Overview
It is imperative that schools/districts continually assess, review, and revise school curricula to support the assurance that all students have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions for future success. Systems and processes must be in place that allow schools and districts to ensure validity and alignment, and fidelity of standards deployment. Schools and districts should use the Strategic Evaluation of Key Core Work Processes: Design and Deploy Standards needs assessment tool to evaluate the current state of standards deployment through valid curriculum.
Standards and Curriculum Support
It is well known that standards drive the curriculum alignment process, but it is important for schools to feel empowered to think innovatively and to be visionary when it comes to curriculum development. Schools should understand that there is no ‘right’ way to build curricula and they need to feel compelled to rethink curriculum possibilities. Curricula that is broad, flexible, and based on the needs of the students, community, and industry is critical to student success, particularly beyond school.
Diagnostic
The following diagnostic is an interactive and printable tool, which will assist schools and districts in evaluating the components of effectively deploying standards.
Kentucky Academic Standards Diagnostic
Kentucky Academic Standards
The Kentucky Academic Standards Revision Process contain the minimum required standards that all Kentucky students should have the opportunity to learn before graduating from Kentucky high schools. The standards address what is to be learned, but do not address how learning experiences are to be designed or what resources should be used.
The Kentucky Academic Standards (KAS) Grades Primary-12 help ensure that all students across the commonwealth are focusing on a common set of standards and have opportunities to learn at a high level.
Revised Kentucky Academic Standards Adopted for 2019-20 School Year
After undergoing a rigorous revision process as laid out by Senate Bill 1 (2017), revised standards for health education, physical education, reading and writing, and mathematics have been adopted into law. The process included revisions by Kentucky educators and community members, public input and review by the Kentucky Board of Education before undergoing final legislative review and adoption. New computer science standards also were developed and adopted into law. The newly adopted standards will be implemented in Kentucky classrooms beginning in the 2019-2020 school year and can be accessed on the Content Area Standards webpage.
Senate Bill 1 (2017) called for the Kentucky Department of Education to implement a process for reviewing all academic standards and aligned assessments beginning in the 2017-2018 school year. The current schedule calls for one or two content areas to be reviewed each year and every six years thereafter on a rotating basis. The rotation schedule began in summer 2017 by soliciting feedback on English/language arts, mathematics and health/physical education standards. For more information regarding the standards revision process, please visit the Kentucky Academic Standards Revision Process webpage.
Learning Targets
The deconstruction of standards into daily learning targets is a critical part of creating a high quality curriculum. In order to create meaningful learning targets, teachers must have a solid understanding of standards deconstruction and target types. The Learning Targets PowerPoint can be used to support work with daily learning targets.
Ongoing Curriculum Work as Part of a PLC
Once initial curriculum work is completed, it should continue throughout the year in order to build upon existing work, to monitor curriculum implementation, and/or to evaluate effectiveness. This work can happen in PLCs, as part of the “PLAN and DO” portion of the PDSA model.