Chapter 3 Curriculum and Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning

This chapter mainly focuses on standards and applying them to the backward design plan. They talk about how the standards provide the ability for excellence and equity for the students. Standards can be very overwhelming for teachers, however, this book talks about how teachers should “uncover” the standards and create ways in which you can use the standards to have informative and interesting lessons for your students. Since standards can be so daunting and overwhelming for teachers, sometimes we get caught up in the “treadmill effect” by going quicker through material, and end up leaving students behind in their crazy chase to reach all of the standards in the school year. So, hopefully focusing on the big ideas, and just creating life long learners can avoid the “treadmill effect”. Another thing that was talked about in this chapter was assessment and how it should tie directly to the curriculum based on standards, and putting their skills to practice. Backwards design is a great way to figure out in which way the standards will be taught, and just which standards will be taught.