How to Create an Effective Curriculum That Works For You and Your Students

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A curriculum is only as effective as its teacher. For a teacher to be as effective as possible they must inspire student learning. This can be achieved by providing clear learning objectives and a sense of purpose, both of which are excellent ways of fostering student success. While curriculum planning is an essential aspect of the job for all teachers, it’s also an art. Teachers must implement various strategies according to their classroom’s respective grade level, learning abilities, and individual needs. 

Schools or school districts may provide continued educational opportunities to their staff through teacher resource books and workshops detailing curriculum planning strategies, classroom management, and more. In other instances, teachers are encouraged to reach out to their peers for advice and feedback on their teaching methods. While there are many ways to create a cogent curriculum, a guideline of some tried and true ideas is embedded below:

Identify the Purpose of Your Curriculum

Prior to outlining a plan of action, it’s imperative that you have identified the purpose of your curriculum. Whether you’re teaching second graders or college students, the subject material needs to be tailored to their ages and learning capacities. 

Having a purpose in mind before taking a pen to paper can help to create a curriculum that is specifically tailored to your student’s needs. Important questions to ask yourself include: “What do I want the students to gain from this course?” and “How will I engage the students?” Questions such as these provide both you and your students with clear expectations. According to NPR, studies have shown that when teachers set expectations, the students are likely to show an increased performance in school. Affirmative nods and smiles are two simple, everyday gestures of encouragement that are proven to be extremely beneficial to a student’s success. 

Outline Your Areas of Focus

After an overall direction has been established, breaking up that material into specific areas of focus is next. For the majority of K-12 public schools in the United States, that material is already selected for you under Common Core State Standards. Depending on grade level, the material is sorted into areas of focus such as mathematics and language arts. From there material can be even more specific, breaking up topics such as mathematics into algebra and geometry. 

While there may be state standards required of you, there’s still opportunity to propose some overarching questions throughout the duration of the course. For example, when studying World War I and II in highschool, ask philosophical questions that could apply to any war, such as: “is war worth the sacrifice?” These kinds of overarching questions engage students and help foster important critical thinking skills, all while staying relevant to the topic at hand. 

Another idea is to provide an integrated curriculum by linking different subjects together. The integration of math and science, when considering weather and climate, is one example. When teaching a lesson on such topics, teachers can emphasize how math skills are essential in gathering and analyzing data. This will help students to understand that math and science can be largely dependent upon each other, as are so many other topics.

Establish a Timeline

Knowing how much time you’ll have to teach a course is essential, as it determines how much of that time can be allotted to individual topics. Ask a supervisor about time constraints before delving into extensive subject material. Once a timeline is established, curriculum can be laid out efficiently. 

Throughout the course, however, it’s important to be flexible in making adjustments as different students learn at different paces and in varying ways. For instance, utilizing descriptive grammar in the classroom can help ensure that every child understands the material despite any socio-economic differences. Descriptive grammar takes into account variations in language usage across communities and cultures; by doing so, it is able to eliminate any proposed notions of correctness. With this tool, teachers can reach across socio-economic barriers, all the while staying on course with their timeline. 

Teachers also need to be prepared to be flexible when dealing with adolescent focus (or lack thereof). For instance, you may have the perfect lesson plan for the day, but ten minutes into teaching you realize nobody is paying attention. While you could continue on with the same material, changing things up a bit may to go a long way in the end. Introducing an interactive component or allowing for group discussion could help to alleviate disengagement. 

Plan Lessons According to Your Timeline

After outlining the topics of your course, you can begin to plan your day-to-day lessons. However, bear in mind the overarching topic you are trying to convey. Though teachers are encouraged to make their own, many websites offer pre-made lesson plans from fellow teachers and educators. Lesson plans are of significant importance as they must work to engage the students with the subject material. For that reason, be careful when using pre-made lesson plans that might be too rigid and not particularly geared towards an individual classroom’s learning styles. Accordingly, they should largely be viewed as a template for teachers, rather than a be-all and end-all.

Make Sure You Have the Necessary Materials and Resources

School supplies, technology, and books all play decisive roles in shaping lesson plans; therefore it’s important to have these assets in your classroom. While purchasing all these materials yourself can get expensive, there are websites where teachers can buy books in bulk for topics such as literature and fiction, social studies, and even early childhood development

Ask For Help and Feedback

A teacher’s biggest source of help oftentimes is other teachers. Not only can you utilize other teachers’ curriculum, but you can also do workshopping activities among each other. All in all, their advice and feedback can be very conducive to undertaking a whole new curriculum. 

Additionally, when it comes to measuring how effective your teaching methods are, don’t forget that your students are an excellent source of feedback. Many university educators, for instance, give out end of year surveys in order to obtain feedback from students. These can help assist a teacher in knowing how well they are relaying the information their students need to know for testing purposes. 

Put Your Curriculum Into Action 

Once all these steps are completed, it is time to implement your curriculum. However, no curriculum is foolproof so being cognizant of any needed adaptations is imperative. 

Utilize feedback from students to know what is working and what isn’t then make changes based off of that. While testing can serve as an indicator of where a student is, asking them how they are doing prior to a test can make all the difference in their performance.


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