Standards & Curriculum
Analyze and develop standards and curriculum to support academically rigorous, culturally relevant instruction for English and Multilingual Learners.
Ensure that standards and associated curriculum meet the language and content needs of English and Multilingual Learners while supporting instruction and assessment that serve to develop conceptual, analytical, and linguistic understanding. In order to improve learning outcomes for diverse learners, we help you to expand inclusivity, accessibility, and cultural relevance and integrate recent and emerging research and theory into practice.
WestEd’s English Learner Services team provides targeted support and technical assistance in the following areas:
- Curriculum Evaluation and Augmentation
- Curriculum Design and Development
- Standards Review and Development
Support You Will Receive:
- Development of standards and associated curriculum
- Professional learning to ensure instruction and assessment practices develop conceptual, analytical, and linguistic understanding
- Ensuring inclusivity, accessibility, and cultural relevance for diverse learners
- Alignment to emerging research and theory
Who Will Benefit:
- Policymakers
- Educators
- Curriculum Designers
Costs and scheduling are based on the scope of work within your organization. For more information about the services listed below, please contact Sharon Sáez.
Services at a Glance
Standards and Curriculum services include:
Curriculum Evaluation and Augmentation
WestEd’s English Learner Services works with you to enhance curriculum and instructional materials to accelerate learning, increase opportunities for differentiation, and ensure access and equity for a variety of student groups, with a particular emphasis on English and Multilingual Learners. The scope of our curriculum evaluation and augmentation review is designed in collaboration with the client and may include:
- Suggesting curriculum revisions to enhance differentiation opportunities and ensure access and equity for English and Multilingual Learners, Standard English Learners, girls and young women, and students with disabilities
- Providing guidance on culturally and linguistically responsive teaching and social and emotional learning
- Identifying salient ELD standards addressed in unit activities
- Suggesting opportunities for designated or targeted ELD instruction that aligns to core content curriculum materials
- Creating alignment documents to articulate the correlations between the curriculum and associated academic and ELD standards
- Developing a program reference document focused on access and equity
Curriculum Design and Development
Develop tailor-made, standards-based curricular units and lessons that foster language and literacy development for PK-12 English and Multilingual Learners across all disciplines.
We provide schools and districts with customized curricular materials to meet the needs of English and Multilingual Learners by offering high challenge coupled with high support. Curricular units and lessons are designed to:
- Focus on conceptual, analytical, and language practices central to the core disciplines
- Use a spiraling architecture that increases in complexity as the unit progresses
- Meet the needs of individual schools and districts based on student demographic and achievement data
Curricular units and lessons include:
- Comprehensive unit overviews that explain how the lessons in a unit work together to meet an overarching purpose
- Detailed instructions for implementation
- Annotations on individual lessons that explain the purpose of tasks and how they are ordered and connected in the unit
- Notes on how teachers and students can engage in formative assessment opportunities as the unit progresses
Standards Review and Development
WestEd’s English Learner Services team supports states to engage in an extensive and robust process to develop and validate new standards or revise and align existing standards, resulting in standards that:
- Describe the key knowledge, skills, and abilities required of rigorous academic content
- Define intended outcomes prior to designing educational experiences to ensure students attain those outcomes
- Create student-centered and outcomes-based achievable goals
- Ensure inclusivity, accessibility, and cultural relevance for diverse learners
- Reflect recent and emerging research and theory
Our process is grounded in two core principles: transparency toward and input from the field, and development based on sound theory and empirical research. The first principle includes counsel and input provided by experts, researchers, educators, and key stakeholder groups, as well as public comments on standards drafts. For the second principle, WestEd analyzes and incorporates three overlapping guidance areas: theoretical foundations; current empirical research and research reviews; and additional relevant guidance documents, such as policy documents.