For Curriculum Developers

Guidelines for Effective Instruction and Best Practices

A standards-based curriculum should include guidelines for effective instruction and best practices. We know that teachers who teach with knowledge, enthusiasm, and passion for their material inspire students. This enthusiasm increases when teachers learn effective new methods, keep up with the research, and are provided the time to collaborate with their peers.

Suggested items to address in the curriculum regarding instruction:

Study the Best Practices section for each content area in this web site and consider your district's needs relative to these suggested strategies.

Review recent research about instruction and evaluate how it can be applied to your school or classroom. Example: Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. Marzano, Robert J., Pickering, Debra J., Pollock, Jane E. 2001. ASCD.

Review curriculum that has been tried and tested in rural and urban Alaskan classrooms, and design ways of supporting instruction that will reach all students. Consult Alaska Native Knowledge Network.

Encourage on-going professional development and research.

Support teachers who take risks in trying new strategies
Support the participation of teachers in statewide forums and conferences.
Promote teacher-leader participation in the consortia and professional associations.

Understand learning styles, multiple intelligences, and other modality-oriented instructional issues.

Support discussion and working groups around ways to broaden the instructional approaches beyond the traditional linguistic and mathematical-logical intelligences.
Evaluate and discuss the pros and cons of instruction based upon learning-style analysis.

Enhance the partnerships between professionals and paraprofessionals.

Provide real world experiences for students that help prepare them for their future. Support instruction that is based in community-oriented projects, school-to-work principles, and authentic products. Provide models of such projects that are purposeful and guided.

Support action-research in your classrooms.

Create working groups of teachers who are willing to research and share their ideas with others.
Encourage opportunities for teachers to receive constructive suggestions for enhancing the academic value of their projects.
Promote peer-coaching opportunities that allow teachers to observe others in the teaching process.

A first step toward effective instruction is to assess students' current knowledge so that instruction can provide the scaffolding necessary to bridge prior knowledge with new concepts.

Suggestions and models of assessment

A standards-based curriculum should include suggestions and models of assessment.

The six major purposes of assessment (identified by the Alaska Statewide Assessment Advisory Committee in 1995) are to

help teachers understand student mastery of concepts, skills, and attitudes, diagnose assistance where needed, and alter instruction;
show individual student growth and progress over time;
report to parents about students' progress and achievements;
compare student achievement with other same-age students nationally and statewide;
evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum/school program; and
communicate to the public what we value in education.

Teachers must use multiple measures and diverse avenues of expression to continuously assess the current knowledge of students. Teachers need to know exactly when a student becomes confused, and they need to be committed to providing alternative experiences to help the student understand. Assessment and instruction often become indistinguishable because the assessment activities are an immediate and integral component of instruction.

High quality, classroom-based assessment provides useful information that can clarify and guide instructional decisions for students, parents, and teachers. An assessment program should be able to provide information to a variety of audiences-students, teachers and parents, but also the school, the district, the state, and others-about the attainment of critical educational goals. No one indicator or type of assessment tool is adequate to meet all of the potential needs for information or to demonstrate the attainment of the Alaska content standards.

Different types of assessment have very different effects on the person or persons being assessed, and they show different strata of what that person knows or can do. Some types of assessment are more appropriate for students with different learning styles than others.

Assessment used in classrooms across the state should:

include multiple forms,
link assessment to real world tasks and
give students an opportunity to experience assessment which is embedded in instruction (as opposed to the "separate" test)

Assessment professionals should work hand in hand with classroom teachers to develop the technical characteristics of good alternatives in assessment across the various content areas (e.g., portfolio and performance assessment).

Three dimensions of consistency affect the quality and value of assessment.

Consistency over time.
How many samples of one student's work need to be collected to know how well he or she writes? Emerging research on performance assessment, for example, indicates that somewhere between 8 and 16 trials of student performance may be necessary in order to obtain a reliable judgment.

Consistency from student to student.
Does the assessment trigger the same dimensions of performance again and again with different students? If not, the assessment cannot be said to be reliable for any type of group testing.

Consistency of raters.
Do judges looking for the same dimensions of performance see them consistently across the raters themselves? Would two people with the same criteria for judging rate the same student performance differently?

The Alaska performance assessments are instructional tools that can provide valuable input into the instructional needs of students and can also provide the state with comparative data. Standardization reduces subjectivity in assessment and increases credibility. Commercially purchased norm referenced tests are language-based and assess skills. Performance assessments are better suited for assessing the standards but also need to be standardized as well, for the same reasons. Scoring guides should identify criteria that are understood through the use of concrete examples.

Suggested items to address in the curriculum regarding assessment:

Review the Assessment sections in each content area of this web site and determine the needs of your district relative to these expectations.

Create an educational culture, based on a partnership of school, students, parents, and community, that insists upon multiple measures of what students know and are able to do before making placement decisions about students.

Provide staff development that covers the broad range of assessment strategies and provides examples in familiar contexts.

Provide opportunities for teachers to work together to develop and discuss a variety of assessments.
Expect teachers to rely on assessments to provide a clear picture of their students' prior knowledge before planning instruction.
Model effective assessment techniques in district activities.

Develop ways to help teachers embed their assessment record keeping into their instruction through strategies such as observation checklists.

Evaluate and improve the assessments being used in your district. Consider questions such as those asked by the Philadelphia School District:

Do the assessment strategies ask the students to apply basic skills, think critically, and solve problems? Do they involve 'real life' applications?
Are there varied methods to assess students' process, performance, and understanding of content?
How do district and state mandated assessments, such as the TerraNova, link to daily assessment practices?
What assessment accommodations can be made to ensure that all students have equal opportunity to demonstrate what they know and are able to do?