Sometimes, if it proves useful, I conceptualize a curriculum as three pillars: learning objectives, assessments, instruction. The alignment between these pillars is fundamental to productive learning/teaching. Learning objectives (LO) define what you want students to know and be able to do with that knowledge. Assessments (AX) are opportunities for students to showcase what they know and can do. Instruction (IN) is how students are expected to know and do things; it’s how they learn. Regardless of how you define LO, AX, and IN, the alignment between them is paramount to insure you, the instructor, are not fighting against yourself, and that your students are not set up to fail.

If your LO are misaligned, then your assessments are not measuring what you want them to be, and your instructor is not teaching student what you want them to learn. If your AX are misaligned, then you are still not measuring your LO properly and your guidance will be misled by all formative AX. If your IN is misaligned, then your students are not properly supported to meet your LO and your AX are doomed to fail because of the lack of support for your students.

This is not my idea but was developed by Wiggins and McTighe (2005), and it is called Backwards Design. It is a powerful tool, not as complicated as evidence centered design (Michelle et. al 2015), and generalizable to other contexts. I wish my name would be attached to something so impactful. Not for the number of citations, but for the people who will benefit from it.

References

Michelle M. Riconscente, Robert J. Mislevy, & Seth Corrigan. (2015). Evidence-Centered Design. In Handbook of Test Development. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203102961.ch3

Wiggins G. P. & McTighe J. (2005). Understanding by design (Expanded 2nd). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.