B. Supplementing Curriculum
As teachers, we are only as effective as how we plan. My fundamental belief is that the best way we can respect our students is to prepare a curriculum that honors their time by challenging them, provides them fun learning experiences, focuses on transferable knowledge, and keeps their growth as the primary target.
Focusing on Transferable Knowledge
Students need to practice being lifelong learners, and there is no better way than applying what they learn in one class to another class. This cross-curricular focus helps students value knowledge and discover the utility of inquiry. As teachers, we need to focus on transferable knowledge. That do that, we need to establish the questions that push students forward, whether they be called inquiry statements, essential questions, or driving questions. Here is an example of a unit plan that focuses on transferable knowledge that I wrote during a training for MYP Individuals and Societies (Cat. 1).
Making Curriculum Maps
The first step I take when I teach a course is to research the expectations of a course, as well as what resources might be used. When mapping out the possible resources for a course, I find it most useful to look at what the school, district, and textbook publisher suggests for each unit of study. The intersections of the resource recommendations can serve as a useful menu for all the members of a department. From that point, I love to get specific and pick the very best texts, videos, and resources for student engagement and academic rigor. This requires an extra layer of planning resources in detailed unit maps.
Undertaking Department Reading List
In 2016, I also undertook the task to create a resource menu of all the books that were available to the Middle School's Language Arts department. The first step was to research all the book lists from years past and determine what resources existed physically and what resources were only written. The second step was to research what each grade level taught as a whole class text, small group text, or independent reading so we could vertically align our resources. Then, I determined genres, researched Lexiles, and wrote summaries for each book so we could all have a good idea of which books were good fits for our students. The result was creating a comprehensive department reading list.
Planning Course Ideas
In 2017, I presented ideas for the next year's Humanities course. My goal was to create some guiding documents for designing an approach to blending the content of Language Arts and Social Studies into a cohesive Middle Grade Humanities experience for the students that made learning World History attainable and fun.
Curating Resource Menus
In the digital world, we often lose track of files, documents, and internet links. In 2016, When I joined the Social Studies department at Ruamrudee, I started a project to create a menu of all our Social Studies digital resources. They were scattered in various places, so my goal was to create a central document where we could find any resource with only a click or two. There are plenty of other topics to include in this menu, so hopefully, it will continue to grow to also list physical resources, including class sets of high-interest history books. This work has led me to developing a much larger and more ambitious version as an ongoing passion project.
