Academy Reference · For Instructors & Administrators
A scope and sequence sets the intent. Curriculum is written once against it. It is scheduled into a term as a class. Only then is it published, assigned, attempted and scored. This is a map of those four stages — and of the handful of rules that decide what a student can actually see.
Belongs to it, and only to it. A lesson drawn inside a course is part of that course and cannot be moved to another.
A relationship rather than a container — something that connects or adjusts what is around it.
Order of events. What comes after cannot exist until what comes before does.
The name the system uses internally. Quote it in a support request and you will be understood immediately.
A quick fact about the box: how many of it there can be, or whether the system enforces it or merely records it.
Stage 1 — intent, set before anything is written
Scope is what gets covered; sequence is the order it is covered in — two independent axes that behave differently. Scope follows the standards the course answers to: flat, comprehensive, and largely still. Sequence is authored by teachers, carries the pedagogy, and is rearranged often. Part of this lives as a document you write, and part of it lives as structure the system can actually check; knowing which is which is the point of this stage.
Scope — what gets covered
Sequence — in what order
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The two halves differ in kind: scope is recorded as data the system can report on, while the sequence between lessons is something it can actively enforce.
The plan is realised by writing the material it calls for.
Stage 2 — written once, reused every year
Everything here is authored independently of any particular class or student. Nothing in this stage has a due date, a roster, or a grade.
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Each box in this stage carries a plain-language explanation, including the parts of it that most often cause confusion.
A course becomes something students can enrol in only when it is scheduled into a dated term.
Stage 3 — set up fresh each term
A course plus a term produces the thing students actually join. Rosters live here; curriculum does not.
Rather than a separate concept for each level of organisation, the system has a single general grouping called a realm, and each realm is given the specific name that fits it in your setting. So the boxes below are all realms, named for what they are:
Two things follow. Because a realm can always contain another realm, arrangements such as a district containing several schools need no special support — they are just realms inside realms. And because access is granted on a realm, a privilege granted at one level reaches everything nested inside it. When the word realm appears in a screen label, a report column or an error message, read it as “whichever of these groupings applies here”.
Every grouping below is a realm
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The dotted box is a reference back to stage 2, not a copy — worth reading if you have ever wondered whether editing a lesson affects classes already running.
Nothing reaches a student until a specific version of a lesson is published, then assigned to a class.
Stage 4 — what students actually do
Each step here depends on the one before it. This is also where every date, weight and score lives — none of it is stored on the curriculum itself.
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If a student reports that they cannot see an assignment, start at the top box of this stage — it is the gate almost every such report turns out to involve.
Consequences worth knowing
These follow directly from the diagram above. Between them they account for the large majority of questions instructors raise in their first term.
Delivery
A lesson can be finished, reviewed and marked released and still reach nobody. Publishing is a separate, deliberate act. If students cannot see work, check for a publication before anything else.
The plan
The document states intent and nothing enforces it. What the system does hold is the standards alignment and the prerequisite links. Keeping the document and those two in step is editorial work.
The plan
The two halves change at different rates and for different reasons. Scope shifts only when an authority revises a standard or the course changes what it answers to. Sequence is rearranged whenever teaching experience says it should be — so reordering how you teach must never appear to change what the course covers.
The plan
A course’s scope is comprehensive by definition: every objective the course is responsible for appears in it, in full. A list that samples the standards, or stops at the ones with material already written, understates what is owed and makes every coverage report quietly wrong.
The plan
Coverage is built from the bottom up: align individual pieces of work, and a lesson’s or course’s coverage is the sum. This is why a gap is findable rather than merely asserted.
The plan
Standards are versioned. When an authority revises one, the revision is a new version, and alignments made earlier keep pointing at the version they were made against.
Curriculum
Lessons cannot be moved or shared between courses. If two courses need the same material, each needs its own lesson — so decide where a lesson lives before you invest in writing it.
Curriculum
Because classes reference the course rather than copying it, a correction reaches every class immediately — including classes in progress. Substantial mid-term rewrites are better handled as a new variant.
Curriculum
Ordering connects pairs of lessons within one course, and each link is either enforced or advisory. A course may therefore offer several valid routes, and links can never cross a course boundary.
Classes
District, school and class section are all realms, differing only in where they sit. Realms nest, and access granted on a realm reaches everything inside it — so check the level before granting anything.
Classes
The course and its lessons are shared across every class that has ever taught them. A new term brings a new section with its own roster and assignments, while the material stays single-sourced.
Delivery
A challenge carries no intrinsic value. Weight is set each time it is assigned, so the same challenge can be ungraded practice in one class and a major grade in another without being edited.
Delivery
Every attempt is retained. Per challenge, you decide whether the first, best or last attempt scores — which is how one assignment can mix a graded quiz with unlimited practice.
Delivery
You never assign to a single student. Individual needs are met with per-student dates and with lesson variants, which keeps one gradebook column per assignment and class reporting comparable.
Why it is built this way
Several of the choices above look like technical hair-splitting until you see what they protect. Each of these is a decision made deliberately, and each of them exists to keep something from going wrong in your second term rather than your first.
Scope and sequence
Objectives belong to the course, not to the units you group your lessons into. So you can merge two units, split one, or teach light before mechanics, and your coverage is untouched — because you moved the teaching, not the requirements. Restructuring stops being risky.
Scope
The required objectives come from the authority you answer to, and they are the minimum. You add your own on top. What the state chose to write down does not cap what you decide your students should achieve.
Scope
A plan is complete when every required objective is accounted for. Enrichment you would like to reach never blocks a plan, and a requirement you have missed always does. The distinction is what makes “this plan is ready” a statement worth trusting.
Evidence
Coverage is assembled from individual pieces of student work upward. A course cannot assert in the abstract that it covers something; either work exists that evidences it or it does not. That is what makes a coverage report answerable to a parent or an auditor.
Evidence
One objective may be demonstrated across several missions in different lessons over the year, and one piece of work may evidence several objectives at once. Good digital citizenship is shown in many places; Boolean conjunction may be settled in one. The record follows the teaching rather than forcing the teaching into a grid.
Time
The plan carries no dates. The same plan runs in the autumn and again in the spring, and two sections on different timetables share it without either one being edited. Dates arrive later, with the class.
Time
Block timetables, A/B days, short weeks and holidays all change what a week is worth, and two students in the same class may not even meet the same number of times. Hours do not move. Planning in hours is what lets one plan survive contact with several different timetables.
Time
Where a unit’s lessons do not fill the time allowed, you record the remainder deliberately as padding. Slack becomes something you can see and defend — contingency, review, assessment — instead of arithmetic that quietly fails to add up.
Time
Fitting everything into one semester is the genuinely hard part of planning. When your lessons need more time than the unit has, or your units more than the term has, the plan says so and shows you which constraint broke. It will not silently make the numbers work.
Talking to the technical team
If you are filing a support request or reading a release note, these are the words on the other side of the conversation.
| What you call it | What the system calls it | Easy to confuse with |
|---|---|---|
| District, school, class, subgroup | Realm | Each other — realm is the general word, and the specific name depends only on which level you mean. |
| Class, period, block | Section | The course — which is the material, not the class. |
| Semester, quarter | Term | Nothing; terms belong to the school, not to a course. |
| Topic | Lesson | A unit, which collects several lessons covering related topics. |
| Unit | A collection of lessons | A lesson, which is one teachable topic; a unit groups several of them by relatedness. |
| Learning objective | Objective — part of a course’s scope | A mission, which is how mastery is demonstrated rather than the thing to be mastered. |
| Must-teach vs. enrichment | Required / optional objective | Nothing; only required objectives decide whether a plan counts as complete. |
| Performance task, mastery check | Mission | A learning objective, which states what must be achieved; the mission is the means of showing it has been. |
| Question, task, problem | Challenge | An assignment, which bundles several challenges with dates and points. |
| Standards body | Standard authority | The standards themselves; the authority is the body that publishes and numbers them. |
| State standard, TEKS item | Standard | Its wording, which is held separately and in three languages. |
| Standards alignment, coverage | Challenge standard text | Course-level coverage, which is calculated from these rather than entered. |
| Prerequisite chain, pathway | Lesson relationships | A fixed order; these are pairwise links and may be advisory only. |
| Making work live | Publication | Releasing a lesson — a different, earlier step that does not make it visible. |
| Translated or levelled version | Lesson variant | A separate lesson; variants share the same missions and challenges. |
| Extended time | Assignment student override | A second assignment, which would split your gradebook. |
| Submission | Attempt | The score, which is attached to one attempt rather than to the student. |
Course, lesson, mission and challenge names are stored per language, so a school running in more than one language names each item once per locale rather than duplicating it. This map describes structure only — it deliberately says nothing about screens or permissions, both of which change more often than the shape above. Competitive play, teams and seasons form a separate system and are not shown.