Curriculum Development

At the core of a well-run school is a strong sense of direction in terms of curriculum. It is the compass that helps guide and align everything we do within the classroom. Over the past 3 years at my school, I have had significant opportunities to hone and strengthen my skills in curricular design, alignment and mapping. This is because this time period coincided with a change in curriculum as well as with a move to standards based assessment.

One of the tasks that came to me during this time period was to adopt standards for which we would assess student understanding of effective use of technology in learning, and we naturally settled on the ISTE Standards. But we opted to take it one step further. Recognizing that there can be overlap between two or more steps of standards, we aligned the ISTE standards with the Common Core standards for mathematics and the NGSS standards for science. That way, our work as technology integrationists could be more impactful for our students as we could push them towards the highest level of achievement in the standards by having a better sense of what skills they have already covered. As far a we know, we were the first team to complete such an alignment.