Thinking Through Planning Your Curriculum Kathy Granas

As the classroom teacher, you have tremendous control over what your students learn, how they learn it, and most importantly, how they demonstrate their knowledge. Between national, state, and district standards, textbooks and other curriculum guides, the amount of content knowledge that you are expected to help students master may seem overwhelming. The following framework of guiding questions can help you insure that successful learning occurs in your classroom. Planning in this way will give you the flexibility to adjust your lesson plans to the time you have available and will make it easier for you to accomplish your goals for student learning.

Planning for learning:

1. What do I want my students to learn?
2. How does it look when they have learned it?
3. What activities or performance tasks will support students in their learning?
4. How can student choice and interest be incorporated?
5. What other content areas might be connected to this learning activity?
6. How will I modify for student readiness levels?
7. How will I provide flexibility for time and other factors?
8. What types of feedback will I need to assess the effectiveness of the activities?

It's very important that you provide your students with a model of what success will look like. This can mean sharing an example of work done by another student or yourself, or it can come in the form of descriptions formulated by the students of what they anticipate success will look like. It is much easier to reach the finish line if you know where it is!