Apply Marzano's recommendations for improving curriculum to your curriculum management system. Develop a curriculum monitoring system to ensure effective curriculum implementation in your current school, district, or related learning organization. Reflect on how your school or related learning organization can successfully address individual student needs and strengths, as well as individual readiness, learning profiles, and interests.

A Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum

Before we examine Marzano's action steps for improving curriculum and ensuring that it is guaranteed and viable, take a few minutes to evaluate a curriculum with which you are familiar.

Self-Reflection on the Quality of Your Curriculum

The Power of Opportunity to Learn

The first of Marzano's five school-level factors that promote student achievement is a guaranteed and viable curriculum. Using the process of statistical effect size analysis, Marzano concludes that a guaranteed and viable curriculum is the most powerful school-level factor in determining overall student achievement. Districts and schools must ensure that the intended curriculum — written materials such as scope and sequence frameworks and curriculum guides — is implemented consistently by all teachers. In turn, the attained curriculum — what students actually learn — should align with the intended and implemented.

How can schools and districts ensure that this alignment occurs? Introducing his concept of a guaranteed and viable curriculum, Marzano states that "Opportunity to learn (OTL) has the strongest relationship with student achievement of all school-level factors" (2003, p. 22). According to Marzano, students have the opportunity to learn when they study a curriculum that clearly articulates required standards and ensures that all teachers have adequate time to help students acquire and integrate required content. "If students do not have the opportunity to learn the content expected of them, there is little chance that they will" (2003, p. 24). Opportunity to learn involves commitments from schools and districts to ensure that the written, taught, and learned curricula are aligned.

A Guaranteed Curriculum

Curriculum is guaranteed, according to Marzano's framework, if states and districts give clear guidance to teachers regarding the content to be addressed in specific courses and at specific grade levels. In addition, processes and personnel must be in place to ensure that there is sustained monitoring of the curriculum and its implementation and that individual teachers do not have the option to disregard or replace assigned content. Such quality control would ensure that all students receive an effective education based on consensus-driven curriculum standards.

An effective curriculum should allow time for all students to

• Engage in experience-based exploratory activities.
• Move toward deeper levels of conceptual understanding.
• Independently and automatically use what they are learning.

Therefore, educators must provide a coherent and interesting organization for essential curriculum content, with a sequence that revisits enduring understandings, reinforces essential skills and procedures, and includes student interests to ensure ownership in content.

Strategies to Promote Effective Curriculum

A Viable Curriculum

Marzano describes curriculum as viable when districts and schools provide sufficient time for teachers to teach its content so that all learners learn that content. In spite of how obvious this component may seem, Marzano and others emphasize that many state and district curricula are overloaded with too many standards, forcing teachers to teach content for coverage of standards rather than teaching content for depth of understanding.

Viable means that the content that's guaranteed can actually be covered in the time available.

—Robert Marzano, in excerpt from What Works in Schools, Program 1: School-Level Factors, an ASCD video-based professional development program.

Marzano is a strong advocate of a conceptually-organized curriculum that is clearly articulated within periods of time or grade levels — horizontal design elements — and across grade levels — vertical design elements. In addition, as we will see when we examine Marzano's second factor, effective curriculum should emphasize key spiraling components. These components represent the major competencies, ideas, and skills that students are expected to revisit within and across grade levels with growing levels of competence, proficiency, and depth of understanding.

Action Steps to Ensure a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum

Marzano recommends five action steps to implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum. Please consider each of them in relationship to a curriculum with which you are familiar. Use the questions presented for each action step to consider which of his recommendations might help enhance that curriculum.

Action Step 1

Identify and communicate the content considered essential for all students versus that considered supplemental or necessary only for those going on to postsecondary education.

• Have we helped educators in our school or district determine what is core or essential for all learners to acquire and integrate?
• Have we identified supplemental or enrichment aspects of our curriculum that can be studied if time permits?

Action Step 2

Ensure that the essential content can be addressed in the amount of time available for instruction.

• Have we mapped our curriculum so that teachers have adequate time to teach the content in depth rather than having only enough time to teach mile-wide, inch-deep content?
• Have we conducted time audits in our school or district to ensure that we have realistic time expectations related to teaching our required curriculum?

Action Step 3

Sequence and organize the essential content in such a way that students have ample opportunity to learn it.

• Have we communicated to teachers expectations concerning their organization and delivery of required curriculum content?
• Have we organized and sequenced our curriculum to optimize the learning experience of all students?
• Have we identified and articulated essential instructional concepts?
• Have we organized our curriculum based on these concepts?
• Have we ensured that our curriculum spirals, moving all learners toward growing levels of conceptual understanding and independent use of the content learned?

Action Step 4

Ensure that teachers address the essential content.

• Do our administrators monitor teachers' implementation of the written curriculum?
• Have we ensured that quality control processes are in place to ensure that all students are learning the same rigorous standards and related content?
• How do we acquire evidence that there is consistency in the implemented curriculum across teacher and classroom lines?

Action Step 5

Protect the instructional time that is available.

• In addition to ensuring that the content we are expected to teach is viable and realistic, have we protected available instructional time by eliminating unnecessary interruptions?
• Do we ensure that there is a minimum amount of time devoted to noninstructional activities?
• Have we organized our school day in such a way that we promote the opportunity to learn and reduce the interruptive effect of such activities as lunch, recess, breaks between classes, and announcements?

Using These Action Steps in Your School or District

Now that you have had a chance to consider how these action steps relate to an actual curriculum that you are familiar with, we'll conclude our investigation of Marzano's first school-level factor by having you complete the following activity.

Action Steps