1. School Designs Benefits of a Unified Curriculum
A Strong Foundation for Learning
A unified curriculum supports quality teaching and
learning by providing first-class curricula to educators
and students. It presents EdisonLearning® School Designs
partners with research-based programs with flexible
resources for addressing the needs of all learners, a
consistent instructional design to support teacher
individual and collaborative planning, and more robust,
program specific professional development.
Consistent Instructional Format
A highly structured, interrelated curriculum will help
teacher’s present lessons consistently and thoroughly.
Teachers will have more time to perfect their presentation
skills, monitor students’ progress, and keep parents
informed of their child’s progress and advised of their own
role in their academic development.
Improved Planning, Teaching and Learning
By providing instruction to students from Pre-K through
each ascending grade with a unified curriculum, teachers,
advisors and administrators will know more about each
student’s educational progress, his or her strengths and
weaknesses, and how to address each rather than through
a mix and match approach to planning and teaching.
The unified approach affords greater consistency across
curricula and across grades.
Supplementing the Student Support Model
Unified curriculum programs are beneficial to the Student
Support Model and Response to Intervention (RtI). The
RtI system is a preventive, solution focused, school-wide
intervention process. Unified curriculum programs and
their flexible resources and assessments, make it easier to
identify students facing issues that are affecting academic
achievement. This type of continuity provides teachers
with a rich array of tools and resources for differentiating
instruction and lends itself to more productive teacher-parent
collaboration surrounding areas of academic
concern - the first step of the RtI process.
Enhanced Professional Development
Implementing aligned curricula and integrated professional
development with focused training greatly benefits teacher
practice which results in enhanced student achievement.
Pursuing a Strategic Partnership with a publisher to provide
more uniform curriculum complements EdisonLearning’s
robust Professional Development. This comprehensive
approach to professional development was purposefully
designed in response to partner feedback and to meet
the needs of all partner school personnel so that they can
better support students’ academic success.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
EdisonLearning, in concert with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
is committed to providing high-quality, research-based
curriculum offerings to our partnership schools. These
programs support improved instruction, assessment,
and professional development as well as bring greater
efficiencies in implementation.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is recognized
globally as the preeminent educational
publisher - offering best-in-class
instructional materials.
The HMH goal is to help tailor learning
to individual styles and preferences -
ensuring success for all.
Implementation
Using a unified curriculum streamlines instructional
program implementation for EdisonLearning partnership
schools because together we are working with only one
publishing partner.
• Best practices surrounding instruction will be universal;
from year-to-year and from campus-to-campus as more
schools adopt the unified curriculum program.
• As needs arise and change over time, EdisonLearning
and HMH can respond more quickly together because
the foundation for a consistent message has already
been established.
• Formative student achievement data will have greater
validity due to a higher level of consistency throughout
execution.
Instruction and Student Assessment
A consistent instructional model better supports effective
lesson planning. This guarantees lessons reflective of
standards, learner outcomes and student needs because
teachers, administrators and parents are better able to
measure fidelity of lesson implementation.
• Lesson plans reflect more differentiated instructional
strategies because the message of differentiation is
consistent.
• Greater formative and summative assessment
opportunities as a result of regular preparation and a
bird’s eye view of resources across the curriculum.
