Three and a half years in the life... leading a curriculum team

I recently resigned from a position I have loved for the last three and a half years--Humanities 10 Curriculum Team Leader (CTL). I'll still be on the team; I just won't be leading it. Choosing to step down was difficult. Before the work I've done with the team gets too far in the rearview mirror, I wanted to capture the arc of my experience here.

When the two Humanities Department Chairs offered me the opportunity to step in as Humanities 10 CTL, I had no idea how central that role would become to my work or how many opportunities it would afford me to work with colleagues all across campus. In the way that Culver’s mission commits to “developing and nurturing the whole individual,” my role as CTL and work nurtured me—it became an opportunity to develop the curriculum and personnel of the department and, by extension, to work with adults across the school. In turn, I experienced incredible personal and professional growth.

For a long while, my favorite meeting of the month was with my Chairs. Together, they mentored me into the CTL position, helped me make several course corrections along the way, advised me on personnel and programming questions, rooted me deeply in the foundational principles of the department’s work, and then gave me wings to develop the tenth grade curriculum and team. They encouraged collaboration among the members of the Leadership Team (the Chairs plus the other level CTLs), and we made strides towards vertical alignment in the department for a more cohesive department curriculum. They set a tone of respect and professionalism, and they could both be trusted.

The revision of the “What is Humanities?” document (one of the foundational department documents) by the 2014-2015 Leadership Team started on a Friday night in April of 2015. The 9th grade CTL and I had a meeting about some Leadership Team work, and that conversation fueled a Friday night revision frenzy on my part that then led to a series of email messages and LT conversations about curriculum design (and revision of the document). What a team that was.

The work of the LT in 2015 was in concert with the development of the tenth grade curriculum.  In 2013, when I first came back to Culver, I was handed a small Amazon box of five books. While the level's curriculum clearly didn't begin with my arrival, I felt I needed to find more direction than what I had in that box. The Writing Program (in its most boiled down form, a common writing assessment given to the entire tenth grade) was in its infancy, and the tenth grade team had no idea what we were doing in assessment design; it was a year of building the bridge as we crossed it with our students in tow. For some assessments, we were modifying the rubric the day before; for others, we were still modifying the test itself the day before (despite our collective understanding of the importance of backwards design).

February 6, 2015 was my first level meeting as CTL. The Chairs had given me three clear targets that I shared with the Humanities 10 Team at that meeting:
• Writing Program 2.0—aligning assessments to reflect the skills and content of the course
• Humanities Units—building units based in a common text/context
• Grading Course Goals

And that day we started moving beyond just the “texts” to actual “units of study.” At the time, we didn’t even have a name for the units—just the titles of the central texts. Our first day of work on a unit articulation started with this question about our Term 3 text and the team’s answers:

The Swallows of Kabul—At the end of a unit of study based in the text of The Swallows of Kabul, what are the key understandings to come from that unit for our students?
• environment and its impact on the characters of the novel
• geography—how to learn about geography
• how people respond to their environment
• isolation—physical and metaphysical, effects on sense of self
• various forms of violence
• Islam—what it is and what it isn’t, define terms of extremism and fundamentalism
• Islam/elements of Islam
• Taliban—what allowed it to come into power
• fundamentalism versus devotion
• metaphor (and other literary devices) and how they function within the work and beyond the work (what are the stories of the characters in the book a metaphor for?)

This was the beginning of a three-and-a-half year journey of Humanities curriculum development for the tenth grade team. Because we all had books, and we had all been teaching books, we started with the books. But we had a lot of work to do to articulate how each unit would contribute to our students’ understanding of what it means “to be persons, understood holistically, and to live human lives governed by human ends” (WiH 1.0).

As the Hum 10 team changed each year, I continued to work with each new team to develop the unit articulations. We went from that first fuzzy list of concepts to well-defined understandings that help students understand the relationship between text and context. We discussed the unit articulations before we taught the units, then we met again at the end of a unit of study to revise them. We vetted supplementary sources for each unit in an effort to expose students to a variety of types of texts within a unit (WiH) and to prompt a deeper dive into the context for each central text. We left space for individual teacher experimentation and autonomy. We became the level that was teaching students “-isms”—imperialism, cosmopolitanism, fundamentalism, globalism.

The Writing Program
As we developed the unit articulations to ensure that we were teaching Humanities units, I also pushed the level to design and deliver Writing Program assessments that were in congruence with the skills and content of the level. I also pushed us to develop the assessments and the accompanying rubrics prior to the terms in which we would be using them. Over the course of three years, the level went from major overhauls of the rubric ( versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0) to adjustments (versions 5.1, 5.2, 5.3) to tweaks (versions 7.0, 7.1). The rubric was meant to reflect the writing skills we were teaching in our classrooms.

When the ninth grade team made adjustments to their writing expectations, I made sure that the tenth grade team worked in concert with them so that students would experience a more coherent progression through the writing instruction at the levels. When the eleventh grade team made the shift to American Studies with APLAC, the tenth grade team modified the language of the rubric to more closely reflect the language of theirs. I pushed the Leadership Team to have conversations about the 11th grade writing targets so that the work at the lower levels would support students’ transition to the rigorous curriculum of the eleventh grade. When new members joined the team, I onboarded them to the Hum 10 Writing Program and then listened to and incorporated their suggestions for improvement into each assessment and rubric.

We also developed the Writing Program assessments themselves. As each unit articulation was refined each term, the level chose a content focus for the end-of-term assessment that reflected what the level valued in that unit.  Then we revised or developed the assessment from that choice. We weren’t teaching to the test, we were testing what we taught. We all learned more about assessment design.

We evolved the format of the assessments and scoring. I listened to the level’s concerns about the in-class essay format of the assessments, and I developed a proposal for a multi-draft out-of-class essay (OCE) format that the team vetted, modified, and tried. When we weren’t satisfied with the first version of the OCE, we modified the process again. When teachers expressed concerns over the amount of time they were spending scoring other teachers’ essays before then spending a weekend reading and commenting on their own students’ essays, I developed a proposal for a new system of scoring that would still align with and honor the principles of the original Writing Program design while allowing teachers more time with their own students’ essays. After the tenth-grade team tried and liked the new scoring system, the ninth-grade team adopted it, too. And as we developed the assessments, we developed as teachers. Together. And all without tears (no small feat given the culture of the level early on).

Tenth Grade Reading
We also grew as readers and teachers of readers. It was apparent that we all had room to grow in our understanding of the Bard. The level started their “text talks” in the back room of Papa’s on Sunday nights in the fall of 2015. We called it “The Bard and some Brews” and some of us fumbled our way through The Merchant of Venice together while enjoying an adult beverage.  Those Sunday night text talks transitioned to optional Tuesday level talks where we read and discussed each term’s central text together. Eventually, individual level members took responsibility for a term’s talks and planned the professional development experience for their colleagues. In years when we added several new members (e.g. seven of our ten level members were new in 2017), we studied the central texts together. In years when most level members were returning, we studied the unit’s supplementary texts. During one term last year, several members prepared and shared lectures for the team. Over the years, several people have shared that those text talks were their favorite meetings of the week.

We taught Purple Hibiscus one year. And we had a horrible book called The Underdogs on our reading list (so none of us actually taught it). We briefly added Frankenstein back into the curriculum for a year. At one point we had four novels and a play. And then the level determined that four central texts would be ideal; each of the five texts we had were “of sufficient depth and merit to bear th[e] weight”(WiH) of a full term of study, and there were only four terms in a year.  While some at the level wanted to take The Merchant of Venice off the tenth grade team’s slate, The Program Chair and I knew that eliminating it would require a larger discussion in the Humanities department about the role of Shakespeare in the Humanities curriculum. Still, we took a gamble and held the conversation hoping that the level would land on Merchant as one of the four texts. It did.

Since that conversation, the tenth grade has not changed central texts. I did learn from the time that we added Frankenstein to the mix and gave teachers little time to prepare during a June Week (end of school year) discussion, that the level needed to be more careful in making major changes to the curriculum. So when members new to the level asked last year about changing texts, I engineered a June Week conversation through which the team could develop both a process/timeline for text review or selection and key characteristics of potential replacement texts and/or additional central texts. I wanted to help level members feel like they had a voice in the curriculum while also helping us all keep an eye on the guiding Humanities principles.

Essential Questions, Justice, and Rationality 
While a number of essential question combinations had been floating around the department and level for quite some time, as each unit developed, a clear common focus seemed to emerge. Our units all addressed issues related to justice in each of the societies we studied. We formalized the adoption of these essential questions for the Humanities 10 year in the Spring of 2016:

What defines a just society? What creates injustice in societies? What makes it difficult to perceive injustice? What is the role of the individual in responding to injustice?

Certainly, these essential questions directly follow the mandate of the school’s mission to “educate students for leadership and responsible citizenship.” After all our other unit articulation and Writing Program discussions, adopting these essential questions breathed new life into our teaching conversations. How would putting these essential questions in front of our students make shifts to our thinking when we taught? To students’ thinking as they wrestled with the texts and contexts?

The question, “What makes injustice so hard to perceive?” demands attention to the rationality work of Kahneman. The question of what defines a just society demands attention to the work of Mills, Bentham, Rawls, Kant, and Aristotle. We have aspirations to make our sophomores “think inquisitively, critically, and reflectively while demonstrating an understanding of “fast and slow” thinking to enhance interpretive, analytical, and evaluative approaches specific to the humanities,” and to add this layer, we have a lot of additional work to do together as a teaching team.

resign: give up, surrender, abandon, submit; relinquish
The Dean of Faculty asked me if there was some project I wanted to finish or some work that I felt I still wanted to do before I resigned my position as CTL. There are a hundred things I’d still like to do. It can’t be one thing. Being a CTL is a complex juggling job, and I’ve been keeping a lot of balls in the air for a lot of years. And as my best friend would say, “It’s not just balls. It’s a ball, an apple, a sword, a candle, a cat, a bicycle… and you are smiling while you do it.” Dropping them all and walking away in the middle of the act is painful (and promises to be a bit dull).

I’ve been on six different tenth-grade teams in the six years I’ve been in the department. One year, we had ten team members. One year, we had five. Some years, Fellows (our "interns") have been the only additions. Some years, the part-timers at the level outnumber the full-timers. To develop a curriculum while attending to the needs of the teachers at the level is a delicate balance, and I haven’t always gotten it right. But I have always worked hard to keep programming goals in mind to make the best decisions for our students, while also focusing on the colleagues in my care.

Hum 10 Curriculum Overview part 2--Unit 1--"Individual and Society--Cultural Imperialism and Colonialism"

There are a number of moving parts to any curriculum. Here's term 1 of the coming school year in a bunch of boxes. A quick walk-through so that other posts might make more sense (and holy heck, curriculum mapping is a good time!):

• We have four terms in a school year. Each of the four terms has a social justice-related theme that ties directly into the central text and the context for that central text. For term 1, we look at cultural imperialism and colonialism because Chinua Achebe's text and the context for that text (including his writings about "An Image of Africa") allow for a deep, rich dive for students and teachers. 
• The Essential Questions will remain the same over the course of the year. By keeping them the same and studying different societies over the course of the year, we hope to augment our understanding of these questions. 
• The Unit Understandings require a deep understanding of both the central text (Things Fall Apart) and the context (Nigeria, late 1800s). We've laid those out for each of the four terms of the school year.
• The Rationality Understandings build over the course of the year, as well. We're laying a foundation in the first term. It's tough to tease out what exactly we need there. We'd like to do EVERYTHING, but we need to be judicious about how we layer in information. 
• We have two different kinds of supporting texts in the curriculum. One type of text is designed to supplement the central text and augment students' understanding of the context. Here, they are labeled arts/literature/maps/architecture. The other kind of supplementary text augments the central text itself. One of the most powerful pieces in this term is Achebe's argument for why he wrote the central text. It's an incredible read.
• Finally, there are writing program targets for the term. In the lefthand box, we have the synthesis and analysis targets for instruction. In the righthand box, there are some common mechanic pieces to teach. 

The language/information in each and every box has been a four-year team effort. We've had different teachers in the seats every year, but this document has gone through a four-year evolution. Frankly, that's the only way that a map like this will work--it has to come from the people who are committed to delivering on it in their classrooms.  I'm looking forward to seeing how these pieces come together in the day-to-day work of my classroom this coming year. 

Hum 10 Curriculum Overview part 1--To what end? and Jigsawing

I work with someone (fortunately!) who regularly asks me to explain the connecting threads between the different puzzle pieces of our level's curriculum. Why does that piece go with that piece within a certain unit? Or what is the connecting thread between the first unit and the second unit within that component of the curriculum? When he asks me to articulate my thinking, we end up negotiating the language until we gain clarity about the different pieces (the essential questions, the unit understandings, the rationality understandings, and the writing curriculum) and about the relationship between them. Given the long road the 10th grade team has travelled to get to the current curriculum map, it's clear that curriculum mapping is a constant refinement challenge; what I'm about to throw out to the world is the latest (and most complete yet!) version of the Humanities 10 curriculum. My plan is to take myself (and whomever is reading this blog--you?!?) through a walk-through of the design of this curriculum to help reiterate the "whys" of its design.

To throw a little Beauty and the Beast fun into the mix: "It is with deepest pride (seriously!) and greatest pleasure that we welcome you tonight. And now we invite you to relax, let us pull up a chair, as the 10th grade proudly presents... Our curriculum map!"

Wrong picture. But this is kind of how it feels to have a curriculum map like the one we now have...

Terms 1 and 2, an overview

To what ends 1 and 2? 

There are actually three layers of "to what end" in the curriculum map above. To what end is a great 

question to ask when you are looking for your "why" in a curriculum. I have a major brain crush on 

Simon Sinek, and his TED talk  is useful when considering how to get people to buy in to your 

company. So what is the why? Our school's mission is to "educate[] its students for leadership and 

responsible citizenship in society by developing and nurturing the whole individual..." So that's the 

ultimate, "To what end?" And to serve the mission of the school, we need to have clear outcomes 

for our Humanities curriculum. I can identify a number of benefits of a Humanities education, but 

the "21st Century Learning Outcomes" list in that first column seem most relevant to our students' 

futures as leaders and to the mission of the school (so to what end 2). 

To what end 3?

At the top of the map, is the third end--the driving essential questions of the course. While we've 

wrestled with the role of essential questions in Humanities classes for quite some time, having these 

questions as a frame for the year gives us a direction for student understandings. In order to get 

towards those 21st century outcomes and to get through our existing curriculum, the thread that 

weaves all those pieces together is that of justice. Students need time to wrestle with those big 

questions: What defines a just society? What creates injustice in societies? What makes it difficult 

to perceive injustice? What is the role of the individual in responding to injustice? In order to begin 

to answer those four essential questions, students will have to develop deep understandings of 

societies; those deep understandings are the core of our Humanities curriculum.

Jigsawing and Threading

Those big questions all tie in directly to the threads of the curriculum. In order to begin to answer 

the questions, "What defines a justice society?" and "What creates injustice in societies?", students 

will need to do a deep dive into the societies at the heart of our central texts and the contexts of 

those central texts--the core Humanities curriculum. In order to begin to answer the question, "What 

makes it difficult to perceive injustice?", students need to do a deep dive into the rationality/critical thinking curriculum. And finally, in order to consider the question of "What is the role of the 

individual in responding to injustice?", students will be prompted to consider their own roles as 

leaders and responsible citizens (the "Modern Application" section of the map is where we're 

headed here). 

What's next?

Term 1. Overview version 1 is a walk-through of the big picture curriculum pieces. Overview 
version 2 will start to pick at our thinking through the threads of Term 1.  

Wrestling the Writing Program--Vertical Alignment

I've been doing some mental wrestling today with bigger curricular issues. Our Humanities program has students in year-long Humanities classes from grades 9-11; in grade 12, students get to take term-long electives. I'm the curriculum team leader for the 10th grade, so that sandwiches my level's curriculum in between the two other levels.

Our 11th grade American Studies course is now called, "American Studies with APLAC." In the coming year, all our 11th grade students will get exposure to the skills of an APLAC course while in their 11th grade Humanities class. At the end of the year, students will have the opportunity to sit the APLAC exam if that's appropriate for them. That's a pretty exciting development.

What's really interesting to me about this shift is the opportunities it affords the department to have conversations about the content and skills of all our courses. We adopted the APLAC skills model because we looked at the articulated skills and thought that those are skills we'd like all our students to have when they graduate from Culver. APLAC focuses on a number of different types of writing--students write analysis, argument, synthesis, and research essays as part of the course. 

We have a Writing Program in the Humanities department at Culver. At its heart, it's a common assessment program--levels design writing assessments based on the skills and content of their courses, and those assessments are administered to all students in the course on the same day. The essays are coded, so student responses are anonymized, and then the essays are commonly scored by all teachers at the level using a shared rubric. Students get formative feedback on an interim version of the assessment. Then, they take a common assessment approximately two weeks later after a targeted teaching period. That common assessment is again commonly scored, and the score is converted to a summative grade. The Writing Program initially only highlighted students' synthesis writing. Part of the logic of that was the idea that synthesis writing requires that students pull together multiple sources to form an "argument"--something that seems to be at the heart of Humanities teaching. Over the last few years, however, the Writing Program has evolved so that levels are using the CA opportunity to have students do different kinds of writing. 

As a department, we're at a spot where the work of the last few years on the Writing Program and the work of the last two years in the American Studies curriculum are about to converge. (And the work of the TRC--triennial review committee--is coming in hot here, too, but that's a whole other post.) Students in the 11th grade Humanities classes in the coming year will be formally working on four different kinds of writing--analysis, synthesis, argument, and research. And the 9th and 10th grades have maintained their focus on synthesis writing through their Writing Programs. Individual teachers can (and should) choose to do other kinds of writing with their classes, though. 

Given the fact that the EOC assessments for the juniors will be to demonstrate proficiency in those four types of writing, the question in front of us shouldn’t be if we are going to formally introduce analysis and argument and research to students earlier in the 9-11 Humanities curriculum, but really when. If we are going to work towards stronger vertical alignment in the curriculum (per the TRC), we can’t fill in the writing targets column for freshmen and sophomores as “synthesis” writing and then “rhetorical analysis, argument, synthesis, and research” writing for the juniors.  

As the 10th grade curriculum team leader, I concern myself quite a bit with where students are coming from (9th grade EOC targets) and how we can position our students best for success at the next level (11th grade start-of-course targets) through our instruction. So while I'm not responsible for the crafting of the departmental curriculum as a whole, I also can't think of the 10th grade curriculum in isolation. So today's wrestling topic is to advocate for some work I believe the 10th grade students and teachers need to do in order to prepare our kids for the 11th grade experience. We have some work to do to define that writing from a leadership team perspective, and then I have some work to do to figure out how to facilitate conversations about this kind of writing with the other teachers at my level. Interesting work in front of us, but definitely wrestling. 

A new context... a curricular evolution...

In some ways, this post marks the start of a new teaching project. My last post here was from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and it was four years ago. My context then was an intensive English program for middle-school-aged refugees. My context now is a sophomore Humanities class in a college preparatory boarding school in Indiana. While it is a leap, the curriculum development challenges remain interesting and connected. And we're off wrestling again...

The 10th grade Humanities curriculum has largely been organized around four central texts since at least the time I came to the level four years ago. We've varied the order, but we have always studied the following: The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra, and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. It's been a long time since we've been a school that hands a new teacher a pile of books and invites him to close the door and teach however s/he wants to (and I'm grateful for that), but we haven't always had a clearly articulated curriculum. For the last four years, as a level, we've worked to identify a common set of learning targets around those central texts. 

We're at a point, though, where we're beginning a major curricular evolution. In June of this year, the level started to consider the idea of "to what end?" for our curriculum. And we landed on a connecting thread as we considered the four central texts: social justice. We defined these driving essential questions: What defines a just society? What creates injustice in societies? What makes it difficult to perceive injustice? What is the role of the individual in responding to injustice?

We're hoping that by spending a year working with students on these questions, we'll foster the following 21st Century Learning Outcomes: Intercultural knowledge and competence, ethical reasoning and action, personal and social responsibility, and civic knowledge and engagement.

So far, nothing I've written has been a major evolution. The fact that all of these pieces now live on a piece of paper somewhere that shows how they are all connected is really encouraging. The paper itself represents hours and hours of conversation with colleagues and great effort to honor the work that has already been done. These ideas have floated for a few years, and having them nailed down on a piece of paper (to the extent that anything is fixed on a piece of paper) is great thing, though.

The major evolution to the curriculum is the addition of a layer of thinking: key critical thinking understandings. The term "critical thinking" gets thrown around quite a bit, but this is a specific kind of critical thinking. We plan to directly teach our students about how their brains work and to challenge them to slow their thinking down as they wrestle with the big ideas of our curriculum. Think language like "system 1 and system 2" (Kahneman), fundamental attribution error, narrative fallacy, truthiness, illusion of knowledge, confirmation bias, familiarity effect, availability effect, rationalizing, and motivated reasoning. Kids will be thinking about their own thinking as we study the central texts. We don't just want our students to nod their head to Adichie's TED Talk "Danger of a Single Story," we want our students to be able to slow down their thinking, explain why we ALL create single stories, and consider how to recognize their own "single stories."

Most of the teachers at my level have been studying texts that teach us to think about thinking: Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow or David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart among many other sources. Some of us have had the opportunity to sit in a seminar with a colleague who has developed her own expertise in this area and in thinking about how it applies to our work with students. And this fall, we'll all be studying this together all over again as we work to deliver this to our students.

Posts to come (things I'm thinking about) will be about how this work is going from a curricular design level and at a classroom delivery level. I imagine, too, that I'll be doing a lot of thinking about how to facilitate conversations among the colleagues at my level as I'm the curriculum team leader for the tenth grade, and I spend a lot of time trying to create meetings that support others in their work. Plus, there are other components to the curriculum that I haven't mentioned here--the grading of course goals, creation of assessments, creation of common assessments (the Writing Program). And then there's my work around the teaching of reading. I think a lot about how to help my students be better readers. I'll work some of that out here.