College- and career-readiness skills can easily get lost if you don't have a clear school-wide plan for teaching them. While curriculum in schools is primarily meant to ready students for college and career skills, ensuring those skills actually transfer is another story. Andrew Miller lays out a system for teaching and assessing key…

School leaders could see all their students ascend to new heights of academic achievement and find their jobs de-stressed and joyful--if they focused on only the one or two most urgently needed instructional initiatives. Schmoker makes the "case for less" and notes that if school leaders applied strict criteria to select the initiative…

A teacher describes how a team of educators from two elementary schools in Massachusetts used the Next Generation Science Standards to create a social history curriculum focused on depth--and story--instead of isolated facts.

The authors, pioneers in detracking and in shrinking achievement gaps, pose a question: Is it possible to have all students in a large high school successfully complete a challenging curriculum that gives them practice in the habits and skills necessary for success in college? The answer, they say, "is a resounding yes." This article…

Lesson study requires teachers to discuss the essential concepts that the students need to learn, compare the concepts with curriculums and consider the present knowledge of students. The various examples and experiences of teachers performing lesson study are presented.

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…

Presents some ideas about concept learning and teaching strategies through which the learner can be guided. Characteristics of curriculum materials that promote concept development are discussed. (Author/MLF)

Statistics reveal that students spend more time on electronic games than on any other recreational activity and 32% admit to playing them during class. The gaming revolution contains lessons for teachers, and understanding the pedagogical potential of computer and video games and developing curriculum that supports the educational use of…

Walla Walla Schools (Washington) designed a demonstration project using the Marzano thinking skills model, which emphasizes learning preparation, content thinking, and basic reasoning skills. Placing selected thinking skills within specific curriculum areas and grade levels proved so successful that teachers then collaborated on a content-free…

With its focusing on high-stakes testing in reading and math, NCLB has narrowed the curriculum. This focus comes at the expense of instruction in social studies, the arts, science, and health and denies many students access to the quality curriculums that students in more affluent schools enjoy. NCLB is now the prescribed method of treatment for…

Applies Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal) to designing time-telling exercises for young learners. The idea is to link instructional objectives to words, numbers or logic, pictures, music, the body, social interaction, or…

In response to documented shortcomings of the mathematics curriculum and the national distaste for math, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics have produced 1989 standards outlining broad curricular goals and assessment strategies. The current emphasis on procedural skills must yield to development of strong conceptual knowledge and…

A group of professional staff developers committed individually to different movements cooperated to unite five varied programs: Instructional Theory into Practice (ITIP), thinking skills, cooperative learning, teaching styles and strategies, and reading and writing in the content areas. The group rediscovered the big ideas shaping curriculum,…

A national study of mathematics education reveals mostly traditional content, textbook teaching, and little supervision. (Author)