Virtually all of today’s state content standards require
disaggregation and build out before they can be used to
develop classroom curriculum.
The lack of clear, knowledge-referenced content
in the standards and the absence of a suggested learning
sequence present the teacher with an enormous burden and
a problem because the requirements are incomplete.
The result is misaligned classroom curriculum and
‘teaching to the test’ as a defensive response to
high-stakes accountability.
As the experts have found, today’s standards are
not driving classroom education.
Below are links to four examples of 'content-lite'
standards in use today. The examples illustrate the scope of the burden
placed on teachers and the difficulty they face in
trying to use the standards to define ‘what to teach.’
Following each standard, an illustrative partial
expansion outline is provided.
The expansion outline shows the disaggregation
process and gap filling decisions that are needed to
transform today’s content-lite standards into teachable
and measurable standards that can actually be used to
develop classroom instructional curriculum – lesson
plans.
The amount of time, knowledge and skill required to
property perform the transformation is an unfair burden
for teachers and given teachers general shortage of
time; it is no surprise that today’s content-lite
standards do not drive classroom instruction.
Aligned•By•Design provides time savings
tools and the common libraries to share work and make
this effort manageable.
In addition, course templates can be developed
for libraries with the full high definition detail of
content plus the sequencing and packaging into units.
These templates allow teachers to concentrate
their efforts on determining the “how to teach” as they
develop lesson plans taking the readily usable “what to
teach” directly from templates.
Detail Example Pages
Related Pages
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To
learn more about how the
Aligned·By·Design
Initiative
enables improved schools and student achievement, please
contact us.