Perna, D. M., & Davis, J. M. (2000). Aligning Standards and Curriculum for Classroom Success.

Arlington Heights, IL: Skylight. (126pp., $27.95 paperback)

In 2002 Bush signed into law the "Leave No Child Behind" Act, which increases the emphasis on student achievement as measured by acceptable performance on state mandated tests. The authors of this book, Daniel M. Perna and James R. Davis, offer educators a helpful resource to assist in integrating standards into classroom instruction and assessment practices. The authors' purpose is to "provide classroom teachers at any grade level and any subject with the tools and background to work with standards as the guiding force in their planning and course design" (p. 1), an objective that is met in Aligning Standards and Curriculum for Classroom Success. The authors' experience as educators in public schools is evident in the language used to describe the framework, the emphasis on practical applications of the strategies presented, and the nonthreatening readability of the text. The book provides helpful visual and graphic organizers, charts, graphs, and cartoons to emphasize key concepts of each chapter and eye-catching icons are used to denote sample lesson plans.

The book is organized around six chapters, each concluding with a lesson plan that demonstrates a major concept from the section. Chapter 1, Student Achievement Using a Holistic Approach to Standards, provides readers with a basic understanding of standards including definitions of terms. This chapter stresses the importance of building the classroom instruction and assessment on a foundation of standards and culminates in an elementary example lesson plan (Water Cycle), which attempts to model this. Chapter 2, The Need For Dialogue, emphasizes the importance of communication among all stakeholders (e.g., teacher, administrator, parent, business person) in order to define key elements of each standard. The authors propose the Communicating About Students and Teaching (CAST) Dialogue Process through which identified stakeholders seek to address four questions that serve as the backbone of the curriculum planning framework offered in subsequent chapters.

1. Why do teachers teach what they teach?

2. What is actually being taught and why?

3. What should students know and be able to do?

4. How can students demonstrate what they know and can do? (p. 25)

The book, and this chapter in particular, seems intended toward guiding district and school level planning and leadership rather than for use with individuals. The model places a heavy emphasis on collaborative planning and shared decision making, which may reduce the appropriateness of this text for individual educators' use. This chapter concludes with a high school foreign language lesson that emphasizes the importance of consistent interpretation of open-ended standards. As foreign language tends to be a content area without consistently available standards, this application of the chapter's concepts might have been more effective if it referenced a core content area instead.

Chapter 3, The Language of Expectation, provides a brief explanation about the importance of clear language, particularly emphasizing verb usage in objective and criterion standards. The authors used several verb lists to create a survey for stakeholders to more carefully define levels of thinking at the local level. Perna and Davis suggest that at least 100 people, equally distributed across teachers, administrators, business people and parents should complete the survey followed by analysis of the frequency of responses. Because the authors suggest limiting verb usage in lesson writing to the small number of agreed upon verbs, the heavy use of noneducators' responses to guide curricular policy may be unwise. This unit concludes with an upper elementary literature lesson that emphasizes consistent verb usage throughout the elements to shape the summative assessment.

Chapter 4, Designing and Using the Standards-Based Curriculum, emphasizes the importance of criterion standards to guide evaluation of student work while still addressing standards. This explanation about the importance of observable goals for assessment will go some distance toward aligning instruction and assessment but still leaves great room for teacher subjectivity and bias. Taking the explanation one step further to include elaborate, detailed rubrics that further clarify these objectives could reduce this issue. This chapter culminates in a junior high school government lesson that emphasizes criterion standards.

Chapter 5, Instructional Plans Based on Criterion Standards, provides an overview of the seven elements that comprise the instructional plan. This planning format has been used without comment since chapter one, and raises questions of why the authors delayed an explanation of these elements until this point. The bulk of this chapter is dedicated to 14 lesson plans dealing with various subjects and grade levels that incorporate the seven instructional elements. Chapter 6, Lesson Planning Takes Root, summarizes the previous chapters and discusses vertical and horizontal planning procedures. Several helpful graphics are provided that might be helpful for practitioners to further understand these concepts.

In summary, Aligning Standards and Curriculum for Classroom Success is a helpful resource for schools and districts seeking to better align their standards, instructional planning, and assessment procedures. The intended audience seems to be district and building level administrators rather than individual educators. As a result, the emphasis of this text is on seamless instruction at a global level, not at the individual student level. None of the lessons provided in this book, nor any of the narrative surrounding each one provides any support or recommendations for dealing with students of varying academic abilities. The individual classroom teachers seeking a resource to assist them in addressing standards and academic diversity will need additional mechanisms to meet this need. The authors did not attempt to create a text that would be useful to specialized populations, such as the gifted. Rather, the authors sought to create a text that would assist administrators and other educators in the challenge of linking the standards to meaningful and aligned classroom experiences.

Use of this book will likely make curriculum, instruction, and assessment more seamless for all students, including the gifted, and will likely increase teachers' understandings about standards in general. This book, however, will do little to improve learning for students with unique learning needs such as the gifted, learning disabled, or bilingual who may require differentiated lesson plans not addressed in this book. If educators better align their curriculum, instruction, and assessment, this will go a long way toward making learning more meaningful for all students. However, this is only the starting place for designing defensible curriculum, instruction, and assessment for gifted learners.

Reviewed by Catherine M. Brighton, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Virginia and a co-principal investigator with the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented (NRC/GT).