Table of Contents
What is Vertical Alignment?
Vertical alignment in school is the process of organizing curriculum in a mindful way between grade levels so that students can smoothly transition between grade levels. Many times, teachers in different classes focus on different elements of a course, have different expectations for their students, and sometimes even use entirely different vocabulary to describe class terms.
Schools that are not vertically aligned often have students that struggle at the beginning of the year due to all of the changes they experience between courses. This can also lead to teacher frustration as they feel that students are not adequately prepared for what they expect students to know before starting their course.
Vertical Alignment is important because it eliminates the need to spend a large portion of the beginning of each course “catching students up” and reviewing concepts to ensure they are ready for the main course materials. When a school has effective vertical alignment, students should be able to seamlessly transition from one course to the next without seeing a large shift in expectations, content focus, or language.
Vertical alignment can be brought about by giving teachers time to discuss their courses with teachers across grade levels to ensure that they are all using the same jargon and have mindful stepwise expectations for students. This can be a difficult process that requires compromise, but in the end, it will result in a student journey that makes sense from kindergarten all the way up to graduation from high school.
For example, a middle school science teacher might feel that physics and chemistry are too advanced for their students and desire to focus more on the fundamentals of biology and leave chemistry and physics for high school to deal with. While generally students spend much more time on physics and chemistry in high school, the high school science teacher may expect the students that join their course to at least understand some basic fundamentals before they get all the way up to a high school physics or chemistry class.
In a vertically aligned school, these teachers should come to an agreement about how much physics and chemistry should be covered in middle school in order for students to meet standards in later years. This will require compromise on both sides. The middle school teacher will probably have to accept that they need to introduce at least some basics of physics and chemistry while the high school teacher will need to understand that they need to devote more time to teaching basics at the beginning of the year.
Whether it be expectations on students’ science skills, writing ability, or content knowledge, vertical alignment discussions will help teachers and students create a mindful educational journey for students that doesn’t come with giant potholes and surprise detours. While these discussions can become heated due to different teacher priorities, with thoughtful listening and some mediation from department heads, teachers can always find a way to come to an agreement that in the end will result in much less friction between grade levels.
New Research on the Importance of Vertical Alignment
A recent study on memory formation found that previous experience is fundamental for understanding new knowledge. When new information is experienced, it is processed and encoded based on what has been learned before.
The study focused on several neural networks that are known to be important for learning. One network was the set of connections between the amygdala, which deals with emotional memories, and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) which is involved in logical thought. The other important network that was observed throughout the experiment was the connections between the hippocampus, an important brain region which transfers short term memories into longer term memories, and the PFC.
The researchers used multiple electrophysiological recordings through electrodes implanted in rats. These electrodes allowed the researchers to not only watch these specific regional network connections and avoid other “noise” from other regions, but also understand the temporal relationship between the networks to see which fired first and how quickly the activity started and stopped in each region. It also allowed the researchers to see the rate of activity in each region to help understand the role that different “oscillations” or rates of firing in the network affected learning.
The results showed that the Amygdala-PFC networks were the first to synchronize when the rats underwent the behavioral conditioning tests and that the Hippocampus-PFC networks ramped up and synchronized later on during sleep. The amygdala is crucial in immediate emotional learning, especially negative emotions. The hippocampus is associated with memories being transferred from short to long term memory.
The Hippocampus-PFC networks did activate immediately, but the activity was generally not synchronized between the two brain regions and only started matching later on during sleep and then also during recall activities that reexposed the rats to their previous experiences and tested what they had learned based on their past tests.
These results make sense with previous research and explain why people often react emotionally to new information that has not been properly digested yet. Initially, information is processed emotionally to help in avoiding dangerous situations, and later on gets consolidated with previous experience in the hippocampus to create new understanding and true learning.
According to the researchers, the findings suggest “that information about new experiences is retained by being tied to pre-existing activity patterns, and that a memory is acquired when these patterns are connected to each other across brain regions” (Miyawaki and Mizuseki)
Why is Vertical Alignment Important?
This research shows the process that the brain goes through when exposed to new information. New information initially is processed emotionally and only later is it connected to the hippocampus for connection to previous experiences. Because the information is dealt with in a primarily emotional way until it is connected to previous experiences, this shows the importance of teachers mindfully making connections between new material being learned and previous learning the students have done.
Being exposed to a lot of new information simultaneously can be stressful for students. In addition to this, the beginning of the year is full of many other new experiences and stressors. At the beginning of the school year, students are taking new classes, in new settings, often with new peers as well.
Humans naturally have an aversion to too much change and newness to their environment. New things challenge the stability of what they have known and grown accustomed to. When people are in a new situation, they do not know what consequences could result, and therefore are more likely to be uncomfortable until they get used to the new norms in their new learning environment. This discomfort can have a negative impact on learning, especially in the beginning of the year when many teachers are trying to lay down the fundamentals of their course that will guide students through the rest of the school year.
All of this newness can cause students to have trouble connecting to their past experiences and have much of the intended learning for the beginning of the year be overshadowed by students slowly getting accustomed to their new learning environments. Teachers can help to alleviate some of this newness stress by making many connections to what the classes the students took in previous years.
This familiarity in language, style, and content can help students transition more quickly and comfortably. Because so much more will be familiar to students when courses are vertically aligned, less time will be wasted and students will feel more comfortable in these often difficult transition times at the beginning of each year.
This approach also will ensure that teachers are not caught off guard by students they feel are drastically unprepared for what they hoped to focus on during the course. For example, in an English classroom, students before might have focused more on creative writing, poetry, and Shakespeare but be totally unprepared for writing clean and clear analyses on nonfiction.
When teachers work together year after year for the same goals and support students’ knowledge using the same frameworks along a clear path, students are better able to learn. While individual teacher passions should always be considered and included whenever possible, if one teacher spends too much time on one content area or style all year and misses fundamentals of the next year’s course, it can lead to departmental friction.
How Can Administrators Improve Vertical Alignment?
- Give teachers time!
Teachers need a significant amount of planning time together to do a proper curriculum review and understand how their course fits into that framework. They will also need time to discuss which priorities they feel are crucial and which are negotiable. This discussion will take quite a bit of time and will require teachers to come to a compromise on what to include, what to cover briefly, and what to cover in depth.
This should not take away from regular lesson planning time. Looking at the macro scale curriculum does not help teachers prepare lessons for the following days. Instead, administration should set aside PD days specifically for this purpose. Because teachers will all have the time off simultaneously, it also allows more people to join the conversation, take their time in discussing, look through data, and come to a decision on what changes should be made.
When teachers feel that their prep time is being taken away for large scale PD discussions, they can often get upset and feel that the exercise is a waste of their time. Those that feel this way will not be able to contribute to the discussions and will instead speak as little as possible so that the meeting will end sooner. These types of discussions should not be optional, but they should consider the needs of the teachers, as they are the ones who will be using this information to make classroom changes.
- Do not change everything at once.
Additionally, teachers will need time to come to terms with all of these changes and they should not all be changed at once. Many veteran teachers have whole units planned out with full lesson plans that they have used for years. Asking them to put those aside and start something totally new that they may not personally feel is important can be very frustrating.
The same can be true for new teachers who can sometimes come in guns blazing with all sorts of new ideas fresh from teachers’ college. Similarly, while many of these new ideas should be listened to and implemented where possible to keep education on the cutting edge of research based practices, it is important to not throw the baby out with the bath water. Many tried and true teaching strategies are the way they are because they have helped hundreds of students graduate and achieve further in life.
Making yearly changes is a good idea, but throwing everything out each year to start with a ton of fresh new ideas can be very messy and disorganized. While some of these changes may indeed work, many will not be implemented well. As any teacher knows, lesson plans rarely, if ever, go exactly as planned. There are unforeseen issues, or perhaps some students need certain things differentiated more than in other classes.
Making smaller mindful changes to single units rather than redoing all units simultaneously allows for new ideas to be trialed, while not losing the tried and true structure that has worked for years. Either extreme will just frustrate teachers and a more mindful pruning of the curriculum will lead to happier staff and plenty of data to parse to make more changes next year.
- Have clear learning benchmarks.
When making decisions about what should be included, it is important that schools have a curriculum expert who can look at the curriculum as a whole and ensure that each year leads mindfully into the next. Teachers often will have a more narrow view of what they expect and often have very high expectations for their students.
One reason for this is that when starting a new year, teachers often feel that their students are behind because they are comparing their students from last year at the end of the year with their new batch of students at the start of the year. What some fail to recognize is that what these new students are missing is a year of their powerful teaching.
Having a curriculum expert in place to set clearer curriculum expectations and benchmarks for various skills will help put teachers minds at ease. Instead of feeling how much worse the new students seem, they can look at what benchmarks their students have at various points in the course and make more mindful decisions about differentiation based on data rather than feelings.
How Can Teachers Improve Vertical Alignment?
- Be open to change.
As for teachers, it is important to not fall back on the cliche of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Education is not a tool that has a single purpose like a wrench. It has a million moving parts and has to deal with constantly changing people. Even on the small scale, what works one day may not work the next.
In education, it is important to always be trying new things not just to find better ways to get content to students, but to find new ways to reach more people and pass the love of learning on to the next generation. While many traditional teaching techniques are quite effective at putting content into students’ heads, many students leave school viewing school as “work” and forgetting most of what they learned.
Whether it be new technology, a new unit, or even dropping old content that is no longer relevant, trying new things regularly helps keep students and teachers fresh and keeps learning fun. While not everything will work, refusing to make any changes because it is how things have been done for decades will only lead to stagnation.
The world has changed drastically, yet classrooms often look strikingly similar to how they did in the early 1900s before the invention of some of the most world changing inventions such as the internet, computers, and smartphones. Classrooms need to update to learn how to help students navigate this new world more effectively, not view technology as an intrusion to the classroom.
- Be ready to defend passions with research.
Any new addition to the curriculum should not be introduced just because it sounds interesting, is a personal passion of the teacher, or will please parents. Changes to curriculum should be data based and backed up with clear research.
Teachers wishing to include new content, units, or strategies should introduce their ideas, but also come prepared to back up their ideas with research studies and clear reasoning. This will help to show reticent colleagues the value in what is being brought up and be based on data which will help admin in accepting the changes.
- Be willing to listen and compromise.
Whether a teacher defending methods they know work from years of experience or a teacher passionately trying to modernize their classroom, both ends of the spectrum will absolutely have to compromise. There is no way to keep everyone in a diverse large school happy with all of the curriculum choices and so in the end, everyone will need to be willing to accept that they might not always get their way.
What is most important is the educational journey of the students as they go from class to class. If students have teachers teaching one way in one class and then the next year everything is completely different, they will need lots of time to adjust and there will be lots of wasted learning time.
The most important thing to ensure is aligned is terminology. For example, if one English class uses the term “literary device” for the techniques the author uses to affect their audience, then that is the term that should be used in all years.
Students who learn the term “craft moves” or another similar term will be confused by the two terms. This needlessly adds to the amount of class vocabulary that students need to learn and will just slow down learning and understanding between the years.
Conclusion
Some teachers may suggest that vertical alignment sucks the individual creativity out of teachers by forcing them to teach in a way that puts students on a conveyor belt of education and doesn’t allow time for passion projects. While not everything should be the exact same year after year, some sense of a connected journey will help students see how new concepts they are being taught connect to their previous experiences.
Teachers need time to align their courses in a way that allows for each teacher to reach their course goals but keeps in mind that students will also have to be prepared for what is expected in the future. A curriculum expert can help teachers see the bigger picture of where students have to be at each stage and help teachers modify their courses to work as helpful guideposts as students continue along their educational journeys.
Want more like this? Make Lab to Class a part of your weekly professional development schedule by subscribing to updates below.
References
Miyawaki, Hiroyuki, and Kenji Mizuseki. “De Novo Inter-Regional Coactivations of Preconfigured Local Ensembles Support Memory.” Nature Communications, vol. 13, no. 1, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28929-x.
