Savvy Instruction: Engaging Instruction to Complement Curriculum

If you’re like most teachers, your school has a designated curriculum that is based on national, state, and/or district standards. And your district may have adopted standards-based units and lesson plans that have been developed externally, such as through NGSS and EQuIP. The result is that you may not have a lot of flexibility in what you teach. You do, however, have some degree of control over how you teach.

Savvy instruction is the process of making sense of all of these requirements and guidelines so you can create or revise learning experiences to engage your students cognitively. This course examines why it’s important for students to talk about the content, to explain their thinking to you and to their peers, to puzzle through challenging projects, problems, and questions, and to transfer their knowledge to all types of situations inside and outside of the classroom.

The course invites you to dig more deeply into the curriculum design process by making explicit, transparent connections among curriculum standards and performance criteria to design a unit of instruction that includes rigorous, cognitively engaging learning activities for your students.