3: Written Curriculum Leadership

In order to create a system for teaching and learning, the first step is creating a plan around what and how to teach. This is called the written curriculum. The next step is implementing the plan, and this is called the taught curriculum (discussed in Chapter 4). Lastly, we have to determine whether students learned what they were supposed to learn—the assessed curriculum (discussed in Chapter 5). We use the results of the assessments to make improvements to our written and taught curriculum, and it continues in a cycle. An aligned curriculum is one in which the written, taught, and assessed curriculum are aligned with one another in terms of content (what we teach) and cognitive level (the type of thinking that we do with the content). Another way to think of this is that curriculum = instruction = Assessment (or C = I = A). It is our belief that the district is responsible for ensuring curricular alignment (Squires, 2012) and thus, we have focused much time and effort in this area. Additionally, the development and implementation of this model is not static—it is a constant, cyclical process, that involves writing, teaching, assessing, rewriting, and so on. We can think of it like this: