To Use a Pacing Guide or to Not Use a Pacing Guide
I have a love/hate relationship with pacing guides. I am a big-picture to small-picture thinker. In “before times” I would take the standards and block out weeks for standard clusters and then break things down further by day. Did I always follow it day by day? No, because that isn’t real life. But I generally tried to stay within a couple of days of my original plan.
When adopting a curriculum there is usually some type of scope and sequence or the suggested number of days. I have yet to meet a curriculum resource that gives enough time for some of the “major” standards where students might have some unfinished learning. The IM/Open Up Resources/Imagine Learning resource is no different in pace, being too fast in some places and too slow in others (much rarer). The following pacing guides map out the units of study. This is one version of several that I have helped districts create. I have realized that additional days must be built into the calendar for additional small groups and interventions. These are designated as “no new content days’ or NNCD. Generally, I try to build these days in after a section checkpoint so teachers can immediately provide additional small group intervention based on the checkpoint.
In some districts I support, they have decided to teach some units after high-stakes testing. This is generally because those standards can be taught in centers or some overview can be done electronically. The focus and time for the year were given to the foundational standards critical for each year’s learning.
The links below are for grades K-8. I will update you shortly with the AGA guides. I hope you find them helpful and I would love to hear any feedback you might have.
Nice!