Curriculum Development

Kevin Palmer posted on August 14, 2008 - 8:16pm no comments

Do Your Research
Your curriculum is likely going to be incorporating and synthesizing your local community needs with national or field-specific trends (what others in the field are doing). To ensure that both of these aspects will be addressed in your curriculum, look at some of the following resources:

  • A local Community Stakeholder analysis
  • Literature, research, and publications related to your topic area
  • Any previous curricula developed by your organization or by others doing similar work
  • Seek out input prior to starting curriculum from the practitioners, trainers, or teachers who will be the ones directly implementing your curriculum

Statement of Philosophy
After you’ve sifted through your research and information collection, you should start to develop a statement related to the philosophy and motivations behind your curriculum that includes the following information:

  • Why the curriculum is being developed
  • Why it is necessary to be taught in the community
  • How the methods are sound and in line with national/field trends and standards
  • The overarching goal of teaching the curriculum
  • Why your organization is the authority to be developing the curriculum

These pieces should all be fairly obvious from your previous research and from input from your organization, collaborators, and community.

What kinds of Curriculum have CTC VISTAs developed before?

  • Digital Video Bootcamp
  • Media Literacy
  • Digital Storytelling
  • Basic Computer Skills
  • Online Youth Radio Programming
  • Digital Photography
  • Youth Web Design

Starting the Process

Of Curricula and Lesson Plans
A curriculum and a lesson plan are not the same thing. A curriculum is a broad overarching plan and timeline that determines skills and knowledge learned, the timetable for doing so, and how progress or learning will be assessed. A lesson plan is a day-to-day breakdown of what specifically is going to be taught, in what order, by whom, what resources will be needed, etc.

In other words a curriculum is macro focused while lesson plans are more micro focused. A curriculum is designed to be adopted and implemented by practitioners. These practitioners then incorporate their own teaching style and realities of the teaching environment into creating their own day-to-day lesson plans.

However, curricula and lesson plans are often used interchangeably and will mean that when your nonprofit asks you to write a curriculum, they will almost always mean curriculum plus individual lesson plans.

Break Out The Calendars
To start the process of mapping out your curriculum by days, weeks, and months, first grab all relevant calendars and schedules. This includes any institutional calendars (such as school calendars), your organization’s calendar, your personal calendar, and a schedule of the times allotted to your course (M-W-F? Tu-Th?).

Make sure you account for any conflicts between the calendars (such as an event at your organization on the same day as a class) and also for any holidays or breaks (which are typically listed on institutional calendars).

Incorporating Standards
If you ware working in schools or any other public institution, take some time to research if there are any official standards or assessments you need to be aware of. Teachers in public, private and higher education have to constantly ensure that their curricula are in line with government standards.

For example if you collaborating with a teacher and are designing a curriculum for an in-school history & media course, then you should probably review any state standards related to language arts standards and/or technology standards. Even if it is not in an in-school environment, there still may be formal or informal standards you should be meeting. Do your research to make sure.

While you will not likely be creating a curriculum where you’ll have to worry about state or federal standards, you will have to impose some form of accountability standards to ensure your curriculum is actually achieving the goal and objectives you set out. Your organization might want to set out its own standards if they run several different courses or programs.



Developing Objectives

What Skills or Knowledge Will Be Learned?
List out any and all the technical skills, knowledge, etc. that will be learned throughout the course. Examples of skills could be video editing on Final Cut Pro, operating a digital video camera, writing code in HTML, how to use a mouse, or writing a resume. Some examples of knowledge would be working in collaborative groups, historical aspects of journalism, how to run a field shoot, how to conduct a interview, or how to access technical support.

An easy way to think about it is by putting it this way: By the end of the course, the student will be able to [enter skills here].

Curriculum Grid
You can begin to map out your curriculum on a grid that plots your skills and objectives up with different courses (if you’re creating a broad curriculum that incorporates a number of different courses), different classes, or different projects (if learning is going to be mostly project based as is usually the case with tech curricula).

Here is a basic example of how to create a curriculum grid for a project-based curriculum:

Again, you can replace “Projects” with “Courses” or “Classes” if that fits the orientation of your curriculum better.

Setting Your Outputs
Aside from acquired skills and knowledge, you will want to set outputs in your curriculum, which will also act as great benchmarking and assessment metrics. Outputs differ from skills and knowledge in that objectives can be looked at as the “deliverables” of your curriculum.

Here are some examples of potential course outputs:

  • Each student will have 4 finished videos
  • Each student will have completed their resume and sent it to three employers
  • Each student will have a portfolio of work

Knowing the Resources Needed
You will without a doubt need to utilize a variety of resources throughout your curriculum. Knowing and pinpointing specific resources and when they’re needed makes coordinating classes much easier for those teaching it.

If you are generating a project-based curriculum, then the resources needed should be fairly evident based on the requirements of each project. For example, if your projects center around creating a series of community podcasts, then required resources will be a microphone, recording device, computer, internet connection, audio software, etc.

Resources refer not just to hardware or software, but also any prepared materials or documents you need to hand to the class. For example in Class 1 you will probably want to hand out a course guide or in Class 8 you may want to use a Powerpoint presentation to explain a concept or idea.

Accounting for the Realities of the Classroom
A lot of CTC VISTAs develop curriculum to work in specialized environments such as computer labs. It is important, especially for CTC VISTAs, to document exactly what is going to be need to make the teaching environment conducive to the curriculum.

If your curriculum calls for a media lab, then specify that the room should have one computer per person, be well ventilated, have a sign-in policy, have an equipment check-out policy, have a locking cabinet to store equipment, etc.

Make sure to list and document all considerations to have about the teaching environment since there are a number of environment issues that affect technology curriculum that are absent from traditional curriculum.

Make sure to document any and all proficiencies that instructors must have as well. Often with nonprofit programming, staff turnover is high so the skills and knowledge of trainers/instructors/teachers is extremely variable.

Setting Performance Indicators/Evaluations
You should establish regular performance indicators that will be used throughout the duration of the course so that the instructor will be able to accurately judge the health and progress of their students and the course in general.

These indicators, or metrics, are used to make adjustments to content, methods, and timetable of the curriculum and also for individual students. Typically for most courses these come in the form of tests, quizzes, homework grades, and project grades.

Thankfully, if you’ve already set the skills and knowledge as well as course outputs, then most of the work of developing assessments and performance indicators is already done for you. If your curriculum is project-based then you can simply look at the curriculum grid and also the timeline to see if projects are on-track.

It is often difficult to administer tests to students in afterschool programs or adult education classes since earning a good grade has little bearing or effect on them individually. This is why for a number of nonprofit curricula, performance indicators and assessments are ‘baked in’ to project-based work.



Formatting

Formatting your curriculum should be fairly simple if you’ve done all the preceding work. The worksheet for this section provides some templates to use.

However, any format you choose will have several overlapping components in each unit of the curriculum including:

  • Statement of Curriculum Philosophy/Purpose/Vision
  • Resources Needed (included type of teaching environment)
  • Skills and Knowledge Gained
  • Outputs/Deliverables Produced
  • Performance Indicators/Assessments Used
  • Timeline

Lesson Plans

In order to make your curriculum actionable, individual lesson plans will need to be developed. You can develop full lesson plans yourself and include them with the curriculum or you can rely upon the instructors/trainers/teachers who will be delivering the curriculum to make their own plans (so long as the curriculum is complete and thorough enough).

Activating Prior Knowledge
When completing the process/procedures sections of your lesson plans, try to incorporate as much prior knowledge as possible. Activating prior knowledge such as life examples, applications, or real-world situations tied into your student’s lives or education makes new learning more ‘sticky,’ meaning it is acquired and adopted easily. Referencing skills or ideas taught in previous lessons can also activate prior knowledge.

Lesson Plan Format
Formatting for lesson plans varies, yet content is fairly uniform across lesson plan templates. The standard content in each lesson plan usually includes:

  • The subject of the lesson
  • What prior knowledge or skills are needed or will be activated
  • The lesson objectives (should reference aspects of broader curriculum objectives)
  • Step-by-step procedural on how to execute the lesson
  • What assessments or performance evaluations will be included and where for the lesson
  • Outputs or deliverables by the end of the lesson
  • How the instructor/trainer/teacher will assess themselves and the lesson for improvement or alteration

Get as Much Review and Input as Possible
Lastly, make sure that as many people as possible look over and give feedback on your curriculum. This includes staff at your organization, other practitioners, volunteers, any instructors/trainers/teachers who will use it, potential students, and other CTC VISTAs. Get as many eyes on it as possible to ensure that it will be relevant, effective, well paced, and in line with reality.



Further Resources

Note: there are a multitude of specific curriculum guides available for a wide range of subject areas (particularly for medical or K-12 education) but very few on general curriculum development (for an afterschool program for example). You may find it useful to gleam as much information from specific curriculum development guides, as they can be applicable across subjects, fields, and purposes. Some of the resources below fit this description.

Informal Education (INFED)
(http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-curric.htm)

How to create a (clerkship) curriculum
http://familymed.uthscsa.edu/ACE/chapter3.htm)

Curriculum Models from Chicago Public Schools
(intranet.cps.k12.il.us/Training/Curriculum_Model_Catalog.pdf)

Framework for (math) curriculum research and design
(http://www.mathcurriculumcenter.org/research_framework.php)