Educational Psychology

10. Planning instruction

activities or tasks for students, though some might include brief classroom examples—enough to clarify the
meaning of a standard, but not enough to plan an actual classroom program for extended periods of time. For these
latter purposes, teachers rely on more the detailed documents, the ones often called curriculum frameworks and
curriculum guides.

Curriculum frameworks and curriculum guides

The terms curriculum framework and curriculum guide sometimes are used almost interchangeably, but for
convenience we will use them to refer to two distinct kinds of documents. The more general of the two is
curriculum framework, which is a document that explains how content standards can or should be organized
for a particular subject and at various grade levels. Sometimes this information is referred to as the scope and
sequence for a curriculum. A curriculum framework document is like a standards statement in that it does not
usually provide a lot of detailed suggestions for daily teaching. It differs from a standards statement, though, in that
it analyzes each general standard in a curriculum into more specific skills that students need to learn, often a dozen
or more per standard. The language or terminology of a framework statement also tends to be somewhat more
concrete than a standards statement, in the sense that it is more likely to name behaviors of students—things that a
teacher might see them do or hear them say. Sometimes, but not always, it may suggest ways for assessing whether
students have in fact acquired each skill listed in the document. Table 29 shows a page from a curriculum
framework published by the California State Board of Education (Curriculum Development and Supplemental
Materials Committee, 1999). In this case the framework explains the state standards for learning to read, and the
excerpt in Table 29 illustrates how one particular standard, that “students speak and write with command of
English conventions appropriate to this grade level”, is broken into nine more specific skills. Note that the excerpt
names observable behaviors of students (what they do or say); we will discuss this feature again, more fully, in the
next part of this chapter, because it is helpful in classroom planning. In spite of this feature, though, the framework
document does not lay out detailed activity plans that a teacher could use on a daily basis. (Though even so, it is
over 300 pages long!)

Table 29: An excerpt from reading/language arts framework for California public schools

Comments:

More general standards statement

More specific or concrete framework statements →

(stated as relatively specific skills or behaviors)

Written and oral English language

conventions, third grade

Students write and speak with a command of

standard English conventions appropriate to this grade

level.

Sentence Structure

1.1 Understand and be able to use complete and

correct declarative, interrogative, imperative, and

exclamatory sentences in writing and speaking.

Grammar

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