How To Lead A New Open Curriculum Project

Once you have joined the Open Planner network, you may want to use it to help you plan your next semester....

Unleash the collective genius...lead an Open Curriculum project.

Because it is our goal to host ad-hoc teams working to create conceptually coherent instructional programs, we strive to enable:

• ...curriculum pages that can be quickly produced and require no HTML or other web-coding skills, and can be hierarchically arranged into overview, units, lessons, and resources.

• ...a culture of risk-taking and constructive criticism that acknowledges EVERY DOCUMENT AS A WORKING DRAFT.

• ...an ongoing conversation amongst members in which a common planning model and language can be adopted that allows our work to come together in an organized, and somewhat "modular" fashion.

• ...the ability to upload and attach MS Word or other files to curriculum pages with a few clicks.

• ...a peer review and action research process that develops high quality course experiences for students and takes advantage of the collective expertise of teachers.

• ...a team leadership model that promotes clarity of vision and the coherence of the parts with the whole.

What follows are pages and subpages that model and explain the structure we are proposing you use for the creation of Open Curriculum. Please offer suggestions in the forums if you find this model flawed and we can sponsor a debate around possible changes.

Top Curriculum Page

Curriculum Overview

• Essential Understandings, Skills, and Discipline-Specific Habits of Mind: How do you think knowledge is constructed in this discipline or subdiscipline? What skills and big picture ideas are requisite for expertise in this realm of knowledge? Less is more!
  

• Pedagogical Stance: How will this curriulum promote the development of the above skills, understandings, or habits? What are the most common preconceptions specific to this subject matter that students bring into the learning process? How will this curriculum address these? What experiential resources might students possess that will aid the adoption of these new understandings? How will this curriculum utilize these?

• Supporting Research: What educational research supports the adoption of a curriculum that takes these pedagogical and/or epistemological approaches? Provide a brief synopsis of the existing corpus of evidence with links, if this exists. If limited research currently exists, describe an action research plan that will enable you and others to assess the value of this instructional methodology.

• Common Unit Structure: What patterns and rituals will punctuate and motivate the movement of learning in this curriculum? Is there a learning cycle? A project-driven structure? A skills/content-driven cycle?

• Action Research Tools (optional): What measurement tools can educators use to quantify the relative success of this curriculum in their classrooms?