High-Quality Curriculum

Teachers who understand the centrality of high-quality curriculum in differentiation know that students can become powerful learners only if what they are asked to learn is powerful. Providing high-quality curriculum looks, sounds, or feels like the following:

• Teaching for understanding (emphasizing the concepts, principles, and essential understandings of a discipline)
• Teaching for transfer (making sure students use what they learn in authentic contexts)
• Insisting on and supporting consistent growth in high-level thought
• Guiding high-quality discussion to explore important ideas
• Ensuring that students examine varied perspectives and the relative merits of those perspectives
• Helping students connect the important ideas of content with their own lives and experiences
• Vigorously supporting students in developing the skills and attitudes necessary to do quality work
• Starting with what the most able students need and supporting all students in success with that level of curriculum