Curriculum Documents

Curriculum Documents

“Unwrapping the Curriculum and Curriculum Renewal”

During the 2009-2010 school year, our division participated in a professional learning opportunity to cognitively study and understand the renewed Saskatchewan Curricula.

Terminology:

  • Outcomes:  Describe what students will know or be able to do in a particular discipline by the end of the grade or course.
  • Indicators: Are a representative sample of evidence that students will be able to demonstrate if they have achieved the outcome. The indicators also identify the breadth and depth of understanding that are required in instruction and learning.
  • Essential Questions: Are questions deliberately selected to drive the instruction and assessment for a particular unit.
  • Big Ideas: Are the answers to the Essential Questions. They are those “Aha!” realizations, discoveries, or conclusions(lasting understandings) that students reach on their own either during or after instruction.

Nature of the Process:

The process for “unwrapping” was built upon collaboration. Initially, teachers were divided into teams to collaboratively study each of the new outcomes. The first part of the task for each outcome involved the following:

  • Identifying the key nouns and verbs to help understand what students should be able to “Know” and “Do”.
  • Translating the intent of each indicator into “student friendly language”.
  • Creating Big Ideas and Essential Questions to assist teachers in developing assessments and to aid in instruction.
  • Levelling the verbs using Bloom’s Taxonomy to help understand the different degrees of complexity in each of the indicators.
  • Prioritizing the indicators in an effort to identify which ones are critical for student success.
  • Developing a list of grade specific vocabulary words.

Available Documents:

In each subject area, the “unwrapping process” enabled the creation of different support documents to help plan for learning and instruction. Please select one of the following subject areas: