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Curriculum & Instruction
An Educational Approach Grounded in Current Research
The faculty of Saint Mary’s is a community of educators for whom professional development is continual. Current educational research—in curriculum development, instructional methodology and pedagogy, assessment, and grading—informs our teaching. Several key, inter-related initiatives our faculty are engaged in are “backward design,” an outcome-based approach to lesson and unit design; the use of “Essential Questions” as a basis for each course of study; and the mapping of Saint Mary’s curriculum using web-based software.
Backward Design—The Teacher as Designer
In devising lessons and curricula, teachers often begin with the question, “What do I want the students to do?” Saint Mary’s employs the conceptual framework of authors Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. In their book, Understanding by Design (1998, 2005), the authors suggest that educators interested in enhancing student understanding--and in designing effective curricula and assessments to promote understanding—must ask these questions first:
- What should students know, understand, and be able to do?
- What will I accept as evidence of student understanding and proficiency?
- What class activities will equip students with the needed knowledge and skills?
In essence, teachers should have their performance assessments--in traditional terms, their “tests”--completed before they begin their instruction. Thus, there is no mystery or caprice in evaluating whether or not students have acquired the essential understandings.
Every faculty member possesses a copy of Understanding by Design to use as a reference. It is the expectation that the ideas therein will prompt stimulating discussions and promote ideas that will better serve our students.
Essential Questions
Students and teachers perennially feel pressed to cover numerous topics in the course of a each semester. An alternative approach is to emphasize a concept-driven (rather than a topic-driven) approach to curriculum, to emphasize depth rather than breadth, and to use the natural academic links among the various disciplines to reinforce essential knowledge and skills. The work of Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, and others suggest an effective approach to the “coverage versus depth” dilemma. These educational researchers recommend that teachers build their curricula around “essential questions,” the handful of key questions which embody the subjects’ core concepts and drive an inquiry into a subject. Various units have their own “unit questions” which may be more numerous. In this way, key concepts and essential questions—not chronology or the sequence of the textbook--drive the course.
Curriculum Mapping
While lesson plans articulate day-to-day classroom learning outcomes, the Saint Mary’s faculty employs an ongoing activity known as “curriculum mapping” to clearly identify and coordinate our broader curricular priorities. Time is set aside each month so that the faculty can build diary-based curriculum maps--month-by-month summaries of the content knowledge and skills taught in each course and the assessment methods employed by the teacher—using web-based, password-protected software. The central purposes are to build an accurate inventory of what content knowledge and skills are learned by Saint Mary’s students over the course of their four years and to refine the methods by which student learning is assessed. Individual teachers benefit from the reflective elements of the mapping process. Departments are readily able to identify and close curricular gaps, to discover more easily the natural interdisciplinary links that occur, and parents are able to understand clearly what the Saint Mary’s curriculum embodies.