Essential Understandings

Cycle Step 1: What is it that we want students to know and be able to do?

What the Research Says:

Buckeye Unified School District believes that personal potential can only be achieved if students are offered a guaranteed viable curriculum designed to focus on each student’s needs and abilities. Schools follow the standards set forth by the State of Arizona. Each level of instruction in the district uses a specified resource to help organize and identify an explicit course of study. These resources form the basis of a curriculum guide that brings coherence to a course of study by identifying the core skills and content taught, processes employed to deliver instruction and may include related test items. While all curricular systems are compatible with Arizona’s Standards, collaborative teams must work to ensure that unit and lesson content is delivered at the appropriate level of rigor and aligned with the assessment criteria required by the state. Particular attention should be given to identify, address and close any variance gaps between the curriculum guide and the required state standards.

There are three additional components to a viable and effective curriculum system (Marzano, 2007; Kramer & Schuhl, 2017). Pacing calendars, outline when, and for how long, various concepts and skills should be taught. By using pacing calendars, teachers can be certain they are teaching all the essential standards prior to the state assessment taken by students during the fourth quarter of the academic year. K-12 teachers are required to follow the pacing calendar for core subjects of reading, math, writing, science, and social studies. Since common assessments are based on learning targets derived from the essential standards, it makes sense that teams agree on the pacing of instruction to support this critical element. This pacing does not require uniformity daily, but it does require an agreement on how much time teachers devote to a unit and the window during which common assessments will be administered. The topic of Assessment will be addressed in greater detail in coming sections.

Unpacking Standards is the next component to consider. While the district curriculum guides begin to clarify the components of the essential standards, and the common pacing guides help teachers organize their time, more work is required by each grade level subject-specific collaborative team to agree on the essential knowledge, consider the needed background information, outline big ideas and essential questions, identify necessary vocabulary, set up performance tasks/model product examples, and generate comprehensive and targeted instructional activities. This work is known as unpacking standards. What's more, teachers use the time during their collaborative team meetings to plan weekly lessons or units and analyze data from formative assessments to help make informed instructional decisions.

Unpacked standards help teachers in several different ways. These documents establish a district-wide agreement on what students are expected to know and do by the end of a specific grade level or course. Initial work in this area should be focused on prioritizing the highest impact standards. Next, the unpacking document clarifies state standard expectations for classroom teachers and administrators by breaking down broad general statements into specific and measurable performance objectives. These objectives are then affirmed as daily learning targets written in student friendly language (DuFour et al., 2016). Teachers use these documents to ensure the standard is being taught at the correct rigor and essential content is included in their lessons.

The third component of a viable curriculum system is to implement a form of reteach and enrich in order to help bring all students to a level of mastery. While assessment and multilayered support systems are discussed in more detail in later sections of the Playbook, reteach and enrich in this context refers to building differentiated supports and activities into initial strong Tier I instruction (Buffum, Mattos & Malone, 2018). As a part of the unwrapping and planning process, teachers will use time during their collaborative team meetings to plan lesson activities tailored to student needs. Guided by formative assessment data, students who have already mastered the concept can be grouped and engaged in activities that extend their learning. Students that need more time can be grouped for reteaching and to receive scaffolded supports to ensure mastery.

Buckeye teachers have been engaged in this work to answer the critical question – What do we want our students to know and be able to do? This question is the first crucial step to ensure teacher clarity of curriculum and instruction.