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Curriculum Planning Strategies
What kind of curriculum user or developer are you?
- Do you build your lessons from scratch?
- Do you use published curriculum as it is written?
- Do you adapt others' curriculum for your own use?
Like many teachers, you might answer that you do a little of all these things, depending on the circumstances, your available resources, your students, and the learning goals you need to reach. In an environment of accountability, building new units from scratch is challenging because of time and risks. Yet teachers find many rewards in well-crafted project-based units, their students are more actively engaged and maintain interest in their learning.
Ideas Worth Borrowing
When you turn to the Internet to find teaching ideas, you have to bring an extra amount of critical awareness to the task. A simply query on an education theme can return a landfill of material, some of it good, a lot of it bad. Hidden among the incomplete or unworthy projects, broken links and pop-up ads are the few "ideas worth borrowing" you set out to find.
What criteria do you use to evaluate and select online material? What is your "bottom line" for whether you will use an idea? The unit plans in the collection present projects that are useful, adaptable "ideas worth borrowing".
- Use unit plans as written. Each unit plan is a well-developed guide for implementation, offering a detailed description of the entire instructional cycle, from introduction to assessment. Supporting teaching materials such as outlines, student work samples, and rubrics supplement the unit and help express its intent and processes.
- Adapt a plan. Unit plans are built for flexible use. Resources that support the plan, such as work samples and rubrics, are presented in original file formats so teachers can download and modify them for their own purposes. If a teacher finds a worthwhile unit plan but wants to adapt it for a different grade or purpose, she can open the original source files and modify them to meet her needs.
- Use as models for your own planning. The unit plans are a model for good planning and technology integration. They illustrate important processes teachers can follow during their own planning.
- Start with learning objectives
- Frame the unit and focus students' attention with guiding questions
- Plan assessment that puts the objectives in operational terms, describing what students must do or create to show evidence of understanding
- Build instructional activities and plan assignments that address the objectives
- Make work samples that show what students can to when they understand the concepts addressed by the objectives
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