By Sarah Merrill and Jamie Sheehan

Ultimately, it will help state and district educators use national and state standards to design or re-build mathematics and science curriculum programs that develop new ideas and skills based on earlier ones—from lesson to lesson, unit to unit, year to year.

What Is An Effective Curriculum

• Elements from the rhetorical curriculum are comprised from ideas offered by policymakers, school officials, administrators, or politicians. This curriculum may also come from those professionals involved in concept formation and content changes; or from those educational initiatives resulting from decisions based on national and state reports.
• Effective Curriculum Ideas is the home of: The Progressive Curriculum Frameworks - User-friendly word-by-word replicas of various curricula from around the world that identify progression and opportunities for differentiation.
• Going through this process has meant that, alongside the curriculum document, teachers (and subject leaders) have a clear understanding of which skills to include within schemes of work, and how these skills are developed throughout children’s time at school. With all of the building blocks in place, it’s time to get to the good.

When we think about early learning environments, what comes to mind? Often, it's things: alphabet puzzles, books lined up neatly on shelves, blocks, water tables, and more. But the most important part of a positive early learning environment is you. Teachers and family child care providers—all the education staff working with the children are what matter most. Though staff roles may look different across various types of settings (e.g., home-based, center-based, family child care), you remain the most important component of a responsive environment.

Positive early learning environments start with you when you create a positive social and emotional environment that is built on caring and responsive relationships. Children can't explore and learn, experience joy and wonder, until they feel secure. They need to trust their caregivers and know their needs will be met. Young children need adults to establish the relationships by being consistent and responding to social and emotional cues, both in classrooms and home-based settings.

When you build a unique relationship with children, learn their cues and communications, their likes and dislikes, their strengths and the areas where they need support, you help them feel safe. That's why providing nurturing, responsive, and effective interactions and engaging environments is the foundation of the Framework for Effective Practice, or the House Framework. The practices at the foundation of the house are critical to promote early learning and development in all domains.

But what you do for the children in your care is not everything! Take care of yourself! Make sure you feel safe and secure in the environment, too. When providers calmly manage the stresses and challenges they experience in an early childhood program, children feel safe and secure.

What helps you keep cool when challenges ramp up? When the toilet breaks one more time? When the children are antsy after a week of rain? Self-regulation skills. 'Self-regulation' is your ability to manage your feelings, actions, and thoughts so you stay goal-directed and do not get derailed. For example, when a car pulls out in front of you on the highway, can you stay calm and carefully slow down so you don't hit it? Will you still get to the movie on time? Your self-regulation skills are at work every day, in so many ways.

Young children are just learning how to regulate their emotions, behavior, and cognition. But they can't do it alone. They need you! The Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework says it clearly in the Approaches to Learning and Social and Emotional Functioning domains, where the self-regulation goals for young children include 'the support of familiar adults.'

Exactly what kind of support can you give young children? It's called co-regulation. 'Co-regulation' is an interactive process where adults provide regulatory support to children in the context of a shared, nurturing relationship. It looks different at different ages, but adult support remains a critical piece of the puzzle throughout childhood. Even as grown-ups, we often need support from others to regulate ourselves—think of when you call your mom or meet a friend to talk through a bad day.

You might co-regulate when a baby is startled by a dog barking loudly. You pick the baby up, rock him, reassure him in a gentle tone, and rub his back until he is calm again. A preschooler becomes incredibly angry when a peer pushes her on the playground. In this case, you might kneel to the child's level and validate her feelings (e.g., 'You're very mad because someone pushed you!') and suggest pro-social next steps (e.g., 'Should we tell them how you feel?'). When you respond calmly to a child, the child's feelings often de-escalate. Children tend to turn up the intensity if they feel they aren't being understood. When you respond calmly, you show children what regulation looks like.

About Effective Curriculum Ideas Examples

To work with children as they co-regulate, you need to:

• Identify your own feelings and reactions when you are stressed.
• Find healthy outlets to manage your emotions. Exercise can be an effective stress management practice for many people, while others find that meditation works best. Experiment and discover which strategies work for you.
• Pay attention to your thoughts and beliefs about child development, behavior expectations, and individual children. Make sure you're interacting in developmentally, culturally, and linguistically responsive ways.
• Use strategies to calm yourself so you can respond to children effectively and compassionately. Decide what works best for you. Drinking a glass of water? Singing a song with the children?

A key part of building a positive early learning environment is providing children with the co-regulation they need. There are three main ways you can do this:

• First, build a warm and caring relationship with each child and their family. Your goal is to understand their development, communication style, and temperament. Some children may need a lot of support to co-regulate and others not as much. You only know those cues when you know the child. Parents can help you here because they know their children best!
• Second, create an environment of 'yes' for children that buffers them from environmental stressors. Establish predictable routines, transition strategies, and behavioral expectations appropriate to their development. You can also create a 'cozy corner' in your classroom or family child care home where children can go if they are feeling overwhelmed. Share these ideas with families so they can create 'yes' spaces in their home.
• Third, offer children intentionally planned learning experiences to help them practice self-regulation skills. For example, you can plan fun activities to help children as young as 18 months learn to name their own feelings, recognize others' feelings, and self-soothe in moments of distress. Model these skills yourself and point out when you see other children and adults using them, too. Review your curriculum to ensure it offers appropriate social and emotional learning opportunities.

Youare the most important part of the early learning environment. Offering young children calm, nurturing, and predictable social and emotional environments, and promoting their self-regulation skills, helps them feel safe and secure so they can learn, play, and grow.

Sarah Merrill and Jamie Sheehan are Program Specialists for the Office of Head Start.

Curriculum has the potential to have a dramatic effect on student achievement and teacher quality. When teachers thoroughly learn to use a highly effective curriculum, they learn about how to teach a particular subject and have ready-made lessons and materials organized in a developmental sequence that promotes student learning.

How can you tell what makes a good curriculum? It’s not simple. People looking for simple answers will base decisions on the most superficial things: cover design, greater number of pages, special features, or that they like the sales person. But people looking to implement a quality curriculum have work to do.

First of all if it is going to improve student achievement, a quality curriculum will require changes, changes that faculty and administrators may find uncomfortable. But unless changes are made, how can anyone expect any changes in student achievement?

So, what kinds of changes?

1. Content. Content in a quality curriculum is more thorough and deeper. Instead of mentioning topics, concepts in history, math, or science are developed and explored.

2. Concept and Skill Development. Concepts and Skills are developed along student learning trajectories. One concept builds on the previous one without abrupt changes that leave students perplexed.

3. Lesson Plans. The introduction, development, guided practice, practice, and assessment of each concept and skill is rich, practical, and engages the majority of students at their level of development. Lessons are not overly complicated or too simple. They build on previous lessons and lay the foundation for subsequent lessons. They don’t introduce new skills or concepts out of the blue or drop them without sufficient development and practice.

4. Research Based Teaching Methods. The teaching methods in an effective curriculum are based in educational research or a history of effective practice. Educational research is not comprehensive, but it does provide guidance for curriculum developers. There is research about how to teach reading, beginning with phonemic awareness and developing the alphabetic principle and phonics. There is research that identifies the most effective ways to teach math facts. There is research that identifies the most effective ways to teach spelling. There is no reason teachers have to discover these methods through trial and error and implement them on their own. A quality curriculum would incorporate research based practices into the daily lessons.

5. Student Population. An effective curriculum meets the needs of a given student population. If you have a population of struggling learners, the curriculum concentrates on developing foundational skills and concepts. If you have a high achieving population, the curriculum challenges students with advanced concepts and extended learning opportunities. No one curriculum will be appropriate for all learners at all levels.

6. Standards. An effective curriculum meets the state or national standards in a comprehensive way. A standard, such as the grade 4 Common Core reading standard (“Determine the main idea of a text and explain how it is supported by key details; summarize the text.” ) is not just addressed in one lesson. It is comprehensively developed throughout a grade level.

Determining whether a program meets standards qualitatively, is difficult. Most new educational materials will reflect the new Common Core standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics. But most curriculum developers will simply relabel existing curriculum with the Common Core standards and fill in any gaps. Yes, they will look as if and claim to “meet” the Common Core standards. But the curriculum will not be developed based on the Common Core.

To do this would require that curriculum developers start with each standard at each grade and lay out a series of lessons so that students build understanding throughout the year. These lessons would be interwoven so that the different strands of the subject area build together. The materials would clearly reflect each standard and how it is developed and assessed, not isolated mentions of the standard.

This would most likely require that a developer would completely revamp an existing curriculum that was not based on the Common Core, which requires a significant investment… or would start anew, which requires an enormous investment. Educational publishers will not make that investment unless they absolutely have to because customers are demanding it. And customers won’t demand it if they don’t know what they’re looking for or think curriculum doesn’t really matter. Without a real change in curriculum, we can’t expect the Common Core or any reforms to have any substantive effect on educational practices, teaching quality, or student achievement.