The Common Core State Standards, released in June 2010, offer an opportunity to shift education away from shallow, test-prep instruction and toward a focus on key cognitive skills, writes Conley. Two consortia of states are now developing common assessments to measure these standards--assessments that will be designed to capture deeper, more…

Teacher leaders assume a wide range of roles to support school and student success. Harrison and Killion describe 10 roles that teacher leaders can fulfill in their schools. As resource providers, they provide materials to help their colleagues. Instructional specialists help colleagues with instructional strategies, and curriculum specialists…

The Comprehensive Instructional Management System (CIMS) is a partnership between the state of New York and local school districts. Regional teams integrate curriculum, assessment, instructional support, and staff development for local schools by focusing on student outcomes. (MD)

Robertson discusses the "perceived dichotomy" that permeates science teaching: teachers can either stress inquiry learning with lots of hands-on experiences or stress content knowledge and swap hands-on inquiry for direct instruction. Although a curriculum of unstructured hands-on science activities leads to shallow content knowledge, it is…

Examines a number of questions related to the role of structure in curriculum development. Available from Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1701 K Street, N.W., Suite 1100, Washington, D.C. 20006, single copies, $2.00. (JG)

Discusses the concept of double alignment, where the curriculum, instruction, and assessment are aligned to both state standards and the needs of students. Describes curricular, instructional, assessment, and administrative features of double alignment. (Contains 10 references.) (PKP)

Condensing the teaching of cognitive strategies into a discrete instructional unit is self-defeating. Success in teaching thinking skills results when content objectives are contingent upon activities that also promote thinking and when thinking skills permeate the entire curriculum. (TE)

Discusses "backward design," a strategy for planning curriculum and school improvement by first thinking carefully about desired results and then working backward to develop meaningful assessments and learning plans. For this design to work, educators must identify desired results, analyze multiple sources of data, and determine appropriate action…

Describes a 5-year futures curriculum planning process currently used by an 11-member network of California and Canadian school districts. Addresses the definition of information technology and the definition of reasoning that describes the inductive, as well as the deductive, higher-order thinking skills. (MLF)

Discusses how schools can avoid mistakes in building their school-improvement plans. The two most common mistakes are (1) using measures of student learning that are not sensitive to the actual learning occurring, and (2) having no system for interpreting and using the data. (Contains 1 figure and 11 references.) (WFA)