Performance-Based Curriculum for Language Arts

From Knowing to Showing

Use this book as your guide to develop a performance-based curriculum based on language arts standards recommended by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. Take your students beyond knowledge and basic skills by teaching them to be accountable for showing what they are learning.

Using this performance orientation requires your students to apply their knowledge in a learning performance you can both observe and measure. Educators, parents, business and industry leaders, and community member throughout the nation want students to be able to demonstrate what they learn. Shifting the focus from "knowing" to "showing" means your instruction, curriculum, assessment, evaluation, and reporting will be oriented around these learning performances.

Performance-Based Curriculum for Language Arts offers you a framework for a logical, incremental transition to a performance-based orientation. Provides performance benchmarks to assess progress at Grades 3, 5, 8, and 12.

The performance benchmarks will help you

• Organize what you teach around a clear set of content/concept standards
• Organize how you teach by emphasizing what students need to do with what they know
• Focus your instruction around the six major strands of language arts—listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing, and representing
• Center your students on what they will need to demonstrate in a formal evaluation of their learning
• Communicate to parents your clear and rigorous academic focus on performance-based education

Also includes templates you can customize and use for teaching your students to "show what they know" and technology connections to apply measurable, performance-based learning to computer-aided classrooms.