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What are the components of instructional alignment and how do they relate to one another?
This is an excerpt from The Essentials of Teaching Physical Education 3rd Edition by Jennifer Walton-Fisette,Stephen A. Mitchell.
Instructional alignment is an important component of teaching for learning for preservice, beginning, and experienced teachers. As a preservice teacher, you will not be expected to formulate and align a curriculum, but you will be expected to align the unit and lesson plans you develop for your field-based experiences, both in methods courses and during student teaching. The concept of instructional alignment is what we intend our students to learn (goals), how we teach and how students practice (instructional strategies), and how we determine student success (assessment) and is the basis of offering a quality physical education program centered on student learning. For this to occur, four relevant components must align: National Physical Education Standards (SHAPE America 2025), unit outcomes, instruction implemented based on unit and lesson plans, and assessment of student learning (figure 2.2). This section provides an overview of each of these components, but the bulk of this book is structured on the concept of instructional alignment (i.e., part II—Teaching to the National Physical Education Standards; part III—Building the Curriculum; and part IV—Instruction and Assessment).Figure 2.2 Components included for instructional alignment.
2024 SHAPE America National Physical Education Standards
The National Physical Education Standards (SHAPE America 2025) guides teachers on instructional alignment—that is, how to articulate what students should know and be able to do by the end of each unit of instruction or individual lesson. Without framing your instruction based on the standards and learning indicators, questions can arise: “So what? What is the point?” Using the standards to develop unit and lesson plans provides purpose, intention, and accountability about what you are teaching and why you are teaching it. With standards and learning indicators provided for each grade span (i.e., preK-2, 3-5, 6-8, high school), you should have a clear understanding of what students should be expected to accomplish by the end of each grade span, which provides insight about the unit outcomes and instruction that you should offer over the course of the academic year, semester, or quarter.
Unit Outcomes
Initially, as a preservice teacher, you will have the task of developing an individual lesson plan. You might believe that this task is formidable, and it is! Over the course of your methods courses, you will probably develop and implement numerous lesson plans. Then, either at the end of these courses or during student teaching, you find out that you have been taught backward and that you first need to develop a unit of instruction before you construct individual lesson plans. A unit of instruction is the big picture of what you intend to teach from start to finish of a particular content, concept, or theme based on one or more of the standards and learning indicators. You have to identify the units of instruction that you intend to teach over the course of the academic school year, semester, or quarter (depending on the grade spans you teach and the design of the school district). After you have selected the units of instruction, you then have to determine the standards and learning indicators you are going to address over the course of each unit. After selecting the standards and learning indicators, the next step is to formulate specific unit outcomes (i.e., objectives) that indicate what students will learn by the end of the unit and align with the identified standards. For example, Standard 1, which focuses on motor skills, is the basis for most units of instruction at the elementary level. In a unit on underhand throwing, the unit outcome might be to have students implement the critical elements of the underhand throw and hit a target x number of times at x distance. In contrast, at the middle school level, the unit outcomes you develop may be for students to maintain possession consistently, create space, attack the basket, and defend an opponent in 3v3 small-sided basketball game play.
Unit and Lesson Plans
After you have identified the national or state standards and learning indicators and developed specific unit outcomes (objectives), you can start planning for instruction. As explained in the unit outcomes section, ideally you first want to create a unit of instruction and then individual lesson plans. Besides standards, indicators, and unit objectives, a unit of instruction includes other content and materials (e.g., management plan, content analysis or map, block plan, instructional materials) that you intend to implement and use within the unit.
The basketball example can demonstrate what is meant by “other content and material.” First, you want to make sure that you develop specific rules, routines, and expectations for the basketball unit in addition to your daily physical education rules. Second, you want to plan all the content that you intend to teach from the start to the end of the unit. In basketball at the middle school level, this might include triple threat, various types of passes, dribbling, shooting, layups, and zone or person-to-person defense. Third, a block plan is an outline of what you will teach or focus on in each individual lesson over the course of the unit. Fourth, instructional materials are anything that you believe will help enhance or provide instruction or be a resource for students, such as handouts or posters of the rules or various skills and movements, signals for officiating, or league standings or tournament brackets, to name a few.
As a preservice or beginning teacher, planning all this in advance can be challenging. However, doing the detailed planning for the entire unit before you formulate individual lesson plans allows you to see the big picture of what you want students to learn and makes for a smoother and easier transition to individual lesson planning. Each lesson plan should include specific standards, learning indicators, lesson objectives, instructional tasks that students will engage in over the course of the lesson, and a formal or informal assessment to measure whether the students have learned.
Assessment of Student Learning
As indicated in the section on curricular alignment, assessment is implemented to measure student learning. Whereas curriculum assessments are designed to measure the objectives and outcomes of the overall physical education curriculum and program, assessment of student learning that occurs within units of instruction and individual lessons measures the objectives and outcomes of a specific unit. When developing a lesson plan, you want to include a formal or informal assessment that you will implement in the lesson to provide both students and teachers with feedback about whether students learned from the instruction provided (i.e., formative assessment) and whether they are making progress toward achieving the standards and unit outcomes (summative assessment). The intent of this section is not for you to gain an understanding of the various types of assessments and ways to implement them to measure student learning but rather to develop an understanding of the importance of assessment. Even if quality instruction is offered, the absence of assessment diminishes the meaning and accountability of physical education.
Collectively, the National Physical Education Standards (SHAPE America 2025), unit outcomes and objectives, instruction (units and lessons), and assessments of student learning are interconnected and must align with one another for effective teaching for learning to occur at the instructional level.
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