This section reinforces the importance of formulating your school’s vision and goals from shared understandings about the impact of curriculum and instruction on student achievement.

Maintaining an effective, comprehensive curriculum and instruction action plan (CCIAP) is a constantly evolving process sustained only through open communication and problem solving. Continuous assessment of teaching and learning is inherent to improvement. Informed decisions that drive the direction of curriculum and instruction are made through a commitment to ongoing opportunities for personal and professional learning for all staff and support for the necessary resources critical to effective implementation.

This section relies heavily on the messages and actions suggested in previous sections of the guide. This section is designed to help school staff:

1. Understand the KEYS indicators that relate to curriculum and instruction.
   
   
2. Develop a shared understanding about how students learn and effective instructional strategies.
   
   
3. Develop a shared understanding of effective teaching practices and what it takes to sustain a CCIAP.
   
   
4. Identify first steps for building a CCIAP in your school.

Defining a Comprehensive Curriculum
and Instruction Action Plan

A comprehensive curriculum means that a school’s education program accounts for all learning across grades and over time. Subject areas are focused as well as taught as a collective whole.

To ensure that your school’s curriculum and instruction action plan are comprehensive, you must build new topics on ideas, concepts, and processes previously taught. You must build new skills that students attain on skills they have already mastered. Building content occurs within a lesson—from lesson to lesson, class to class, grade to grade, and subject to subject—but avoids excessive repetition.

When teachers use effective instructional strategies and encourage students to construct their own ideas, combining what they know and what they are learning, students acquire knowledge that grows richer and more complex over time.

A comprehensive curriculum and instruction action plan contains five essential components:

1. A shared vision for the school community (see Key 1).
2. Goals for student outcomes (see Key 1).
3. A direct relationship between content standards and curriculum for each subject taught that addresses learning for the 21st century (see Key 6, Indicator 5).
4. A school specific curriculum framework (see Key 6, Indicator 4).
5. Instructional materials that support effective teaching strategies (see Key 6, Indicator 6).