Design Principles

All students are consistently expected to engage in grade-level texts and tasks   that build knowledge, understanding, and skills in a logical progression. Curriculum provides students with consistent opportunities to engage in rigorous practice, productive struggle, meaningful discussion, and writing to build and demonstrate their understanding. Curriculum is coherently sequenced within and across grade levels, so that it builds knowledge and vocabulary about topics as well as reading foundational skills systematically.

Curriculum consistently contains supports that allow students with diverse learning needs to access grade-level content. Curriculum regularly honors and validates students’ home languages and provides opportunities for students to use their knowledge of language to build their understanding of new concepts and skills. It includes regular opportunities for all types of learners to engage in content through academic discussions and writing with appropriate scaffolds and home language encouragement and access.

Curriculum consistently incorporates asset-based perspectives and depictions of identities across cultures, races, ethnicities, religions, abilities, genders, and sexual orientations. Content, texts, and tasks provide students with the opportunity to affirm and discover more about both their own identities and those of others.

Curriculum regularly provides opportunities for students to consider, discuss, and determine applications of their learning outside of classroom contexts. Curriculum builds upon students' prior knowledge, cultures, heritages, and home languages, to support frequent critical thinking and problem solving. Curriculum provides opportunities for students to share their own stories and perspectives, fostering their sense of identity and empowerment. Curriculum allows for frequent active processing of and appreciation for other identities, perspectives, histories, and experiences different from one’s own.  Curriculum encourages opportunities to engage families and communities in the application of student learning.

Curriculum includes assessment methods that allow students to demonstrate their understanding and knowledge in various ways, through speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Curriculum provides teacher guidance for consistent formative assessment and feedback that is supportive of student growth and both honors and continues to develop students’ language proficiencies and content understanding. Curriculum includes assessment methods that cultivate student agency over their own learning, such as self-reflection and goal setting.