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Tag: curriculum review

Curriculum Collaboration Process- A New Take

How does your school create and review the curriculum? Who participates? What are their roles? What are the protocols for the meetings? Suppose you have followed this blog, the Shifting Our Schools podcast, or the Ed Tech Co-Op podcast (restarting in a month). In that case, you probably say, “there goes David again talking about collaboration and curriculum…”. Yes, here I go again because I have landed at a school where our principal is all over using the curriculum collaboration process, among many other structures and systems, to shift our school. 🙂

Our principal Dr. Dan Keller is now developing the guidelines for how to review units of study. Over the past few years, he had the teachers create four transdisciplinary, concept-based “super units” per grade level. A significant shift has occurred, so now it is time to polish the process and fill in where there are some gaps.

 See below for the guidelines used at the Saigon South International School to create a new curriculum.

If you are new to this blog, I have posted the following resources on curriculum development over the years. There are several Ed Tech Co-Op shows on this topic as well.


Saigon South International School ES Curriculum Development System

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Curriculum Mapping Tool: How to Create a Collaborative and Systematic Process for Curriculum Development and Review

This is the fifth post about how to develop a curriculum review system in one’s school. It deals with where your school stands using a curriculum mapping tool to support the curriculum review process. As the first post on the big picture, these are questions for community members to work through before designing their system. These posts support an article my wife Margaret and I have coming out in the December/January 2008 Learning and Leading with Technology magazine.

1) How does your school currently document and later archive your curriculum?

2) How do you organize your units in timeline, size, importance, etc.?

3) If you have an online curriculum mapping tool, what are its strengths and weaknesses? What barriers are there to using it?

4) If you don’t have a mapping tool, what are your school’s barriers to purchasing or creating one?

5) How does or doesn’t this tool connect to what is happening in the classrooms?

6) How does it connect to your online course management tool?

7) What does the template for all of your units look like?

8) How is your unit planning template functional in guiding input to lead to output/action?

9) How does it support your school’s teaching and learning beliefs (i.e., mission statement, strategic plan)?

What other questions (and answers) come to mind?

The Big Picture: How to Create a Collaborative and Systematic Process for Curriculum Development and Review

What a mouthful for a post title. 

I have spent my years as an instructional technologist working through the curriculum development and review process to help shift my schools toward becoming what we call School 2.0. We constructed a workable system at my last school that made a difference in how and what we taught in our classrooms.

We are now developing a curriculum development system at my current school that will involve working with our school culture and unique needs. Hsinchu International School is very different than the huge school I worked at before. We will use questions around specific categories to help us through this creation process. The questions come from a workshop I developed to help guide school communities to either refine their current curriculum review system or start a new one. I will be sharing these categories and questions in a series of posts.

This is the first one, covering the big picture when school-wide leaders come together to start the conversation.

1) What would be an effective way to manage school-wide subject area meetings to review the standards/benchmarks for scope/sequencing (i.e., facilitation, time of year, one or several meetings by division, etc.)?

2) How do discussions take place about the big picture and developing ownership of the curriculum?

3) Who oversees this process of creating this process?

4) Who will be the leaders in each division to support and gain support for this effort?

5) Who would be involved in curriculum development in each division? What would be their roles? Is there a place for students and parents at some point in the curriculum review process?

6) How would you ensure follow-through on action items (to-do’s) as you create your curriculum development system?

7) What big-picture topics (i.e., each school year’s goals, student learning results, differentiation, etc.) would you want to integrate into your curriculum besides aligning standards and benchmarks?

8) What are your priorities in refining your current curriculum review system (or starting one from scratch)? In other words, how much can you take on and still be effective in this process?

9) What ultimately do you want your curriculum to do?

10) How will you provide your participants the time and coaching to learn the skills needed to develop the curriculum?

11) How will you get “buy in” from your participants to be curriculum designers?

12) How will you get buy-in from all of your educators to actively use the curriculum?

13) How do you share the curriculum? To whom?

14) What other questions (and answers) come to mind?

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