District Sample Curriculum Project

Beginning in 2012, the Standards and Instructional support team worked with educators across the state of Colorado to build curriculum support resources for the implementation of the 2009 Colorado Academic Standards. 121 school districts participated in the authoring and/or refining of the processes and products of the Colorado District Sample Curriculum Project.

The Project, whose origins and goals are firmly grounded in standards-support requests from Colorado educators, had three main phases:

Phase I | Curriculum Overview Samples (Fall 2012) Colorado educators worked with fellow educators and the Standards and Instructional Support team in grade level and content area teams to engage in the process of translating the Colorado Academic Standards (CAS) into curriculum overview samples.

Phase II | (Area) Refining Workshops (Spring 2013) Colorado educators, in area workshops across the state, provided feedback on the Project, the curriculum overview samples, and the future work of the Project (i.e., Phase III).

Phase III | Instructional Unit Samples (Fall 2013 - Winter 2015) Colorado educators worked with fellow educators and the Standards and Instructional Support team to build units based on select curriculum overview samples. In three-day workshops, district-teams of general education, special education, ELL, and gifted and talented educators/specialists worked together to plan for the instruction of all students.

Phase IV | High Impact Instructional Strategies (Summer 2016 - Present) During a kick-off institute in the Summer and Fall of 2016, Colorado educators came together to discuss key instructional shifts within their disciplines and engaged in reflective lesson planning. Phase IV focuses on providing tools and resources developed by teachers for teachers that highlight the teaching and learning cycle:

•  Planning for Instruction  
•  Enacting Instruction
•  Reflection on Instruction

Curriculum overviews, blank templates upon which they are based, instructional units, and other supports for the curriculum samples can be accessed on this website. Together, these voluntary-use resources were created by and for Colorado educators as a way to better understand and translate the Colorado Academic Standards into curriculum.

Users of the samples should feel free to copy, distribute, and transmit the samples and adapt them to fit their needs. Please honor the work of the Colorado educators that created these samples by providing them attribution. These samples are not intended for commercial purposes.