K-12 Curriculum Development

Opportunity to Learn is often overlooked in U.S. schools.  Educators attend conferences and visit the exhibit hall looking for the next 'solution' to current problems.  What does it mean to have the 'Opportunity to Learn'?  If you ask three sixth grade science teachers this question would you receive a consistent answer?  K-12 Curriculum Development seeks to answer the question, "Learn What?"  Once we identify what each student should know and be able to do, we can begin developing course goals, enduring understandings, unit goals, essential questions, and common assessments.

Some school districts have professional documents, but the district leadership becomes so focused on developing teacher-friendly documents that they forget to monitor curriculum implementation and student understanding.  Recently, I discovered an article titled,

Opportunity to Learn: A High Impact Strategy for Improving Educational Outcomes in Developing Countries.

This article is a great introduction to "Opportunity to Learn."   According to the article, "In the 1960’s, John Carroll wrote that equality of Opportunity to Learn required increasing the amount of instructional time for the least prepared students to enable them to master the curriculum. In the 1980’s, RAND developed a set of institutional quality indicators, including teacher qualification, curriculum, and spending indicators."

The article cites Eight Factors Which Impact Opportunity to Learn.  One example is "an OTL study in Ghana found that the overly ambitious curriculum was poorly aligned with teacher capability, so that less than half of the material was actually covered during the school year. However, the national examinations measured learning on the entire curriculum, so that the theoretical maximum score that most students could achieve would be 50 percent, even if they learned all of the material covered perfectly."
 
For more resources and research on this topic, visit the Blog Archives at:
Opportunity to Learn

Feel free to share additional articles or resources related to "Opportunity to Learn."