Enhancing Education: Evidence-Based Strategies in the Lincoln Empowered Curriculum

This resource provides an in-depth overview of the Lincoln Empowered Curriculum, outlining the curriculum's design, which is based on research-based strategies and instructional approaches to ensure high-quality education and student engagement.

The Lincoln Empowered Curriculum provides a comprehensive and flexible educational experience meeting the diverse needs of students. Founded on a series of research-based strategies and instructional approaches, the curriculum ensures high-quality education and student engagement.

The instructional approaches of the Lincoln Empowered Curriculum center around several key principles.

The courseware is developed from a meticulous unpacking of both national and state standards across applicable subject areas.
After deriving the standards into measurable learning objects, these elements are woven into a progressively scaffolded scope and sequence for each course.
Students receive a comprehensive and rigorous learning path preparing them for their next educational step and eventual academic and career success.

Supported by the ADDIE model, the Lincoln Empowered Curriculum development process is rigorous and thorough.

Each course goes through a planning stage, where a project plan is devised, a project manager is assigned, and a scope and sequence is outlined based on a specified standard set. The content is then developed, reviewed, edited, and validated through a comprehensive quality assurance process by certified subject matter experts. This meticulous approach ensures the curriculum is of the highest quality and meets the needs of all students.

The curriculum is designed to be modular as well as multi-modal, allowing for customization to meet different educational needs and to adhere to different intelligences, as outlined in the principles of the Universal Design of Learning. Such flexibility enables teachers to adapt the content for remediation, accelerated learning, special needs adaptations, and learning style variances. Further, the way in which the materials are built and delivered is intended not only to provide options but also to create equitable choices for the teachers and students utilizing the courseware. This approach also allows for the curriculum to be applied in various educational settings and instructional formats, ranging from purely asynchronous, to blended and virtual models, to traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms.

Lincoln Empowered courses are structured to provide a consistent layout and delivery, ensuring a seamless learning experience for students. Each course is designed with a logical progression of content, where skills are introduced, practiced, and eventually mastered before advancing to more rigorous concepts and analytical applications. This scaffolded approach allows students to build a strong foundation of knowledge and skills, which they can then apply to more complex and challenging tasks.

Outlined in the framework elements of 21^st Century Skills, Lincoln Learning courses incorporate multi-modal materials to engage students and support their learning by leaning into the different types of intelligences various students possess. This includes direct instruction in various formats, interactive elements such as games, activities, and videos, opportunities for practice and self-assessment, hands-on labs in science courses for experiential learning, case studies, inquiry, exploratory applications, and independent work.

TIP: Click here to learn more about the Lincoln Learning Objects which make up the Lincoln Learning curriculum.

The curriculum also includes numerous forms of assessment that are both formal and informal, including regular formative auto-graded assessments, project or application-based assignments giving teachers the ability to evaluate authentic student-produced work, and summative assessments evaluating mastery across a series of concepts within a course. These assessments offer a variety of opportunities to gauge understanding and provide relevant and valuable feedback to students, parents, teachers, and administrators, helping them understand a student's proficiency and progress.

TIP: Click here to view an overview of Lincoln Learning assessments.

The curriculum also incorporates the guiding principles from various third parties. To demonstrate, the Lincoln Empowered product is accredited by third-party institutions including Cognia and WASC and is continuously pursuing accreditations from other provisioning bodies. Additionally, the curriculum employs a mixture of Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge within the creation of behavioral learning objectives, targeted content, and related assessment items. Further, The Lincoln Empowered curriculum has undergone an initial ESSA study attaining the Level IV designation indicating the approaches herein demonstrate rationale. These strategies ensure the curriculum is grounded in best practices and evidence-based research, providing a high-quality educational experience for students.

In summary, the Lincoln Empowered Curriculum is a well-researched and thoughtfully designed educational program providing a flexible, engaging, and rigorous learning experience for students. Its alignment with standards, modular design, variety of content, and comprehensive assessment strategies make it an effective tool for educators to support student success.