Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum

How to Design, Revise, or Adopt Curriculum Aligned to Student Success

Angela Di Michele Lalor

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781416622826
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrpläne

We know that curriculum is the core of the classroom experience, but what makes a quality curriculum? How can educators be sure that what they teach is strongly aligned to the specific standards that their district or school has adopted? What kinds of lessons, learning experiences, and assessments are most effective, and how should they be embedded within the curriculum? You'll find the answers to these and many other questions in this definitive, step-by-step guide to curriculum design and evaluation.

Drawing from her work with teachers and administrators to facilitate curriculum development, Angela Di Michele Lalor offers targeted advice and real-life examples from elementary and secondary units of study across a variety of content areas and standards, as well as field-tested rubrics, protocols, and other tools. She provides criteria for evaluating each component of a curriculum and end-of-chapter checklists to help you ensure that the criteria are met.

Relevant to anyone who is creating or revising curriculum, or evaluating options among published alternatives, Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum is a comprehensive and accessible roadmap to developing a solid foundation for teaching and learning--and better results in the classroom.

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CONSIDERATION 1

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Organizing Centers

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Which unit within each of the following example sets captures your attention?

Example Set 1

A. The Grapes of Wrath and the Great Depression: Students read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and write a report on the Great Depression.
B. Literature or Life? In this unit students study the essential question What's more real—literature or life? They read several poems, short stories, and a full-length novel to analyze the connection between the time period in which the works were written and the events of the time. Students use their understanding of this connection to write their own review and analysis of a contemporary novel and how it reflects the lifestyle and values of today.

Example Set 2

A. Goods and Services: Students learn the difference between businesses in their community that sell goods and those that provide services. Based on what they have learned, they sort pictures of different businesses into the two categories.
B. The Business of Business: What do you do? Students understand that businesses provide different types of goods and services. They explore different types of businesses by analyzing those in their own local community and conducting additional research on the goods and services provided by businesses online. Students prepare and conduct an interview with a local businessperson about the goods or services that individual provides for the community. Students use their understanding of goods and services and information they learned from their interview to write a proposal suggesting an idea for a new store or website that would provide a good or a service that their age group or family would find appealing.

Example Set 3

A. Habit of Mind 12—Wonderment and Awe: In this unit students study the habit of mind "wonderment and awe" (Costa & Kallick, 2000). They learn what this habit of mind means and find examples of how it exists in the world around them and in themselves.
B. Wonderment and Awe: How do you see the world? In this unit, students explore the habit of mind "wonderment and awe" and how it affects the way people see the world. They find examples and nonexamples of how wonderment and awe affect a person's views of text, art, music, and the natural world. Students end the unit by selecting a visual art form and using it to show how they see the world with wonderment and awe.

Sometimes first impressions do matter, and the way in which a curriculum first communicates what it values is through its organizing center. An organizing center is the central idea upon which a unit of study is built. It can be a topic, a theme, a concept, an issue, a problem, a process, or a phenomenon (Martin-Kniep, 2000). An organizing center is communicated through a unit's title, essential question, and big idea. A quality curriculum will organize units of study around centers that are worthy of the time and energy set aside for their pursuit and that reflect the overall intent and purpose of the curriculum.

So the question becomes, What is the best way to organize the curriculum? If you review the examples just provided, you can see the impact that decision has on the curriculum.

In the first example set, the same unit is organized around a text and a related topic, and then a simple question. The first organizational structure, Unit A of the set, limits the scope of the unit to a particular text (The Grapes of Wrath) and topic (the Great Depression). More than likely, students will be led through an in-depth analysis of the text with references to their research on the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The unit has not been intentionally designed to make the leap from The Grapes of Wrath to other texts and time periods and to the larger question posed in Unit B: What's more real—literature or life?

In Unit B, students have the opportunity to examine the connection between literature and life, contemplating the role of fictional accounts in understanding real events and time periods. Although The Grapes of Wrath can still be a central text, teachers will likely want to consider additional works from other time periods, including To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee; The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; and The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger. Each text allows students to examine how literature reflects real life and prepares them for an analysis of a contemporary work.

The units described in the second example set are from a financial literacy curriculum for elementary students. Unit A approaches the curriculum in a direct manner. The organizing center is the topic students will be studying: goods and services. In Unit A, students learn to distinguish between businesses that sell goods and those that provide services. Unit B identifies the context for the examination of goods and services by identifying the bigger idea of businesses. It personalizes the unit through the essential question What do you do?—a common question posed by adults among their peers. Although both units may have students engaging in similar activities, such as examining the types of goods and services provided in the community, only Unit B requires that students apply their understanding in a new and novel way.

In the third example set, the units come from a curriculum developed around the habits of mind articulated by Costa and Kallick (2000). Unit A is structured to present "wonderment and awe" as one in a series. Unit B links the habit to an essential question, showing how wonderment and awe can affect the student and moving the unit from abstract to practical. The essential question lends itself to exploration across media and content, bringing in literature, art, music, and science.

In each example set, Unit B

• Moves away from a topic to a bigger idea, concept, or essential question.
• Can be explored from different perspectives, across content, place, or time.
• Is relevant and meaningful because it results in the application to something bigger than school.
• Requires higher levels of thinking by asking students to analyze, evaluate, and create.

Organizing Centers in the Content Areas

The same principle of organizing centers applies to content areas. Let's look at a social studies unit to see the impact of three different organizing centers on the same unit of study. Typically social studies units are organized around topics such as the American Revolution. Students know that in such a unit they will learn about the war. Instruction will focus on the events that led to the war, the major battles, and the ultimate results. The unit stays within the context of that event, in that time, in that place.

Let's see what happens when the organizing center moves from topic to concept and the unit explores rebellions and revolutions. Now the unit lends itself to the exploration of other events. With this organizing center, the students first take a look at the American Revolution and then examine other events in American history that fall under the heading Rebellions and Revolutions. These events could include the Whiskey Rebellion, Shays Rebellion, the War of 1812, Nat Turner's rebellion, and John Brown's raid, to name a few.

A third approach to teaching these topics is to examine the same events through an organizing center of an essential question: Rebellion or revolution? This example differs slightly from the other two. Rather than focusing solely on the events, this essential question requires students to evaluate the events taught in the unit of study through different points of view. For example, in their examination of the American Revolution, students might examine how the British and the Loyalists viewed the events leading to the war and the war itself as acts of rebellion against the British king and parliament. At the same time, the Sons of Liberty, the patriots, and eventually the Continental Congress felt they had legitimate cause to sever ties with Great Britain and form their own country, hence the naming of the American Revolution. Similar studies of point of view and cause and effect are examined as they relate to each of the subsequent events, asking students to determine the legitimacy of the name given to the event and the way it is presented in history books—and, more important, establishing a set of criteria with which to examine rebellion and revolution in the world today.

Essential Questions

The unit title communicates the focus and importance of the unit, but it does not stand alone in identifying the organizing center. The organizing center is further explained by the unit's essential question.

Which of the following two groups of questions are essential? How do they differ from each other?

Group A

• What makes a story last?
• How do you measure success?
• What is more constant than change?
• Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?
• Are all leaders great?

Group B

• How do folktales and fables share a lesson or moral?
• How do you describe the characters in the story?
• What is erosion?
• How do poems incorporate similes and metaphors?
• What were the contributions of the American presidents?

The questions in Group A would be considered essential questions because they are large, global questions that can be explored and contemplated, elicit multiple perspectives, and do not require one correct answer. In Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins's book on essential questions, these questions would be considered "overarching" essential questions (McTighe & Wiggins, 2013).

In a quality unit of study, the essential question provides the context and direction for the unit. It poses the focus of exploration as it relates to the unit title and in some cases serves as the title itself. If the essential question changed, the unit would go in a different direction, as seen in the social studies example just presented.

The essential questions in Group A are different from the questions in Group B, which are guiding questions. Although still important for articulating what students will examine in a unit of study, guiding questions are answerable and do not communicate the organizing center of the unit. Guiding questions identify the important skills, content, and dispositions of the unit and are used to create the classroom learning activities.

The Central or Big Idea

The central or big idea is a statement that identifies the most important learning of the unit in a clear and concise manner. Often it articulates a generalization related to the essential question and serves as the connector between the essential question and the unit title, as seen in the following examples:

Example 1

Unit Title: Civilizations: Old and New

Essential Question: What makes a civilization classical?

Big Idea: Students understand that classical civilizations share common characteristics and have left unique contributions that still affect us today.

Example 2

Unit Title: Homes for Everyone and Everything

Essential Question: Why is a home important?

Big Idea: Students understand that home is an important concept to all living species and that environmental challenges can affect a living species' ability to survive and thrive in its home.

The big idea communicates the overall outcome for the unit. Without it, the curriculum user would need to examine all of the curriculum components to determine the desired results, often resulting in multiple users having different interpretations. With clear articulation of the big idea, all users understand the importance of the unit—a consequence that is particularly valuable when it comes time for assessment, because the performance task is designed to measure the most important learning for the unit.

Implications for Evaluating, Creating, or Revising Curriculum

Although it may seem like the organizing center plays a minor role in the overall curriculum design and evaluation process, examining or determining the organizing center is an important first step. Keeping in mind that this book is about the "big picture" of curriculum, it is important to look beyond the first unit of study or the unit of study you are currently working on and examine or identify all the organizing centers for the curriculum to determine if they convey the message you want to send about what you value in curriculum.

An example from my work in P.S. 11 in New York City illustrates how examining and revising the organizing center can affect the overall curriculum. The principal, Dr. Joan Kong, invited me to work with the school's coach, Angela Miuta, and a group of teachers—Hande Williams, Teresa Ranieri, Thalia Jackson-Cole, Elvira Gonzalez, and Laura Magnotta—to assist them in using the New York State Common Core Learning Standards to design their own curriculum. The group engaged in a recursive process of design and revision based on implementation, and after several years of doing so they had to choose a textbook for English language arts. Because textboo...