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

2) How do you organize your units as 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 the barriers for your school in either 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?

How is your unit planning template functional in guiding input to then 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?

I have spent my years as an instructional technologist working through the curriculum development and review process to help shift my schools towards becoming what we call School 2.0. We were able to construct a workable system at my last school that really 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 very large school I worked at before. We will be using a series of 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 to start a new one. I will be sharing these categories and questions in a series of posts.

This is the first one and it covers 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 overseas this process of creating this process?

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

5) Who would be involved in curriculum development in each division? What would be their roles? Is there a place for students and/or 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 other than alignment of standards and benchmarks?

What are your priorities in either refining your current curriculum review system (or in 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 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?