Curriculum Design Sequence Assessment

Instructions: Please refer to your readings from the Rigorous Curriculum Design
text and your personal experience to assess the quality of curriculum design and/or
implementation in your school or a school you have served in previously. Attach 3
pieces of evidence to your submission that support your responses below (i.e.,
journal articles, examples from your schools/experience, etc.). Each response
should be a minimum of 200-300 words.
1. Refer to the five steps for building a strong curricular foundation in
Chapter 4 from Rigorous Curriculum Design, which ones, if any, have you
observed or participated in implementing? For Education Administration
degree candidates, please apply a school leadership lens to your response.
Larry Ainsworth contends in Rigorous Curriculum Design that it essential to
have a solid foundation upon which a strong curriculum is built. The first important
step in completing this foundation is study, dissect, prioritize and align the
standards by which you must be teaching, for example the Common Core State
Standards or the Colorado Academic Standards. I have and continue to actively
observe and implement the ELA standards in my classroom; unfortunately, I am the
only high school language arts teacher and so I dont have anyone to collaborate
with when doing this step.
The next step involves creating and naming units of study. My curriculum and
textbooks help give me a basis for my units of study; however, Id like to deviate or
extend from the textbook more as I become more comfortable and confident in my
position. For example, my American Literature class is broken up into units based on
periods of time, whereas my 9th and 10th grade English classes are separated into
units based on genres. Regardless, students will be assessed on their
understanding and skills related to the standards and learning objectives for each
unit. This step reminds me of the concept of backward design, keeping the bigger
picture concepts and goals in mind within each unit of study.
The first two steps relate very closely with the third: assigning standards. A
concept that I have found slightly difficult, yet have attempted, is dividing the
academic standards into priority and supporting standards for each unit. This is
necessary because it can become overwhelming, otherwise, and one might lose
focus on whats the most important for the students to gain in each unit. I
appreciated how Ainsworth clarified that priority standards can/should play a role in
several units of study. In language arts, in particular, I feel that most of the
standards based on reading, writing, language, and speaking and listening are
observed to some extent in every single unit. Mastery Connect is a program my
district purchased this year, that serves exactly this purpose and I am curious to see
how it will work out this year.

Another important step for building a strong curricular foundation that I

definitely partake in is preparing a pacing calendar or curriculum map. Although I
believe flexibility is crucial with teaching and I realize that my pacing will most likely
have to change at some point, for differentiation or re-teaching for example, my
pacing calendar gives me a great foundation and timeline for the school year, as do
all of these steps.
2. Refer to the twelve steps for designing the curricular units in Chapter 4
from Rigorous Curriculum Design, which ones, if any, have you observed or
participated in implementing? For Education Administration degree
candidates, please apply a school leadership lens to your response.
Now that the foundation is in place, teachers should be in a better place to
design the curricular units now. The first step when designing a curricular unit,
according to Ainsworth, is to unwrap the standards that were already assigned
and labeled as priority for the unit. As a new teacher, especially, I spent a good
amount of time unwrapping the standards, picking them apart to really try to find
the key words in each, as well as the differences between standards and grade-level
expectations. It makes sense that this is the first step of designing a curricular unit,
so that I know what my students need to know and be able to do at the end of each
unit that I am designing.
Step four requires the end-of-unit assessment be created and then step five
deals with creation of the unit pre-assessment. Both assessments will be very
similar, either aligned or mirrored, as Ainsworth explains. This is a more difficult
step for me to completely implement; however, I realize that it is important to begin
with the end in mind and have participated in this process. I am confident that I will
get better with these steps, in this order, as I gain more experience this year.
Another related step in this process, step eleven, is about creating more informal
assessments to progress monitor students often throughout the unit. Mastery
Connect, which I mentioned above, also is meant to fill this role as I can assess my
students for every single standard. I, then, see a visual of which students have
mastered a particular standard, as opposed to near mastery students and students
that need remediation. It can also show me if the entire class is struggling with a
single standard in particular, or if it is a single student struggling with multiple
standards. By entering the pre-assessment, formative assessments, and postassessment, I should ideally get accurate results in my Mastery Connect trackers.
Clearly, step seven is central to the success and engagement in a unit of
study: plan engaging learning experiences. A huge part of designing a curricular unit
is the everyday learning experiences, keeping the students engaged and
productive. I appreciated how Ainsworth reminded me to always consider 21 stcentury learning skills and higher-level thinking skills, like Blooms Taxonomy, when
planning these activities for students. Everything I have my students do has a
purpose, directly tied to the unit of study and standard(s) in focus at the time. Like I

mentioned in the previous question, I feel fortunate with my curriculum and

textbook and the abundant amount of instructional resource materials available to
me in the text, in workbooks, on CDs, and online. I, still, often search online for
additional resource materials, such as graphic organizers. As a result, I have also
got step eight of designing the curricular units under control.
I also feel that I participate and observe consistently step twelve, making a
weekly and daily plan, step three, design essential questions, and step six, identify
vocabulary and interdisciplinary connections. However, one of the Ainsworths steps
that I would really like to improve on this year is step nine, recommending effective
instruction, differentiation, and intervention. I realize how important this is to the
success of my students, but effective and valuable differentiation is something that
I have not found easy to implement and continue to work on every week.
3. Refer to the fourteen steps for implementing each unit of study in
Chapter 4 from Rigorous Curriculum Design, which ones, if any, have you
observed or participated in implementing? For Education Administration
degree candidates, please apply a school leadership lens to your response.
Once I have my foundation and my curricular units designed, it is then time
to get down to the nitty-gritty and implement the units in my classroom. Obviously
teaching the unit, as described in steps five and nine, is central to implementing
each unit of study. It would be a shame to spend all of that time and effort
establishing a foundation and building a curricular unit, to then fall short in the
implementation process.
Every unit that I teach is introduced, like step one describes. This is where the
big ideas and essential questions get introduced, as well as the teaching objectives
and standards. My textbook has pretty good introductory pages to each unit,
establishing concepts and skills, whether its setting and plot in short stories,
political writing during the formation of the United States, making predications, or
identifying persuasion. Those skills and concepts are not only introduced at the
beginning of the unit, but then reflected upon at the end of the unit. I feel that I do
participate in this step, step fourteen; yet, I believe that I could do it with more
attention and intention.
I have also been trying to analyze my student pre-assessment data, as in
step three, and progress monitor data, as in step six using Mastery Connect. Of
course, I have many more informal formative assessments than what I enter into
Mastery Connect, such as quick writes, demonstrations, and observations. However,
I want to make sure that I am using these formative assessments effectively to
impact my instruction by following step seven, which revolves around differentiating
instruction. As Ive already mentioned, this is an area in which that I aim to improve
this year.

I feel that step ten of implementing each unit of study is a very important
one. Teachers must be flexible and able to modify and adjust instruction throughout
the unit. If you move on without getting the foundational skills first, those students
are going to suffer. Some students may need re-teaching and additional practice.
For example, in my Freshman English class recently, almost every single student
missed at least one of two questions regarding the use of suspense in a short story.
As a result, I chose to spend the next class period conducting a newly added lesson
and activities on suspense, more explicitly to try to re-teach and correct this
apparent gaffe. Like this example, the following attachments are further
documentation of how I am working towards implementing each of these three
stages in my curriculum design sequence.

ATTACHEMENTS:
Textbook: Elements of Literature (resource material)

continuedMasteryConnect (progress monitoring data linked directly to

standards)

continued

Curriculum Map (example of what my pacing calendar looks like right now)