Curriculum Guides

Curriculum guides have historically been paper documents developed by local school districts, designed to specify what students should know and be able to do in each course in every content area. Most of the time, guides were developed by district committees made up of teachers who were considered by district personnel to be experts in the effective delivery of instruction. After the guides were developed, they were typically distributed to all of the teachers, and they were supposed to be the basis for teacher planning of instruction and administrator monitoring of the delivery of the instruction.

Traditionally, building principals have spent little time monitoring whether the learning as described in the guides was being delivered. Often, traditional guides did not deal with procedures for documenting student mastery or using assessment data to modify and adjust the expectations in the guides. At best, the guides served as suggestions to teachers about what should be taught. Some teachers followed them, and others did not.

The accountability movement has changed all of that. Now, local district curriculum guides are increasingly being developed to focus and connect the work of the school system. State accountability assessment has had a dramatic impact on the need for and importance of local district curriculum guides. The greatest impact on these guides is in the content areas assessed by the state. Not all states assess every curriculum content area. The federal legislation, No Child Left Behind, requires assessment in language arts and mathematics, and testing in science will soon be required.

To understand the present situation, it is necessary to trace the development of state standards in content areas and state accountability assessment. Late in the 1980s, mathematics standards were developed by the National Association of Teachers of Mathematics. This event had a dramatic impact on the development of textbooks in mathematics. In the early 1990s, many major curriculum content area associations received federal and private funding to develop national standards in other content areas. The documents produced by these associations were not only used by textbook publishers but also became the bases for the construction of state curriculum frameworks and accountability assessments.

Initially, these assessments were often stateapproved, standardized, norm-referenced tests. Today, state accountability assessment can include a variety of criterion-referenced tests, including items described as short response, extended response, multiple choice, open-ended response, short and long essays, performance events, and others. The variety and complexity of cognition required to demonstrate mastery on these assessments has resulted in renewed interest in curriculum guides.

The curriculum guides being developed in the early twenty-first century are most often grounded in the concept of curriculum alignment. That is, the guide is designed to show the relationship among the written, taught, and tested curricula. Most state standard documents simply list what students should know in a content area. Initially, in the 1990s, these state standard documents listed general statements that were not specific enough to direct teacher planning. As states have [Page 259]revised these standard documents, they have become more specific, and/or the documents have been expanded to include benchmarks (what students should know within a grade range, such as 6–8) and indicators of specific skills, concepts, knowledge, and processes at specific grade levels. Because state documents generally do not provide enough information for focused and connected PK–12 instruction, there is renewed interest in the development of quality curriculum alignment guides that teachers can use to plan instruction and administrators can use to monitor the implementation of the board-adopted curriculum.

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