Module 8: Lesson planning
8.2 Following a curriculum
Depending on where you end up teaching, you may have a say in the creation of the curriculum, but it is more likely that you will not. Gone are the years where a curriculum was just an amorphous general idea, and here to stay is a culture where most schools have an extremely detailed and prescribed curriculum for each of their teachers to follow. To truly understand how to follow a curriculum, we first need to look closely at the components involved.
8.2.1 Curricular components
Standards: As we discussed earlier in this module, all planning should start with the standards that you want your students to be able to achieve during the curriculum.
Essential questions: Whereas the standards are focused on what the students are going to be able to achieve or work on during a unit, the essential question is the thematic question that the students should be exploring throughout the unit. For example, you may decide that you want your students to work on a standard that focuses on using two informational texts to draw conclusions. You may want to design a unit that covers World War II and ends with a discussion of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You can have an essential question that asks something such as “Should there be rules in times of war?” Then your students could explore two nonfiction texts to draw conclusions about America’s decision to drop atomic bombs to inform their understanding of the essential question.
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