Creating a Scope and Sequence & Setting SMART Goals

The weekends are a time for me to catch up on all the aspects of my life that take a backseat during the week: the yard work, my hobbies, the dishes, the laundry. As my eyes take in the sunshine of Saturday morning, my brain begins scrolling through the mental to-do list I’ve added to all week long. I process the must dos from the nice to dos and think about the most logical sequencing of these tasks. After some time, I’ve worked out some timeline of my day, and it always begins with making coffee. 

Developing a curriculum is similar to determining how you’ll structure your day. First, you have to separate your must dos from your nice to dos, which you’ve done by choosing your essential standards. Now, you have to structure your year so that the sequence in which you teach your essential standards makes sense. You’ll also need to set SMART goals so that you and your teammates know what you’re working towards all year long. 

SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. Setting SMART goals helps teachers think realistically about their content and their students. Of course, teachers want all of their students to master all of the skills, but that isn’t realistic or achievable. There are too many external factors that prevent teachers from reaching 100% of their students: absences, environmental factors such as homelessness or food poverty, learning difficulties, behavior or emotional disruptions, etc. We know that, unfortunately, some students will unintentionally fall through the cracks. SMART goals help teachers get real about what they can achieve with their students in a given amount of time. PLCs who plan with the end in mind and set a SMART goal for the end of the course might write: By ___(insert the date of the end of course)___, 90% of students will be able to ___(insert skill here)____ with 100% accuracy. And, don’t worry, I’ll discuss how we can reach those students who have fallen through the cracks in upcoming blog posts. 

In the previous blog post, I mentioned that determining our essential standards helps us answer the first PLC question: What do we want our students to know? Establishing SMART goals helps us determine the second question: How do we know when the students know it? Before attempting to sequence your essential standards, take a step back with your PLC and consider what you want students to know and be able to do by the end of the course. For my English I team, the answer is easy. We want our English I students to be able to analyze the author’s purpose and message in fiction and non-fiction texts, and we want students to write a well-developed expository essay with a clear thesis statement. What is your end goal for your content area? Determine your end goal and set a SMART goal for it. This will be the goal you and your PLC are working towards all year long. 

Once you’ve determined your end goal, now, you and your PLC must consider the steps to achieving that end goal. What must students know and be able to do before they can reach the end goal? Planning backwards ensures that teachers think through the steps that must be taken and the scaffolds needed to prepare students to achieve the established end goal. While planning backwards, teachers must consider the cognitive rigor of each of their essential skills. For this process, we look to Benjamin Bloom. I could write an entire blog post on Benjamin Bloom’s work, but for sequencing skills, teachers should be familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy. The taxonomy pyramid categorizes cognitive functions from the lowest level to the highest level: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. For some standards, the cognitive rigor it requires of students may be obvious. For example, standard 8A for biology in Texas says that students are expected to “define taxonomy and recognize the importance of a standardized taxonomic system to the scientific community” (TEA). The verbs “defining” and “recognizing” would fall in the remembering category on Bloom’s Taxonomy, the lowest order of thinking skills; therefore, teachers should address this skill before students should be expected to “compare characteristics of taxonomic groups, including archaea, bacteria, protists, fungi, plants, and animals” (standard 8C TEA) since “comparing” is a verb that would fall into the understanding category on Bloom’s Taxonomy. Regardless of content area, when sequencing your curriculum, teachers should teach the lowest order thinking skills first and work their way up the pyramid to the highest order thinking skills. This process can happen within a unit, a grading period, a semester, or an entire year. 

Once a sequence for the standards has been established, you and your PLC should set SMART goals for all of your essential standards since these are the standards that are tracked using standards based grading. Some teachers may be hesitant to set SMART goals, especially if the curriculum is being written before the beginning of the year. Teachers may find it difficult to set goals for students they haven’t met yet, but rest assured, there are data points that will help teachers make educated decisions about SMART goals. For starters, teachers can review previous students’ achievement on assessments, including end of course assessments. By analyzing previous state assessments, teachers can determine which standards pose the greatest difficulty for students. Teachers can also look at the state averages for those assessments and determine if previous students have performed above or below the state average. Teachers can pull data from the previous grade level to make determinations about the skills that students have acquired in the previous year. You and your team will need to reevaluate your SMART goals throughout the year; even though SMART goals are established before the teacher meets the students, teachers should frequently determine whether or not the SMART goal is still appropriate for their specific students and modify the SMART goal as needed.

Once you have ordered the essential standards in a sequence that will guide students to the end goal and have set SMART goals for each standard, it’s time to zoom into the curriculum and develop the units. In the next blog post, I’ll outline how to ensure alignment between formative and summative assessments and how to create a rubric to measure your students’ progress towards the SMART goal. I’ll also discuss the tool my team uses to track our data so that we can make data driven decisions about our instruction during our PLC time. Until then, don’t forget to listen to the podcast episodes that can be found on teacherjargon.com. Be bold, and be brave!