Curriculum Vocab

Essential Standards (and the REAL Checklist)

Oh the Essential Standard. Aren't they ALL essential? Well, sure, but the reality is we won't be able to teach all of the standards effectively if we try to. So what's a teacher to do? There's a solution to this and it's REAL. According to curriculum guru Larry Ainsworth, essential standards are "Standards that you are guaranteeing ALL students will know and be able to do at the end of the year. These are the standards you will write your common formative assessments around." On your own, or in your PLC/PLT, use this checklist to help you filter out the essential standards.

What's the Big Idea?

"The three or four foundational understandings-main ideas, conclusions, or generalizations relative to the unit's 'unwrapped' concepts-that educators want their students to discover and state in their own words by the end of the unity of study."-Larry Ainsworth. In other words, if you had to boil a unit down to a 30 second speech, what would you say?

Enduring Understandings

What students will know and be able to do (look at the nouns=learning targets (what they know) and verbs (what they will do).

Essential Questions

These are questions that “...do not have a simple ‘right’ answer-they are meant to be argued” (McTighe and Wiggins, 2004). This is the fun part. When students can have academic discourse about content, and apply it to real life, that's understanding.

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