Curriculum

Educators within a system collectively must articulate desired learning results in terms of the “big ideas” of content worth understanding and the larger Mission-related goals and commit to achieving those goals. Allison Zmuda has been a member of the Understanding by Design cadre for ASCD for over six years and has had the privilege to collaborate with Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins as a co-presenter at several national conferences and as a co-author on Schooling by Design: An Action Tool (ASCD, 2008). Zmuda also collaborates with McTighe on development projects in several school districts.

The following website houses K-12 subject area frameworks that include standards, enduring understandings and essential questions as a result of a three-year consulting project – http://www.gips.org/learning/Curricular-Areas

The projects below all were created as part of long-term consulting projects facilitated with a range of different clients.

Project: create a vision for extensive curriculum development project using Understanding by Design. Two files are included here representing work from two different schools.View ProjectView Project
Project: develop k-12 interdisciplinary essential questions as part of the Vision of the Graduate for a school district in Texas.View Project
Project: develop K-5 reading essential questions that illustrate how the reading curriculum becomes more sophisticated across grade levels for a school district in New York.View Project
Project: develop essential questions and enduring understandings for an arts magnet high school that will drive curriculum development both within arts courses and across other subject area curriculum.View Project
Project: reinvent two English high school courses to make the work students are asked to produce more rigorous, meaningful, and fun in order to improve their development as communicators and thinkers.View ProjectView Project

In addition to the creation of overarching curriculum documents, Zmuda has led curriculum development projects in a number of schools. While those unit files are mainly in portals accessible only to school staff, sample units can be seen upon request or in the rich Understanding by Design resources available for purchase at ascd.org or via subscription on ubdexchange.org.