Having attended almost 10 years of legislative hearings, I’ve heard countless educators lament that with so many demands on teachers’ time, lesson planning is often relegated to a last-minute “to do”. They recount relying on lesson plans from prior years or hastily scribbled notes as a substitute for a lesson plan. Moreover, though educators realize the need, few have the time to make sure that the materials they assign to the students are aligned to the standards and reinforce their lessons. I thought to myself, how can students be successful when teachers don’t have lesson plans to help them cover the knowledge and skills students need to learn? It’s like driving to a destination without a map or at very least, a good sense of direction.
Helping teachers overcome that challenge was one our motivations in designing Learning List’s detailed alignment reports. For each instructional material reviewed, Learning List provides an independent verification of the publisher’s correlation, checking that the citations (e.g., page numbers, units, activities, videos, etc…) the publisher lists as aligned to each standard truly are aligned to the standard’s content, context and cognitive demand (i.e., “performance expectation”). If a citation is not aligned to all three dimensions of the standard, Learning List provides a comment explaining which part of the standard is not addressed.
Subscribing educators can consult Learning List’s alignment report for the instructional material their district uses to ensure that they assign the portions of the material that will help their students master the standards.
Just as our alignment reports and editorial reviews help districts and campuses streamline their selection processes, educators can use Learning List’s independent alignment reports to create standards-aligned lesson plans more efficiently and effectively. Most importantly, Learning List’s alignment reports help give educators confidence that their lessons are preparing their students for success.