This book is a teachers’ and administrators’ guide for implementing and sustaining an educational system that ensures students are taught and learn what is required by benchmarks, assessments, and state standards, and to the learning needs of each individual student. This is accomplished by providing a tight alignment between the intended, taught, and tested curricula.

Provides information for school administrators and curriculum specialists on ways to align the curriculum to state standards to improve student achievement and teacher effectiveness.

In response to a quagmire of jargon based and convoluted curriculum textbooks, Instructional Alignment offers a concise and basic approach to instructional design. By exploring the areas of planning, assessment, and methodology, the text explains how these three areas provide an essential framework for effective teaching and illustrates how they align in order to maximize student learning. Houff guides the reader through the process of developing objectives that identify what the learners should know and be able to do at the end of the lesson. Next, the readers study assessment strategies and tools that correlate with the stated objective in order to accurately determine if the objective has been met. Direct and indirect instructional strategies are then explored to provide the reader with a variety of options or methods to best meet the objective. Final alignment is demonstrated through a project-based unit example that provides a visual representation of theory into practice. With the concluding glossary of current trends and terms in instructional design, readers will finish this key guidebook with a thorough understanding of effective instruction, as well as the capacity to adopt methodical, tested, lessons in the classroom.

Outstanding leadership in a professional learning community requires practice and patience. Simply trying harder will not yield results; leaders must proactively train to get better at the skills that matter. This book offers a framework to focus time, energy, and effort on five key disciplines. Included are reflection exercises to help readers find their own path toward effective PLC leadership.

This book provides a review of the effectiveness of Opportunity to Learn (OTL) operationalized as the association between OTL and student achievement. In addition, it presents an elaborate conceptual map in which OTL is regarded as part of a larger concept of curriculum alignment. Major components of this framework are national goals and standards, school curricula, formative tests, textbooks, actual delivery of content as part of teaching, and summative tests and examinations.Alignment between educational goals, intended and implemented curricula, and educational outcomes is considered an important prerequisite for effective education. The expectation is that better alignment leads to better student performance. The concept of OTL is commonly used to compare content covered, as part of the implemented curriculum, with student achievement. As such it is to be seen as a facet of the broader concept of “alignment”. As it comes to enhancing OTL in educational policy and practice, proactive curriculum development is compared to a more retroactive orientation. Legitimate forms of test and examination preparation belong to this retroactive orientation, and are seen as favorable conditions for optimizing OTL. This book reviews the research evidence on the effects of OTL on student achievement by means of detailed descriptions of key-empirical studies, a review of meta-analyses, a “vote count” syntheses of 51 empirical studies, conducted between 1995 and 2015, and a secondary analysis based on TIMSS 2011, and PISA 2012 data. It concludes that the effect size of OTL, at about .30, is modest, but comparable in size to other effectiveness-enhancing conditions in schooling. The final chapter of the book provides suggestions for educational policy and practice to further optimize OTL. /div

Why do testing and accountability efforts in today's schools fail? In Deep Curriculum Alignment, English and Steffy explore the flaws in state mandated testing, advocating a more comprehensive approach to teaching and testing. This highly practical book will guide you into a deeply aligned curriculum that produces academic results and a level playing field. Each chapter covers principles of testing and curriculum building, and concludes with a summary of the key concepts presented. The authors survey various studies, present the ethical dilemmas involved in testing, and present a step-by-step guide to pedagogical parallelism and alignment.

The literature of the behavioural and social sciences is full of theory and research on learning and memory. Teaching is comparatively a stepchild, neglected by those who have built a formidable body of theories of learning and memory. However, teaching is where learning and memory theory should pay off. "A Conception of Teaching" dedicates a chapter to each of the following important components: the need for a theory; the possibility of a theory; the evolution of a paradigm for the study of teaching; a conception of the process of teaching; a conception of the content of teaching; a conception of students’ cognitive capabilities and motivations; a conception of classroom management; and the integration of these conceptions. Written in a highly accessible style, while maintaining a base in research, Dr. Nathaniel L. Gage presents "A Conception of Teaching" with clarity and well situated within current educational debates.