Whether you're at a small private school or a large public school district, aligning state, national, and/or school-level standards and goals can be essential in ensuring a consistent and comprehensive education for all students.
Effective curriculum management involves analyzing and unpacking standards, designing and implementing the curriculum, and then reflecting, evaluating, and revising. While a curriculum management platform won't do the work for you, it certainly makes it easier, thus allowing educators to devote more time to focus on creative curriculum design!
How can a Curriculum Management Platform Help?
1. Selecting Standards and Goals
When using a curriculum management platform, aligning to standards becomes more accessible than ever.
With a Google or Word Document, you lose time finding, copying, pasting, or manually typing standards. You also spend (or waste) precious time formatting the document to ensure the standards appear where you want them. With a curriculum management platform, all of that is done for you.
During implementation, your leadership team will select the standard sets pre-loaded for your curriculum designers. Those standards are then available via easy-to-use drop-down menus. Most platforms should have keyword searches available to simplify this process. Instead of spending time copying and pasting or typing standards, your team can focus their time on analyzing and unpacking them.
You may be a private or independent school that's not using standards. Still, you've created a Portrait of a Graduate or would like to show alignment to other goals such as Social Emotional Learning Competencies, Depth of Knowledge, or Habits of Mind. With an effective curriculum development platform, you're not limited to just State and National Standards.
Any of these 21st Century Skills, dispositions, or broader frameworks for learning can be pre-loaded and made readily available for your team.
2. Checking for Alignment
The power of a curriculum management platform shows when you begin aligning your assessments and learning activities to the standards and goals you've established for your units.
After inputting your assessments and learning activities, you'll take some time to think about which specific standards and goals you're assessing for with your assessments/performance tasks, and which standards/goals you're teaching to with your learning activities.
Eduplanet21's Unit Alignment Check then allows you to look at all of the established standards and goals for that particular unit and where you've aligned an assessment or learning activity. The Unit Alignment Check calls out what you may be assessing for but not teaching, and vice versa.
Similarly, what is being taught or assessed several times, and what is not being hit on? This may help you narrow down the goals and standards you've established that you may not be addressing.
3. Are Standards and Goals Being Addressed?
Alignment within your units ensures that units are addressing the standards and goals you say they are. To take that a step further, as an administrator or department head, you'll want to look at all standards and ensure they're being covered. Eduplanet21's Stage 1 Learning Goals Frequency Report allows you to do just that!
You'll select the standard or goal set you'd like to review - this can be anything from Common Core to your school/district's Portrait of a Graduate. Then you'll see a list of all the standards and goals and how many units they were each addressed in. Not only does it show you the number of units each standard is addressed in, but it also allows you to view the units aligned to that standard easily.
With this same report, you can view the assessments and learning activities aligned to a specific standard. This is an excellent tool for a more holistic view of your school/district's curriculum, rather than looking at each unit individually. You'll be able to easily see your gaps and redundancies, what you may be teaching repeatedly, and what standards you may be missing.
This report can be beneficial for schools to meet their accountability or accreditation requirements. You can easily take a closer look at the standards based on student performance from previous years to adjust which standards may need to be your focus to improve student growth and achievement.
This can be a cumbersome process without an effective curriculum management system. Utilizing a platform streamlines the process, saving time and allowing teachers to focus less time on unit and lesson planning and more on meeting their students' individual needs.
Standards and goals provide clear expectations of what students are expected to learn and achieve.
By using a curriculum management platform to break down and align the standards and goals into more specific learning objectives, educators can better understand what they need to teach, allowing them to develop a comprehensive curriculum that is more tailored to the needs and interests of their students.
Effective curriculum writing is essential in increasing student engagement and motivation. It's also an opportunity for teachers to flex their creative muscles and collaborate with their colleagues.
To learn more about Eduplanet21 and our Curriculum Management Platform, visit our website here.