I believe that it is every educators responsibility to develop goals and objectives for the curriculum. The education of my students is my responsibility. As such, I need to develop my goals to meet the needs of my students and to align the goals and objectives with the curriculum.

I believe that all activities, assessments, and lessons should be aligned with the curriculum. I think it is important to set goals for our students. For example, as a school we have created "I can..." statements for each of our standards. On the board we display our standards, essential questions, and "I can..." statements. For example, this week my lessons's "I can" statements are: 1)I can explain the structures of national governments in Latin America. 2) I can apply economic terms to describe the current economic conditions of Latin American countries. The "I can..." statements give students a clear picture of what exactly they should be learning and getting out of the lesson.

I believe we have a say in it, but at the same time the school district sets those for us, so we still need to follow the guidelines. We can tweak things here and there, but not completely. We can teach the material to how we like it and how we believe the students are going to learn the best.