Instructional Design · 3 min read
Curriculum, Standards and Backward Design
The Dimensions of Curriculum
Curriculum is the set of planned learning experiences a school provides. What a document prescribes, what a teacher delivers and what students retain are rarely identical, so the term has several dimensions.
Effective planning aligns the written, taught and assessed curricula so that the learned curriculum is more likely to match them. Teachers also examine the hidden curriculum, since unintended messages can undercut stated goals.
Content Standards and Performance Standards
Standards specify what students should know and be able to do. A content standard names the knowledge or skill, such as explaining how energy moves through an ecosystem. A performance standard describes how well students must perform to be judged proficient, usually through defined achievement levels.
Each state adopts its own academic standards. Districts build curricula and pacing guides from them, and teachers translate them into units and lessons. Standards fix the destination; they do not dictate the instructional method.
Backward Design
Backward design plans from the end point. The teacher settles the intended results first, decides what evidence will show that students reached them, and only then selects activities.
- Stage 1: Select the standards, enduring understandings and essential questions, and write the objectives.
- Stage 2: Design the assessments and scoring criteria that will count as proof of learning.
- Stage 3: Sequence the instruction, practice and materials that prepare students to produce that evidence.
Planning Driven by the Goals of Instruction
Curricular planning involves four linked decisions: how to cluster content, which instructional methods to use, which learning activities to assign and which assessment tools to apply. The goal of instruction governs all four.
| Decision | Guiding consideration | Example: goal of solving two-step equations |
|---|---|---|
| Content clusters | Group the knowledge and skills the goal requires; teach prerequisites first. | Inverse operations and one-step equations come before two-step equations. |
| Instructional methods | Match the method to the kind of learning sought. | Explicit modeling, because the goal is a new procedure. |
| Learning activities | Give practice in the exact behavior the objective names. | Students solve and check equations. |
| Assessment tools | Measure the same behavior at the same level of thinking. | A problem set requiring full solutions, not a vocabulary matching quiz. |
Mapping, Alignment, Scope and Sequence
Curriculum mapping records what is taught, when and how across subjects and grade levels. Maps expose gaps, needless repetition and misalignment. Horizontal alignment means teachers of the same grade or course address the same standards. Vertical alignment means each grade prepares students for the next.
Scope is the breadth and depth of the content. Sequence is the order in which it is taught. A spiral curriculum returns to key concepts later with greater sophistication.
- Simple before complex.
- Concrete before abstract.
- Familiar before unfamiliar.
- Prerequisites before the skills that depend on them.
- When a question asks what a teacher should do first in planning, choose the option that clarifies the goal or objective before assessments, methods or materials.
- Horizontal means across the same grade; vertical means from grade to grade. Fourth-grade teachers comparing their pacing are working on horizontal alignment.
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