Creating a Curriculum Development Process

October 29, 2015 Leave a comment

Vision and Philosophy

Don’t underestimate the importance of speaking the same language–words matter. At the beginning of our journey in curriculum development it became very apparent that we were spending much time arguing about what we meant while actually meaning the same thing.  We were essentially talking past each other. Our Curriculum Advisory Team was using different terms to mean the same thing, but because we all had different ideas of what those terms meant, we were having difficulty moving forward.  

One of the most productive meetings we had was coming to consensus on a common working language.  We were not going to be able to develop a common vision and philosophy about curriculum and its development until we started to speak the same language.  We discussed and came to a shared understanding of the terms curriculum, instruction, and assessment.  While we all agreed these pieces are connected during the teaching and learning process, they are also different and serve different related purposes in that process.

Different members of our team placed different emphasis on each part.  For teachers, it was the instruction that was most important as it was what they did day in and day out.  For principals and those held to accountability, the assessments held a higher level of attention.  For curriculum developers and course designers, curriculum was paramount.  We needed to step back and view the whole and not just the parts.  Each part was supportive of each other and worked together for the whole.  It took our team some time to come to a common language and a common understanding of each of the parts and how they supported the whole.

When we begin to speak using specific language with a common meaning, we began to move forward to plan our approach to district consensus curriculum development. Our vision for district consensus curriculum essentially followed the four questions used by our PLCs:

  1. What do we want our students to know (student outcomes)
  2. How will we know that they have learned those outcomes (common assessments)
  3. What will we do when they have already learned those outcomes (instruction)
  4. What will we do when they have not learned those outcomes (instruction)

We decided that by developing district consensus about student outcomes and common assessments we would be developing a district approach that supports and respects our teachers and their ability to focus and innovate their instruction.  Essentially defining the district consensus curriculum as the consistent student outcomes and assessment evidence for each unit along with the required resources.  This definition gave more freedom and flexibility for teachers and teams of teacher to try different instructional approaches and have meaningful conversations about how students are responding to instruction.  

District Consensus Curriculum

As a district team, it was important to develop our curriculum development process collaboratively.  We decided to take the approach of developing the consensus curriculum first instead of starting with diary mapping.  By taking this approach, we would be addressing the changes required to curriculum from new standards.  We adopted a tight and loose coupling mentality.  We came to the conclusion that district consensus curriculum would reflect the consistent student outcomes, the common summative assessments, and the required and/or approved resources identified with that course.  Being a large district with multiple schools, it was imperative that we created courses that had the same expectations for students no matter what teacher or campus you attended.  It was also important that we measured student success in the same method–common summative assessment.

It was important to recognize that this new development process would result in curriculum that would be both tight and loose.  That is to mean that there would be components of the curriculum that were consistent and components that would encourage teacher creativity and innovations.  

It was not as easy as it sounds for everyone to come to this understanding.  The initial concern came from the classroom teachers who were afraid that this process would remove their creativity and innovation from teaching.  However, it was quickly discovered that having consistent outcomes and common assessments would actually increase their ability to be creative and innovative in the teaching of these courses.  This design would also create an atmosphere ripe for discussing instructional approaches and sharing the results with colleagues through the PLC process.  

It was easy for the team to agree that the same courses should have the same expectations.  It was less easy to come to a common understanding that each course should have some degree of common summative assessments.  It took a mindshift about assessment before we could move on with common summative assessments.  We had to move away from assessing students on the ability to complete the lessons and activities, and move to a summative assessment schema that assessed students on their performance of the outcomes designed in the curriculum.  The result of this shift created the platform to encourage and respect teacher innovation and flexibility for planning lessons and teaching their students.  We did not want to design a curriculum that would be so narrow that all teachers would be using the same lessons.  We did want a curriculum that would establish the consistent student outcomes for each course and unit; respect teachers as professionals to develop daily lessons, activities, and classroom formative assessments; and give teachers and PLCs information about how students met or exceeded the expectations of the course outcomes through common summative assessments.   

This change in curriculum design required us to focus on what you would gain by developing a viable curriculum with consistent outcomes and common assessments–teachers that were respected for their ability to be innovative in their development of lessons and armed with information about the impact their instruction had on student performance on those curricular goals.

Developing District Consensus Curriculum

The team

As a district composed of 30,000 students and 31 different buildings, it was important to carefully determine our process for developing district consensus curriculum.  While it would be ideal to have a team of teachers that represent each level and building, for our elementary and middle schools, this would not be feasible–they would require a sampling of teachers to represent the different grade levels and at least participation from each buildings.  With three main high schools and one alternative school, we were able to accommodate representation from each building for each course in development.  Each team was comprised of classroom teachers with support from a combination of instructional specialists, department chairs, and building administration.

The teams were comprised of teachers who were instructional leaders and respected by their colleagues.  This development would ask these teachers to spend numerous hours during the summer and some time during the school year to focus on the writing process.  It was important for the team to be committed and understand the impact their participation would have on students and colleagues.   This team was asked to essentially take on a part time job as curriculum developer.  It asked our teachers to go above and beyond their main responsibility, but they were exactly the right people to be doing this work.  Creating this team in this manner was an obvious acknowledgement of the respect we had for our classroom teachers.  

Development process

After we established the teams, it was time to build their capacity to begin developing.  We adopted a multi-year process for development and implementation of new curriculum.  

1.Study

The first phase was to help the development team take a deep dive into professional learning about new learning standards, shifts in instruction, content, curriculum development, assessment development, course and unit progressions, data examination.  We spent much of that first year learning and planning.

2. Develop

The second phase was the initial development of new curriculum or revision of previous curriculum.  As much as we could, we started our developing curriculum from the ground up.  It was tempting to reach back for the previous curriculum and make some adjustment and make the standards fit into the old way.  By removing the constraints of the old, our team was free to wipe it clean and focus on developing courses that would be aligned to our beliefs, mission, and expectations for students.

Our teams developed coursed using our Understanding by Design framework.  We began with the desired results of the course and the assessment evidence required to see that students have met those expectations.  From there, the teams began to work on units that would serve as the building blocks to achieve those results followed by some common summative assessments used to show student understanding.  This was a time of great frustration, debate, arguing, and ultimately satisfaction.  From the outside, it would be easy to quickly dismiss this frustration and try to calm the waters.  Our approach was to embrace this chaos.  It was from this chaos and disagreements and debate, that the truly great ideas emerged or were birthed.  This dialogue and debate was encouraged because the result was fantastic.  The teachers left exhausted but satisfied with the result.  

When the large framework of student outcomes and assessments were established the teams began to develop the context to bring the units together for the student experience.  This work relied on the experience and expertise of our professional teachers–not only did they meet those expectations, but in some cases, far exceeded them.

3. Pilot

With a district consensus curriculum developed, it was time to begin the implementation phase.  Whenever possible, we would try to pilot units of the new curriculum.  Since we developed district curriculum with consistent desired results and common assessments, it was important for teachers to begin creating lesson activities through this pilot process.  By piloting, we could create some exemplar lessons that teachers not involved in the development process could begin with and build from.  

4. Implementation

During the time of development and piloting, teachers not on the development team participated in professional learning about the standards, outcomes, framework, shifts in instruction, the new curriculum and common assessments, and overall support of teaching students the newly identified outcomes to better prepare them for the full implementation roll out.

We did not make the exemplar lesson activities a required component of teaching.  In fact, we were not able to pilot much of the new curriculum at the high school.  We relied heavily on teams of teachers to work collaboratively in their PLC teams to create the lesson activities.  Without the luxury of the pilot, it was as if all teachers of this course were new teachers again.  Teachers took that challenge in stride and came together to crowd-source lessons and activities that were supportive of the unit and course goals.  

5. On-going review

Our final phase is on-going review.  During this phase we focus on two major questions:

Did our students respond to instruction?

Did our curriculum prepare students for the next unit, course, and experience?

The first piece was to use the district common summative assessments and teacher created formative assessment results to empower all teachers to have conversations about best practices with instruction and the result on student learning.  Essentially, this conversations revolved around the experience of the student and did the student learn what we set out to teach in the manner we taught it.  More importantly, the formative assessment information gave teachers timely information to answer this question but then have time to adjust instruction if some or many students were not where they ought to be on the continuum of learning.

The second piece was to use the district common summative assessment and student performance on that assessment and their continued performance on future common and state assessments to determine if the curriculum was appropriate to prepare these students.  If students meet the expectations of the course as identified in the common assessment but did not meet the expectations on the state assessment or other valid large scale assessment of the same standards, then we need to address the curriculum.  That tells us we don’t have a teaching concern, but rather, we have a curriculum concern.

The underlying work of the development team and district research team is to use the variety of assessment information to build confidence in our created district common assessments as a tool to inform the district about the appropriateness of our curriculum.  This confidence helps teachers create formative assessments that help drive and inform instruction at the classroom and student level on a day to day basis.  We strive to develop a balanced assessment system that we are confident informs how students respond to instruction, informs instructional changes, and validates the curricular outcomes and our progressions–all of which are important to better serve the teaching and learning of our students.

Final Thoughts

Don’t underestimate the need to collaborative develop a common language, common vision, and common process.  When you have these pieces in place, don’t be inflexible to adapting the process to serve the common vision.  Your teams do not have to do everything the same, but as long as they understand the language, agree on the vision, understand the general process they will create excellent curriculum, instruction, and assessments that support and focus on the teaching and learning of students–and that is exactly what we want.

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Charleston Educator Symposium Presentations

June 9, 2013 Leave a comment

PowerPoint presentations from Charleston Educator Symposium June 12-13

CES Assessment for Learning

CES Learning Targets

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Assessment as Guide not Judge

July 24, 2012 1 Comment

Despite the increase in summative assessments of learning, little has changed in how students perform on national and state assessments. Current classroom instruction has not led to large gains in learning as measured by these assessments. The research has suggested that the added pressure of large-scale accountability assessments has pressured teachers and schools to provide test preparation for students, not genuine critical learning. Research has shown that teachers who used formative assessments to provide specific and timely feedback to their students have had a greater impact on their students’ academic achievement. Students who were provided with such feedback became more attentive and involved in the learning process and began to see the assessment process as a tool to help foster growth. Meta-analyses and early studies have supported, with large amounts of evidence, that using formative assessment in the classroom had a large impact on student academic achievement—especially for those students who were perennial low achievers (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2004; Black & Wiliam, 1998b; Crooks, 1988; Herman, Choi, National Center for Research on Evaluation, & Student, 2008; Kirton, Hallam, Peffers, Robertson, & Stobart, 2007; Leahy et al., 2005). Students tended to learn more and achieve at a higher level when they responded to assessment results by knowing where they were on the path to success, where they were headed, and what they needed to do to reach that accomplishment. The increased use of formative assessment attributes by the classroom teacher on a daily basis has shown a positive impact on students’ affect toward the learning and assessing process.
The current practice of high-stakes testing given once a year to students to determine the performance that a school or district is making towards adequate yearly progress does little to improve the learning of students. These state-mandated assessments do nothing to provide information to those who need data to inform instructional decisions. The results are often reported 6 months later when those students have finished the school year and are now learning at another grade. The users of that information are preparing to teach students that were probably assessed the previous year on a different level of standards. For assessment data to impact student learning, it must provide immediate, specific feedback to the decision makers (Black & Wiliam, 1998b). The most important users of assessment data are the student and the teacher. This type of large-scale testing does not provide either of those individuals with the necessary information in a manner that will have a useful impact on student learning. For assessments to have an impact on student learning, the results need to provide immediate, specific feedback to the learner and the teacher to inform instructional decisions by the teacher and learning decisions by the student (Stiggins & Chappuis, 2005). Assessments that inform the teacher and student as to where the class or individual student is on the learning continuum and where the class or student need to progress have a positive impact on student learning when they are used during the process of learning—not 6 months later, when learning has stopped (Reeves, 2007). The most important response to the information gained from assessments is the psychological response of the student. Large gains in student learning have occurred when the student received assessment information that helped identify where he or she was and where he or she needed to go on the learning continuum and that student responded to the information with the decision to keep trying (Stiggins & Chappuis, 2008). Ultimately it is the student’s reaction and choice to learn–we must not leave the student out of that equation!

Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B., & Wiliam, D. (2004). Working inside the black box: Assessment for learning in the classroom. Phi Delta Kappan, 86(1).

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998b). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-144.

Crooks, T. J. (1988). The impact of classroom evaluation practices on students. Review of Educational Research, 58(4), 438-481.

Herman, J. L., Choi, K., National Center for Research on Evaluation, S., & Student, T. (2008). Formative assessment and the improvement of middle school science learning: The role of teacher accuracy. CRESST Report 740: National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST).

Leahy, S., Lyon, C., Thompson, M., & Wiliam, D. (2005). Classroom assessment: Minute by minute, day by day. Educational Leadership, 63(3), 18-24.

Kirton, A., Hallam, S., Peffers, J., Robertson, P., & Stobart, G. (2007). Revolution, evolution or a trojan horse? Piloting assessment for learning in some Scottish primary schools. British Educational Research Journal, 33(4), 605-627.

Reeves, D. (Ed.) (2007). Ahead of the curve: The power of assessment to transform teaching and learning. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

Stiggins, R., & Chappuis, J. (2008). Enhancing student learning. District Administration, 44(1), 42-44.

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Failure can be a Powerful Learning Tool

June 4, 2012 Leave a comment

Failure is not a bad “F” word.

We greatly underestimate the value of failure in education.  First, let me explain that I was not the type of teacher to coddle or turn every wrong answer into a “sorta”  or “almost” correct answer.  I saw the value in letting my students know that their answers were correct or incorrect.  Keep in mind, that for the most part, this type of feedback is generally used for  knowledge or factual level information.  As an English teacher, I did not live in that level extensively.  Our classes strove to reach the level of critical thought.  At this level, the feedback may resemble, “I disagree with you, convince me.”  My point is that I never felt compelled to massage an incorrect knowledge or factual answer into a “sorta” correct answer, nor would I accept a general claim from a student without support.

I saw the value in challenging the student to learn from their incorrect answers and failed attempts.  Please don’t think I am mean.  I was genuine in my desire for my students to learn to excel.  I encouraged taking risks; a high level of failure is connected with risk taking.  If you failed, it meant a few things to mean.  First, you tried something that you were not confident you would be successful the first time.  Second, it would provide you with a tremendous amount of quality feedback from me or from your own experience.  I was proud of my students who “risked learning.”

Kids are great at reading adults.  They can see fake or disingenuous comments.  We can do a great deal of harm by providing children with a false sense of accomplishment.  Why would a child strive to do better if their moderate effort was superfluously flaunted.  Don’t be mean–be accurate.  Praise effort and growth, but be accurate about their product.  We should strive to teach students how to use specific and timely feedback to continue to grow.

The best feedback comes from addressing the areas in which a student struggles or fails.  This is a great learning tool.  To illustrate with a non academic example, my oldest son has been wanting to throw a spiral and catch a pass.  In my family, soccer is the sport of choice–football is out of his comfort zone.  So, we have been playing catch in the yard with a soft, under inflated child’s football.  He was not good at catching or throwing a spiral.  In fact he hardly ever caught the ball and rarely was able to throw it back in anything that resembled a football.  My son is 9.  I did not expect him to throw or catch a football the first, second, or even third time we played catch.  When he dropped the ball, I would praise his effort and occasionally point out one area to work on, such as “use your hands and not your body to catch.”  It did not require me to point out his failed attempt–the ball bouncing on the ground was obvious.  I did not give him false or disingenuous praise either.  I explained what catching and throwing a football looked like, modeled it for him, and coached him by giving him specific feedback, but basically, I just provided him with large amounts of time and practice to try it, make mistakes, and learn without fear of my judgement.  I am proud that he now can catch a pretty well zipped ball and returns it with a nicer looking spiral than I ever was able to throw.  Each time he dropped a pass or threw a wild ball, he learned.  he learned more from his failures than from my coaching.  After the initial modeling, I didn’t need to even speak while we played and he continued to learn.  The best part was that I was enjoying the time playing catch with my son.

How did we learn as children?  We made hundreds of attempts before we achieved success.  When do we give our students these opportunities to fail in safety.  Isn’t school the best place to try new things and fail?  How can students learn without failure?  Schools should provide opportunities for students to take risks for understanding and growth without the fear of judgement.  We need to provide them a culture that values the growth that comes from failure.  The fear of accountability through test scores has encouraged schools to value correct answers over growth and risk taking.  However, we do know that students will learn more through challenges and failures along the way.  This form of actual learning cannot always be measured through a standardized test.  Do we want children who know the correct answers for a test, or do we want children who know how to learn from mistakes and failures?  What is our actual mission as educators?

I do not want to teach children to find the correct answer; we need children that can risk, fail, learn, and ultimately succeed.

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Grades–A Different Viewpoint

May 24, 2012 Leave a comment

So, I have debated as to what topic would be my first entry into this new blogging endeavor.  Following  my own past practices, I am about to begin with a topic that all the experts agree should not be the first topic in any discussion–grades.

Grades have been a topic of much heated debate for many years.  I have contributed to that debate ferociously over the past years.  I am sure I will add more to that debate in later entries, but for now, I simply want to share a new lens to consider grading practices.

Several weeks ago, I was having dinner with friends who are also in education.  The topic of grading came up–not by me.  I have made many mistakes in my life and have learned that discussing work while having dinner can ruin a perfectly good meal–especially if you are unsure of you companions’ stance.  Alas, I was drawn quickly into the conversation.  I did my best to remain diplomatic; for those who know me personally, you understand how difficult that may have been.

As we continued to agree, disagree, and even laugh about grades in public school and university, a novel idea hit me–how would educators change their grading practices if they were homeschooling their own child.  Now granted, I realize this argument may have more staying power for those who have children, but hear me out.  How would you “grade” a child’s performance if you were homeschooling them?  I think the homeschooling crowd gets this right.  The intent, for the most part, of homeschooling parents is to help their children learn.  They are not concerned with the number of points earned divided by the total number of possible points.  The focus is on growth and development in academic (and many other) areas.  Some parents try to mimic the public school experience, but in a condensed fashion.  Perhaps, public school can learn a little bit from mimicking the grading stance homeschooling parents take.

What we do know is that both groups intend to teach children and help them grow and develop as learners.  Grades have their place.  Grades should be an accurate reflection of where a child is on the learning continuum.  I just don’t think the letter “A” on a report card or even an assignment accomplishes that.  For the struggling student, inappropriate grading practices may do more to discourage learning than promote it.

I think it is time that we begin to seriously question our grading practices in public education.  Are we  providing accurate descriptions of the skills and concepts our students have mastered (summative assessment)?  Do we provide feedback to students about where they are on the learning continuum along the way (formative assessment)?  Do we change our instruction based on the evidence of learning we collect?

As someone once told me at a conference, “grading is the punishment for not teaching.”

Shift in philosophy

Filed under Grading Practices