On Unit Design and Course Themes

After another meeting to determine the course architecture and content gathering strategies we discussed the need for a more formal template for units (not sure yet if that will also be required for individual lessons). The group decided to incorporate some of the Backwards Design principles into the unit Plan. Each unit now has a page with the same questions that will guide it.

Step One: What are the desired learning results of this unit? (benchmarks that address content)

Step Two: What essential question(s) will anchor students to learning? (one or more that summarize benchmark)
Step Three: What skills are needed to achieve desired results (nuts and bolts teaching)? (civic skills: evaluate arguments, etc. evident in the benchmarks)
Step Four: What is acceptable evidence to show desired results?
Step Five: What is the sequence of activities, learning experiences, etc. that will lead to desired results (the plan)?

The document with more specifics can be found here.

Teachers will meet next week to finalize these unit plans and begin writing the lessons and assessments after that. Ideally, we will have a series of lessons with formative assessments built in that will largely be auto-graded by Moodle or will include Lesson Modules which will direct students through the information and then have one or two larger assessments at the end where the student will produce something to demonstrate that the benchmarks have been left.

In terms of gathering/sharing materials we are using Dropbox for stuff and a Google Spreadsheet for links. Each unit has its own sheet with columns for a title and description as well as other notes.

There was also discussion about including a course theme or some guiding principles that might help for overall consistency throughout as different people will be writing different sections.

There should be more updates now as the writing starts in June.

MN Studies: The Gathering

Since there can be only one (course), we're now entering the content gathering portion of our course. The course glossary, while it can be started now, will likely evolve over time. What we've found through other curriculum development initiatives where the writers work mostly asynchronously is that typically the bulk of the work takes place in June. For many reasons this is teachers' preferred month for this kind of work. We've tried to reflect that in the schedule and expectations. There may not be many updates until late May, but what is happening now is that we are contacting various sources about content we can use; teachers are gathering their own materials; resources and materials are being gathered from various sources and put into Moodle and Dropbox for the writers to use once we're ready.

The only other thing going on now is that particular users are being assigned to topic areas. We will have one person responsible for each topic and a secondary person tasked with supporting its development.

Estimated Completion: 5%

Creating the Course Framework

Yesterday we had our first meeting with a group of teachers who are planning the framework of the course. We are categorizing our writers into Architects to provide the framework, determine vocabulary and consider assessments; Builders who will write the content and assessments; Framers who will work on academic standards alignment and Finishers who will edit content for consistency, voice and vocabulary.

We accomplished the overall organization of the course by setting up the Historical academic standards chronologically and then supplemented those units with benchmarks from the areas of Geography, Civics and Economics. This work actually went pretty quickly. As the group identified the topics for each benchmark, I created labels in Moodle to place the topic and the benchmark identifying number. Within a few hours we had the entire course mapped out. The next steps are to start planning for a course glossary and start gathering materials for the builders who will start writing the content for the course in early June.

Welcome, this blog is going to document the process of developing curriculum collaboratively in MN (and hopefully beyond).

Here's some background info:

About 2 years ago I worked on a grant project that facilitated the creation of over 1,000 hours of instructional content in that was put into Moodle and shared via my site MoodleShare. I worked to train and support over 140 teachers from all parts of MN. Based on that work my district (287) realized what might be accomplished with other curriculum development partnerships. We can provide teachers with resources for training and support and a mechanism with which they can use and share their work with others.

That project opened up a lot of possibilities and led to our Moodle Curriculum Hub which our district's teachers can access and publish work to.

Minnesota is in the process of transitioning to new state academic standards in multiple subject areas.  The Social Studies standards is one area that is changing. Not only have the standards changed, but the year in which MN History (now MN Studies) is taught has also changed. This means that every district in the state is faced with a choice about how they are going to provide that curriculum to their students. It was the perfect catalyst to work on building a course together. After discussing the potential of new web tools and Moodle it was decided by a group of Curriculum Specialists facilitated by District 287 that we should go ahead with creating our own MN Studies course which could be owned and shared by the districts. Each district would put in resources in terms of funding and teachers to help design the content.

We had our first meeting with teachers/designers at the end of March and I'll be documenting the process and progress here.

Our current plan is to pilot the course in the 2012-2013 school year to be implemented in 2013-2014 when the new standards are required. There are also plans to translate the year-long course into Mandarin, French and Spanish.

Updates to follow...