriculum templates.
Essentially this is a course outline with detailed
content identified and explicit sequencing.
Course plan details can be defined sequentially
at the unit plan and lesson plan level. Because the
template provides at least the unit groupings, the
classroom time allocated for each content element is
also established.
Using the Model, teachers can
copy a curriculum template to their own system working
area and start developing the actual lesson plans. This
bridge between standards and classroom curriculum
clearly defines the “what to teach” while leaving the
“how to teach” up to the teachers. Provision of the
course templates promotes high-definition alignment
between standards and classroom curriculum and
eliminates the need to teach to the test.
What’s makes
Aligned·By·Design
so unique?
The Aligned·By·Design Model leverages a new
class of technology developed specifically for education
systems to make it feasible for states, school
districts, schools and teachers to work in a unified way
to achieve and sustain student achievement objectives.
The original research and design of the
technology started with solving problems in the
classroom, and evolved to a system of complementary
processes and tools that supports education at all
levels from the teacher to Governor’s office and
everywhere in-between.
The Model designers understood that education’s problems were systemic
and integrated.
Without the education community working together,
broad-based high-level improvement in the classroom
practice and student achievement could not be realized.
Aligned·By·Design
is a comprehensive and flexible Model that can be applied to any
educational situation, including pre-K, K-12, vocational
and post-secondary, and simultaneously, at all levels in
those systems.
Related Pages
Learn More
To
learn more about how the
Aligned·By·Design
Initiative
enables improved schools and student achievement, please
contact us.
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