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Standard 9

Standard 9

The Seattle Pacific University Standards for Teacher Leadership Standard 9 states teacher leaders “evaluate and use effective curriculum design”.  Throughout my experiences both in my teaching position and through pieces of the courses I have taken in this program, I have had opportunities to practice evaluating and using effective curriculum design.  Within the course “survey of instructional strategies”, we were provided with many opportunities to practice and teach research based strategies that can then be used as guidelines within curriculum development and design.  Through my teaching position, I have also been given opportunities to sharpen my skills in this area such as designing a curriculum map for my team and being a part of a STEM curriculum adoption committee.

Prior to entering the teacher leadership program, I did feel competent in creating and evaluating effective curriculum design.  When I started my first teaching job in Washington State, I was actually shocked by the full curriculum already planned out and given to teachers in my district.  My teacher education program in Michigan focused heavily on creating our own effective, standards based curriculum, because many districts in the state did not have rich and full curriculums offered.  I think this is the best way to learn, because until you know how to design cohesive, standards based units and evaluate it using research based practices, how do you know pre-made curriculum is really effective?  
I used this as an opportunity to demonstrate something that I could bring to my team, even though I was a beginning teacher.  Many of our teachers felt overwhelmed by the amount of curriculum to get through in some areas, and then I noticed we were really lacking in current and updated curriculum in other areas.  I felt like part of the reason the team was overwhelmed was because they didn’t have a clear or cohesive curriculum map. (Linked here) you can see the curriculum map that was made for our team.  I felt it was important for us to have something we could hang up and visually see daily. It was important to me to have something where we could look at a unit and visually see how long it was going to take.  Without having a clear understanding of how much time we have in our units or what topics will be coming up next, the instruction we would deliver wouldn’t be the most effective it could be. Moving forward with this, I would like to continue my research to make our curriculum mapping more effective.  The ASCD article “curriculum mapping” states that while planning that “what” and the “when” is important, good curriculum mapping also includes the “how” (Burns, 2001). Before I take on the role of team leader next year, I plan on digging deeper into this and making a plan to both keep a simple curriculum map that can be posted and glanced at, but then also have it online and linkable to more detailed instructions.    
The “Survey of Instructional Strategies” course also helped with curriculum design because it allowed me to look for exceptional, research based strategies within curriculum already provided for us.  When you are fortunate to have an abundance of curriculum provided to you, you often have to pick and choose lessons due to time constraints. This course gave me a better understanding of what good instructional strategies looked like such as opportunities of collaborative learning, nonlinguistic representations, communication of learning targets, effective reading strategies, and research based graphic organizers (Hyginus et.al., 2018).  It also helped with knowing what strategies would be best to use with specific types of lessons. Gaining this knowledge, I was able to weed out ineffective lessons given to us in curriculum. I was also able to enhance units that didn’t have as many effective strategies embedded in them. (Here) is an example of a lesson from a science unit that was outdated and didn’t have effective strategies within the lessons. I was able to use what I learned from the instructional strategies course to change it while still teaching the same content.  
The final experience that has increased my knowledge of evaluating effective curriculum is being a member of our districts STEM adoption committee.  Here, I was able dig into state standards, pulling them apart and identifying “look fors” in curriculum. I learned even more the importance of aligning our philosophy and teaching practice beliefs with current state adopted standards.  We used this to allow alignment to be a priority in our future decision making, something that is recommended widely when discussing a new curriculum adoption (edreports) I was able to also evaluate various science curriculums to look for effective, research based pedagogy and provide feedback and suggestions on each.  I look forward to my future experiences with this committee as we move onto engaging staff members in our final selections, further evaluation by piloting resources and comparing them to best practice, and training teachers in new implementation of a curriculum.



References:
3 Resources for Successful Curriculum Adoption. (n.d.). Retrieved from

Burns, R. C. (n.d.). Curriculum Mapping. Retrieved from              p://www.ascd.org/publications/curriculum-handbook/421/chapters/Overview.aspx
Hyginus, Arun, Brittani, Imran, S., Hamood, Hamood, & Fekara. (2018, February 28). 7 Effective
Teaching Strategies For The Classroom. Retrieved from
https://www.quizalize.com/blog/2018/02/23/teaching-strategies/

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