Curriculum

Curriculum
Unpacking essential standards provides an effective way to address the appropriate rigor of essential indicators in the classroom.  Rigor is defined as delivering a curriculum to a heterogeneous group of students at the correct level of complexity and difficulty.  By unpacking essential standards it is easier for the classroom teacher to provide a clarity of focus on the issues of meaningful concepts. For classroom teachers, clarity of focus is communicating  academic expectations in terms of required knowledge, prerequisite skills needed to obtainment of an essential standard. Unpacking essential standards also includes the students  level of cognitive processes necessary in terms  of  a taxonomy  of hierarchical understanding; depth of knowledge.

Unpacking essential standards requires a template that articulates certain understandings of the curriculum through written statements identifying first the essential performance objective. The essential performance objective provides an operational definition in behavioral terms. (See Appendix A-5  - Unpacking Template) Secondly, essential performance standards contain verbs and nouns that describe an observable student response. Verbs describe types of skills or responses needed to obtain the essential standard  and are only intended to be a  sample of performance skills that  might be considered for unpacking the standard. While the nouns are representative of the concepts needed to achieve the standard. To ensure clarity of focus on the essential standard must be unpacked into smaller definitions of understanding that include concepts, skills, and knowledge.