What is a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum

GMS Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum

A guaranteed and viable curriculum is the variable most strongly related to student achievement at the school level. That is, one of the most powerful things a school can do to help enhance student achievement is to guarantee that specific content is taught in specific courses and grade levels (Marzano). Guntersville Middle School is dedicated to the PLC Process in which teachers collaborate in departments to determine the essential standards and together through classroom tasks, collaborative formative assessments, and response-to-intervention deliver a guaranteed and viable curriculum for the essential standards listed in the documents for each content area and grade level.   

The guaranteed and viable curriculum are the absolute essential knowledge and skills ALL students must acquire in the course or grade level. Our teams will teach all of the standards in their curricular area but will focus their common formative assessment, intervention, and extension efforts on those skills that are so essential that every student must know.

How will we determine what is essential?

Teacher teams will utilize the state standards, testing blueprints, and their own professional judgements to come to consensus on the guaranteed and viable curriculum in the course/grade level. Teams will consider the following while engaging in this work:

Endurance-Does the GVC standard provide students with knowledge/skills beyond the unit of study?

Readiness-Does the GVC standard provide students with knowledge/skills needed in the next course/grade level?

Leverage-Does the GVC standard provide students with knowledge/skills that will assist them in other disciplines?

Adapted from the work of Larry Ainsworth, “Unwrapping the standards: A simple process for making the standards manageable. Englewood, CO: Lead and Learn Process. 2013