Making Curricula that That Your Teachers Will Actually Use

Purpose & objective

Purpose: Convey a curriculum design and delivery system that fosters teacher collaboration and efficacy (using free Google apps) that can be replicated by any size district.

Objectives: Participants will be able to
1. View our curriculum development process/timeline and examples of our “live” standards-based curriculum files that are used for delivery.
2. Come away with a model of effective curriculum design, delivery, and implementation that can be replicated in whole or in part, based on their district’s needs.
3. View lesson planning tools that improve teacher curriculum usage, collaboration, efficacy, and efficiency.

Educational or infrastructure challenge/situation:
Previously, our curricula was written at our central board office with teams of 2-6 teachers and supervisors. Once they were approved, they became pdfs that were linked onto our website. The only way for a teacher to interact with them was to print them out and annotate their copy. If standards were changed or added by the state or new research or resources were found, they could only be addressed or added several years later when the curriculum was updated. There was no teacher feedback on implementation of the curriculum until years later when it was rewritten.
This type of curriculum delivery forced our teachers to use online lesson planning tools that required them to search for standards and then create their own daily objectives from them or worse sometimes they created their own daily objectives and then tried to “match” them to a required standard. There was no way to record or know if teachers were actually teaching to all standards. Teachers were creating their own daily objectives in silos so that students in different classes and schools were learning and being assessed on different objectives. District midterm and final exam results varied drastically by school and teacher.

Technology intervention (include specific names/titles and descriptions if tools are not widely known and available):
Our district's use of Google Apps (Sheets, Shared Drives, Docs, Meet, Slides, and Sites) has streamlined the curriculum production process while also allowing teachers, administrators, and supervisors to communicate and collaborate inside produced files and build "live" curriculums that can be updated on the fly.

Evidence of success.
Our district started this process in the 2018-19 school year. We began with our Science and Math curricula and have since moved on to ELA, Social Studies, Physical Education & Health, World Languages, and several electives. Several courses have just come “on board” this school year and several more elective courses will be rewritten in this format this year. Like every other school district in the world, the pandemic affected our rollouts, implementation, and accurate measurement of the results. That said, several of our district assessments of science and math courses, the first subjects that had district summative assessments created for them, saw improvements of district averages from year 2020-21 to 2021-22 from 2-7%.
Perhaps as important, we are seeing more and more of our teachers actually engaging with the curriculum they teach. For example, our Health and PE curriculum went live last August. Our district has approximately 70 Health and PE teachers and all have been in their curriculum’s resource catalog at least once.

Outline

1. Introduction: who we are and what problem(s) our teacher coach team was trying to solve in our district. (i.e. teachers not using curriculum with fidelity, difficulty of updating curricula, and teachers creating their own objectives, activities, and assessments detached from their colleagues. (5 minutes)
2. Our process/curriculum development 2 year timeline for courses. In Year 1: 1. assemble teachers, supervisors, C&I admin, and teacher coaches. 2. Sort and order standards. (Teacher coaches create a resource catalog for the course and all subsequent material is created and/or linked in there. 3. Create district daily objectives. 4. Decide critical content for district summative assessments. (Note: critical content is also later used to create curricula for self-contained special education and ELL classrooms). 5. Add vetted resources 6. Create formative assessments. 7. Board of Education approval of curriculum. PDF of curriculum are posted on district site. 8. Create district summative assessments. 9. Create a “Curriculum 101” website and video for teachers that were not part of curriculum writing. 10. Teacher coaches create a planning tool for teachers to plan directly in. All of that (hopefully occurs in year 1 although sometimes step 5 & 6 go into year 2). In Year 2: Enhanced Implementation of curriculum–after each marking period, surveys are sent out to teachers using the curriculum for feedback. A team of teachers are brought back to central office for a day to discuss feedback, look at district summative assessments results, make changes in curriculum files (only for standards & objectives already taught), and add or improve formative assessments and resources within the curricula. (12 minutes)
3. Technology support via Google apps: 1. Multiple Shared Drives (a “working” Shared Drive and a Final Shared Drive, 2. Sheets to create resource catalogs, the “FRHSD Intentionality Tool” (a dashboard for all district curricula), and teacher planning tools. 3. Sites and a video creation tool to make “Curriculum 101” overviews. 4. Forms to collect feedback from teachers. 5. Docs and Slides (and hopefully soon Practice Sets) to create formative assessments. (5 minutes)
4. What improvements have we seen? 1. More collaboration amongst teachers. 2. More input, buy in, and engagement of curriculum from teachers->efficacy. 3. Standardization of daily objectives (but not pedagogy) across schools and classrooms. 4. More efficient lesson planning and less for compliance and more for actual teachers. (5 minutes)
5. Questions and our contact information. (3 minutes)

This presentation will be “show and tell” (we will have a slide presentation with many images and links of examples) while presenting educational leaders in the audience with questions to think about for their own districts.

Supporting research

Our district looked at two key researchers when developing our curriculum creation and delivery model: 1. John Hattie’s Visible Learning research synthesis showed that collective teacher efficacy had the greatest positive impact on student learning over all other factors. 2. Mike Schmoker’s ideas in Focus that included making user-friendly curriculum, breaking down standards into digestible chunks and using formative assessment to measure student learning throughout a lesson.