Learn how you can determine which TEKS need a heavy or light touch by using specific critierion such as 'some, most, all students' and the relevance, readiness, and endurance components recommended by Dr. Doug Reeves. After identifying power or essential TEKS for their content, teachers will design a curriclum road map for students with critical questions linked to assessments and crucial concepts for their content by analyzing the TEKS and district Curriculum documents for Course and/or Unit Planning.
The day long workshops are designed for individual content teachers and content teaching teams (PLC) as well as school and district leaders to use the Understand By Design (UBD) methodology or planning backwards process to design curriculum at the course and unit level. By narrowing the focus of their teaching on necessary TEKS for student understanding, teachers can support the learning of all students.
The workshops are created and will be presented by Region 13 Strategic Instruction specialists who were themselves teachers and principals. We believe the collaborative conversations among teachers and administrators about the essential TEKS and content, that we expect all students to master, can have an enormous impact on student learning. As Marzano said, a guaranteed and viable curriculum is essential for student achievement.
According to Marzano, a guaranteed workable curriculum may be the single largest factor that determines how many students in a school will learn critical content. School leaders and teachers need to be able to identify essential content standards for developing intellectual skills including higher order thinking. In this interactive session, participants will analyze the TEKS to identify crucial Standards all students must learn. They will also generate course and unit level questions, classify significant concepts, and construct formative assessments or tasks to evaluate student learning. Participants will create a graphic organizer known as the Strategic Instruction Model Course Organizer during the planning process as a course or class curriculum road map for use with students.