Roll Into the New Year With Your Best Curriculum Yet
The new year is here, so let’s make sure you’re feeling awesome about how you’re kicking off your curriculum choices from January to June! Pro Tip: You can also do this thinking this spring. Stay tuned for more - we’ll keep you ahead of the curve in curriculum planning this spring!
The key to success is a well-thought-out plan.
A well-designed plan will help keep you organized throughout the year, as well as encourage the use of engaging and exciting material for students to interact with on a regular basis.
Who doesn’t love that?!
Below, you’ll find my 5-step plan for building a framework for a jam-packed, full-of-learning, stellar year for both YOU and your students.
You’ll need a “Year-at-a-Glance” calendar to help visualize the start and end dates (and everything in between) in one place
Are you ready to mark it up? I’m talking colorful markers.
This calendar will become your curriculum roadmap on which you can detail all of your cycles of study, what text types you plan to teach, genres, and skill sets within each cycle of study.
Indicate any non-teaching days
Use the calendar your district provides and mark any important days on your year-at-a-glance calendar.
Focus on marking any days that you are not going to be able to teach. I like to mark them with a black ‘X’ (and save the colors for the different teaching cycles).
These days could be a myriad of reasons – “pupil-free” days, assemblies, holidays, parent-teacher conferences, events – any day that you cannot fit teaching in. You’ll be able to spot the patterns emerging on your calendar pretty quickly by doing this.
Identify and group consecutive teaching days into cycles of study
Ideally, you’re looking for 15-20 consecutive days to segment into teaching cycles. 15-20 days is the typical amount of time you’ll be able to move through a cycle of study successfully without sacrificing interest level or understanding. It’s not SO long that it’ll start to feel dry and cumbersome for you or for your students.
This is an efficient way to keep the curriculum fresh and lively for you and students (and dare I say fun?). It offers a lot of opportunities for students to think through various text types and genre studies.
A common pattern I’ve noticed in schools is that the best of intentions were set by teachers in their curriculum design. We noticed the need to engineer modifications, accommodations, and interventions to ensure student success. But when we looked at the “Year-at-a-Glance” we created, we found that our dates were off, so we reflected.
We realized the curriculum was being modified by adding more days to the study, rather than creating differentiated tools for students, causing major congestion in our curriculum.
If we lag as instructors at the beginning of the year, then we run out of time by the end of the year and may miss a cycle of study that really ignites a fire in kids’ bellies.
I live for that spark, and I’m sure you do, too. Not to mention, in testing grades, a jammed-up curriculum calendar often results in cramming in genre studies before the test. A rushed curriculum is not ideal for anyone - adults or students alike.
Instead, think through cycles of study ahead of time. Pick the start and end dates. Stick to them.
As you think through start and end dates, if you happen to be a testing grade, consider incorporating days into your “Year-at-a-Glance” for Test Prep Boot Camps. Choose a sequence of days after each cycle of study to focus on test prep and mark it on the calendar in a bright color.
This way, you’re tucking in test prep throughout the year in ways that support students in studying and understanding how the test works by creating low anxiety-producing contexts.
Pro Tip: Check in on your mindset on test-taking. Let’s avoid vilifying it. (I’m personally not a fan of tests, but I do think accountability is important. My job is to set students up to think through opportunities to show what they know. Having a negative or anxious mindset around testing doesn’t help set the tone of curiosity and possibilities.)
Let's think through test-taking preparation and teaching in a way that encourages studying by teaching students how what they’re currently reading or writing transfers to a test-taking scenario.
Stay tuned for a series on test-taking on the blog soon!
Determine the focus for each cycle of study
Now for the really fun stuff!
Now that you’ve thought about when…it’s time to start thinking of what to teach. Plug in the content of the curriculum in each cycle of study you blocked out on the calendar.
Need a place to start? I find it helpful to think through the big picture first in both reading and writing. I do this by thinking about text types. When it comes to text types in reading, I think about fiction and nonfiction and alternating those across the year. Similarly, for text types in writing, I think about narrative and expository and alternating those across the year as well.
With reading, text types fall into two major categories: fiction and nonfiction. It is important to organize your teaching cycles around text types and genres rather than skills. It will keep the work engaging and interesting throughout the year and provide countless opportunities for students to approach these concepts differently.
The sky's the limit! Do you like reading newspaper articles? Or maybe biographies? If you’re an ELA Middle School teacher, maybe you’ll pair up with a science teacher and focus on writing about experiments.
See what I mean? You can give students the skills to apply their learning (fiction or nonfiction, narrative or expository) to all sorts of different experiences.
When engineering a curriculum, think of it for your personal classroom, your grade level team or department, or on a school-wide framework. When thinking about the school-wide curriculum, what if we thought about grade levels being stacked in a way that offers learning opportunities and experiences for students that spirals and builds upon itself?
Maybe each grade has a rite of passage study. Annually, you’re approaching these big curriculum content buckets, fiction and nonfiction, narrative and expository.
How you tackle them as a teaching staff across multiple grade levels is important when designing a student-centered curriculum. This way, we set ourselves up to be responsive and teach the students in our classrooms from year to year, rather than simply cover the curriculum handed to us by someone who may not fully understand the community we are creating.
Maybe grade 3 gets to study characters by reading fictional series, grade 4 in historical fiction, and grade 5 in fantasy fiction; the options are endless and it provides a great opportunity to work with colleagues across multiple grades.
Similarly for writing, you have two main categories: narrative and expository text types. By thinking vertically and working with colleagues across other grade levels, you’ll be able to structure lesson plans and provide diverse opportunities for students to approach their learning experiences. For example, one grade can approach informational expository writing through “how-to” writing cycles of study, while others can write personal essays.
By mapping your year with these large “buckets,” you drive your instruction to be consistently fresh and interesting.
Book-end the year with a launch and a wrap up centered around student identity
Who doesn’t love a good launch or wrap party?
Start and end the year with a celebration of personal development, growth, and identity. How you start and end your year is equally as important as what you do in between. Think about these timeframes as non-academic cycles of study. Yes, you read that right. Teach students to think through and reflect on their identity, growth, goals, and emotional intelligence.
The start of the year is a great time to build routines and rituals with students and focus on building community and personal development goals. Set students up to think about their mindset, who they are as a human, and who they want to be as a reader, writer, and thinker.
Similarly, during the year-end wrap-up, take the time to reflect on the year and look ahead to the next. What are their goals for the summer? How can they feel confident going into a new school year and take what they've created and tried out along with them in their next class? It’s amazing to see and hear how their incredible brains absorbed and stored the information from the year.
Pro Tip: This could also be a great time to source feedback from the class community as you look ahead to the next year.
Ask students questions about which cycles of study were the most engaging. Remember to ask why. Perhaps you spend the last round of individualized conferring with each student to listen to their thoughts or provide a way for students to jot down their feedback so that you can use this valuable information in your decisions throughout the year, and in years to come.
I want you (and students) to feel confident and supported throughout the whole year. Taking the time to knock out these curriculum planning steps is a great course of action to make that happen. There is so much fun to be had and learning to be done so take the time to build those opportunities into your calendar and notice how both you and students flourish!
