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The following slides and resources are drawn from professional learning on standards alignment provided across Kansas. Use these materials and suggested steps as a guide for facilitating conversations, supporting collaborative planning, and strengthening standards-aligned instruction in your schools and PLCs. If you have questions or would like additional guidance as you work through the process, please feel free to reach out!
Curriculum/Standards alignment involves several key steps to ensure that educational content being taught is coherent, relevant, and effectively representative of what students at each grade level should know and be able to do. It involves three-way alignment among standards (the expectation we hold), curriculum (the intentional plan and resources we have for guiding students to learn what is necessary to meet the standard), and assessment (an examination of to what extent the student meets the standard). Use the ELA Vertical Alignment document when working with your ELA teams.
ELA Guidance Document
ELA Guidance Document
Carefully aligning curriculum to standards is a process that takes time. It also requires intentionality, communication, and a desire to closely reflect on the effectiveness of our practices and our resources. Carefully planned professional learning will be needed.
The ELA Guidance Document is a shareable Google spreadsheet you can use with your district and schools. Please contact mary.lonker@ksde.gov to receive a copy of this document.
A simple reminder: Standards define what students should know and be able to do; This is what we should teach in our classrooms. A Curriuculum is the planned scope, sequence, and instruction to help students meet the standards. And a high-quality instructional material (HQIM) are the research-based resources teachers and students use to deliver the curriculum.
Vertical Alignment Steps
Vertical Alignment Steps
Using the ELA Vertical Alginment document, find the ELA standard your PLC team wants to foucs on. Look at the standard as it progresses from grade K-11-12. Follow the directions to break the standard down and analyze its skill level progression. Discuss how the standard progresses through grade levels.
Breaking Down a Standard Example
Breaking Down a Standard Example
Reflect on the grade level you teach, the grade level above you, and what the students need to know and be able to do in order to demonstrate understanding of this standard. Reflect on units, lessons, and activities that teach all components of this standard.
Writing Standard Alignment
Ensure your ELA teams have also taken time to align the Writing Text Types and Purposes standards (opinion/argument, informative/explanatory, and narrative). All students starting in Kindergarden should be writing regularly and using text to support their ideas.
Webb's Depth of Knowledge
Webb's Depth of Knowledge
Use the document to determine the depth of knowlege level for instructional strategies. Verify rigor and engagement to ensure students are progressing through learning at an appropriate level to apply and transfer their learning. In order for students to apply and transfer the skill, our lessons, activities, need to reach a deptho of knowledge level 3 and 4.
Perfomance Level Descriptors
Perfomance Level Descriptors
Performance Level Descriptors (PLDs) define the knowledge, skills, and processes that students likely demonstrate at different levels of proficiency within the reporting categories (1, 2, 3, 4). Find your grade level PLD's from the Kansas Assessment Program website and use the PLD's to determine student's depth of knowledge of the standard.
Monitor and Revise
Monitor and Revise
Use formative assessment information. Look at various data pieces such as a diagnostic screener, KAP interim and mini tests, and common grade level assessments. Verify students are progressing forward to mastery of the standard(s) through strong data.
Plan, teach, assess, reflect. Do you need to reteach? Plan, teach, assess, reflect... again.
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