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.

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.

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.

Avoid "analysis paralysis" and just get started! Now that most states have adopted the new Common Core State Standards, the next major challenge is to simplify and implement them by 2014. That is why it is important to begin this work now. Joe Crawford, Milken Award-winning educator and author of Using Power Standards to Build an Aligned Curriculum, shares his proven process for building a viable local curriculum based on the CCSS. Readers will find: A system for creating local standards from the CCSS Methods for connecting the common, formative assessments to quarterly instructional objectives Ways to scaffold learning expectations Examples taken from districts where CCSS is currently implemented Included are helpful charts and graphs plus access to Internet-based software for mapping the CCSS to curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Schools cannot continue to do what they have always done and expect a different result. This book explains how to facilitate learning for all students while taking advantage of the new culture, technology, and norms of today′s learning environment.

Effectively respond to diverse learning styles and achievement levels with strategies and reproducible tools to help you customize, scaffold, and layer your instruction. Reach every student in the classroom, while still holding all students accountable for learning.

This accessible volume helps school leadership teams accomplish the crucial yet often overlooked task of improving universal instruction--Tier 1 within a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS). Strong universal instruction reduces the numbers of PreK–12 students who may need additional services and supports. Providing clear action steps and encouraging guidance, the expert authors present a roadmap for evaluating the effectiveness of Tier 1, identifying barriers to successful implementation, and making and sustaining instructional improvements. In a large-size format for easy photocopying, the book includes 27 reproducible checklists, worksheets, and forms. Purchasers get access to a Web page where they can download and print the reproducible materials. This book is in The Guilford Practical Intervention in the Schools Series, edited by Sandra M. Chafouleas.