his process assumes that teachers are given time during the year and in the summer to design one or more integrated units, either individually or as a team. It also presupposes that teachers will devise a long-term strategy for curriculum design, tinkering with 10 to 20 percent of their curriculum yearly and planning to revamp or redesign their entire curriculum over a five- to seven-year period.

What matters is that before committing to the design of one or more multiweek units, teachers have a sense of their year as a whole so they can see how this unit fits into the whole plan.

In other words, units and assessments are always works in progress that come alive only when they are mediated by students' interests, backgrounds, and questions.

This step is the most critical but most often misunderstood. What is a subject-matter essential, or "standard," and what is not? It is specific, not abstract, but it does not descend to detail. In history a typical standard asks students to understand the causes of the First World War, with an eye to the technological, economic, social, and political forces at work, together with the roles of individuals, of accident, and ordinary confusion. It does not ask students to "master the concept of conflict in world history." Nor does it ask them to memorize the names of the twenty central characters in the tragedy of the summer of 1914.