CURRICULUM ALIGNMENT

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CURRICULUM ALIGNMENT

• Debbi Hardy
• Curriculum Director
• Olympia School District

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What is Curriculum?

• It is
• often confused with instructional materials or
  programs. (e.g., Harcourt Reading or Glencoe
  Math)
• an aggregate of courses of study for a school
  district - what students are supposed to learn.
• based on the state's standards, which serve as
  the minimum requirements for students.
• outlined or summarized in school district
  documents which might include curriculum guides,
  programs of study, course syllabi, teachers' unit
  plans, etc.

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What is Alignment?

• It is
• the congruence or match between the curriculum,
  instruction and assessment.

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Establishing Common Language

• Curriculum defined by district and based on the
  EALRs, GLEs, and Performance Expectations
• Instruction implementation of the defined
  curriculum
• Assessment - multiple measures of proficiency for
  the defined curriculum

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• Alignment

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Alignment congruence or match between
curriculum, instruction and assessment

• Topical alignment
• Deep Alignment

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Topical Alignment

• Congruence of the content (knowledge, skill,
  process or concept) in the curriculum,
  instruction and assessment
• Initial level of alignment (Textbook Correlation
  Analysis)

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Examples of Content

• Equality (concepts)
• Addition Facts (knowledge)
• Inference (skill/strategy)
• Phoneme Segmentation (process)

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Alignment congruence or match between
curriculum, instruction, and assessment

• Topical alignment
• Deep Alignment

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Deep Alignment

• Congruence or match between the content, context
  and the cognitive demand present in the
  curriculum, instruction and assessment

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What are the elements of deep alignment?

• The 3 Cs
• Content
• Context
• Cognitive Demand

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Context refers to the conditions under and the
ways in which the content may be learned and
demonstrated

• Instructional conditions includes supplied
  materials, available resources, specialized
  vocabulary, time (the givens)
• Tasks activities in which students engage

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Examples instructional conditions

• Graphic organizers
• A partner
• List of key vocabulary words
• Dictionaries, thesauruses
• Highlighted text
• A calculator

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Examples student tasks

• Summarize the text.
• Explain the process used to solve the problem.
• Draw, write about or verbally describe the mental
  images that occur while reading.
• Explain your conclusions and support with
  evidence.
• Write a persuasive essay about

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What are the elements of deep alignment?

• The 3 Cs
• Content
• Context
• Cognitive Demand

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Cognitive demand

• refers to the kind of thinking process required
  of the student due to the complexity of the task.
• can be identified or classified using one of many
  taxonomies.

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Application or Utilization of Knowledge

• For example
• Execute to use a learned procedure in a
  familiar situation
• Implement to use a learned procedure in an
  unfamiliar situation
• The more opportunities students have to practice
  skills, strategies and procedures on high-level
  tasks in a variety of rich contexts, the more
  likely it is that they will be able to transfer
  them to new situations.

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What are the elements of deep alignment?

• The 3 Cs
• Content
• Context
• Cognitive Demand

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Research Finding

• The data give rise to a conclusion that
  reinforces the use of curriculum alignment,
• there were desirable gains despite the
  traditional predictors of poor student
  achievementlow socioeconomic status, being
  Black, being male, and learning in a school with
  over 800 children!
• Felicia Moss Mitchell, Ed.D
• AERA, 1999

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Research Finding

• The ability of instruction to overcome initial
  aptitude differences relative to task difficulty
  was a goal of an alignment study. (Community
  College students understanding main idea.)
• Lower aptitude students did not perform as
  well as higher aptitude students when test items
  misaligned from practice. On aligned tasks,
  alignment was so effective that lower aptitude
  students performed better under aligned
  conditions than did higher aptitude students
  under misaligned. (What was structured as
  misaligned was what one normally sees in the
  average classroom.)
• The Fahey Study
• 1986

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Instructional Alignment Searching for a
Magic Bullet

• Instructional alignment routinely causes the
  4-to-1 Effect, effect sizes exceeding one and
  often two sigma, about four times what we
  ordinarily see in typical classrooms. We
  routinely observe these large effects from small
  amounts of instructional effort.
• Presently, we find no other construct that
  consistently generates such large effects, which
  is probably why the idea of instructional
  alignment is so well-entrenched in the
  conventional wisdom of instructional designers,
  even if not in the programs currently found in
  most classrooms.
• Alignment Study Analysis
• S. Alan Cohen
• 1984

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Bridging
Alignment
Mapping
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What is mapping?

• A tool for gathering data on what teachers are
  actually working on with their students through
  the course of the school year.
• A calendar-based technique for recording
  curriculum.
• Allows analysis of the fit between curriculum
  and assessment.
• Assists in identifying gaps and repetitions
  within curriculum.

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Curriculum Mapping is not

• A lesson plan
• A curriculum guide
• A student report
• A course outline

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Central Premise

• The teacher is a member of a HIGH PERFORMANCE
  TEAM responsible for a K-12 continuum.

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Mapping is a communication tool

• Between teachers in a building
• Between teachers in feeding and receiving sites
• For students
• For parents

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Mapping is a planning tool

• For curriculum reform
• For meeting state standards
• For assessment reform
• For coordinating events
• For ordering materials, software, etc

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Mapping is a pedagogical tool

• For ALL teachers (New, specialists, parapros)
• For all students (New, Title, Special Ed., ELL)
• For seeing the operational program
• For designing staff development

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Editing, auditing, and validating

• Gain information
• Avoid repetition
• Identify gaps
• Identify potential areas for integration

• Match with learner standards
• Examine for timeliness
• Edit for coherence

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How do you map?
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What information do we collect on the map?

• Month
• Content
• Assessments
• Materials/Resources

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Collecting Content Data

• Knowledge
• Skills
• Concepts
• Processes

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Collecting Formative and Summative Assessment
Data

• Products
• Performances
• Demonstrations
• Observations

BE SPECIFIC!
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Is what you are doing getting you what you want?

• Curriculum alignment insures that what you are
  doing (what you have mapped) allows all students
  to have the same opportunities to reach state
  standards.
• What is learned
• Types of thinking
• How it is demonstrated