Our Work: Curriculum & Instruction
Curriculum Design and Development
McREL research indicates that effective schools provide a “guaranteed and viable” curriculum, but how can schools and districts ensure that a well-articulated curriculum is taught in every classroom? Through audits, professional development, and curricula analysis, our experts help take the guesswork out of curriculum design, so that you can be assured that teachers are teaching what students need to learn.
Curriculum audits
When McREL consultants audit your curriculum, they
identify its areas of effectiveness in order to help you set future priorities
in areas that most need improvement. For example, a district might decide
to focus on improving literacy scores, which is what Guilford County,
North Carolina, targeted. Initially, they asked McREL to audit the effectiveness
of their reading programs, and we did, but we didn’t stop there.
We helped the district develop a literacy framework for all of its elementary
schools to guide consistent, quality literacy instruction and then provided
district leaders, principals, and teacher-leaders with the professional
development they needed to implement and sustain the new approach to
literacy instruction.
Raise student achievement:
We offer products and workshops / training based on our Classroom Instruction that Works research-based guidance.
Creating a guaranteed and viable
curriculum
McREL research shows that having a guaranteed and viable curriculum—identifying
what content is essential for all students, sequencing it in a way
that gives students ample opportunity to learn it, and ensuring teachers
address the content in their classrooms—is
one of the most important things schools can do to raise student achievement.
Drawing upon research-based guidance, and our book, Classroom
Instruction that Works, McREL offers intensive professional development so school
and district leadership teams can create and sequence curricula that
help all students succeed.
Classroom curriculum design
(See Standards & Assessment)
One of the most important ways teachers influence student learning is through the day-to-day decisions they make regarding how to sequence, pace, and impart classroom curriculum. To help teachers design and deliver high-quality curricula, McREL’s professional development integrates guidance from our popular manuals, Dimensions of Learning and Classroom Instruction that Works, with our extensive expertise developing curriculum frameworks. Through hands-on experiences, teachers learn how to set high expectations for all students, appropriately sequence and pace content, and use effective instructional strategies to help their students meet those expectations.