Curriculum Development Workshop Seminar on College Teaching
By Heather Sturman, Luke Peterson, and Lydia Beaudrot
October 13, 2011
This 40-minute workshop on curriculum development focused on designing curriculum for a single course. Facilitators developed and presented an integrated Curriculum Design Model participants could use in designing their own course. The model focused on six steps instructors should consider and group discussion expanded and improved upon this model. What follows is a summary of each of the six steps, based on this group discussion. Attached to this blog post is a blank version of this model for you to fill out when developing your own curriculum.
Step 1: Determine the (broad) course and (specific) behavioral goals of the curriculum. These goals should focus both broadly on what students should learn in the course and specifically on what they should be able to do by the end of the course. Planning during this step can include developing and/or revising a course description, considering why you want students to learn the material you plan to present, and to make sure students struggle appropriately with the material. Bloom’s taxonomy of behavioral objectives can be helpful during this step.
Step 2 Think about what materials are needed for your course. During this step, you should consider the basic nuts and bolts of your course. This can include reserving a classroom, choosing and ordering appropriate textbooks, developing and printing your syllabus, deciding what laboratory materials will be required, determining your budget for course materials/activities, developing/finding any visualization materials needed, determining assessment tools (e.g., clickers, mini white boards, scantrons, transparencies), and much more, depending on your needs as an instructor.
Step 3: Create interesting, learner appropriate, and appealing instructional experiences. For this step, you should think about how you plan to effectively present course material. Often, a combination of methods is most effective, as students come from a variety of backgrounds and may benefit from a variety of teaching and presentation methods. Options may include lecture, the POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) method, hands-on learning (e.g., in-class demonstrations), guest speakers, videos, audio files, and much more. It is important to emphasize that instructors (and ultimately students) should be able to effectively manipulate the material in a variety of ways and to present real world applications of classroom material.
Step 4: Provide adequate practice for students. For this step, you should plan a variety of ways in which students will manipulate the material learned in the classroom. This can be through labs, discussion sections, field trips, clicker questions in lecture, study questions, problem solving activities, holding study sessions outside of class, and research projects. If you are fortunate enough to have TAs, be sure to coordinate activities with them to ensure that students are actively and effectively interacting with course material.
Step 5: Develop effective assessments that test the understanding and application of the behavioral objectives. There are a variety of ways in which to assess student learning, and you shouldn’t be afraid to try new methods. Student knowledge is measured most effectively via a variety of assessment types throughout a course. Assessment options may include homework, multiple choice exams, regular quizzes, research projects, essays, lab practicals, group exercises/projects, and short-answer exams. As always it is important to keep the assessments appropriate to the level of the course and to give students an appropriate level of feedback
Step 6: Reflect on effectiveness of course. This final step should be completed at the end of teaching a course to help you prepare to teach the course and other courses in the future. When considering your course, think about what worked and what did not and why. Also, closely examine your student evaluations and assessments to gauge what your students thought of your teaching and how they performed in your course in general. Finally, be sure to ask yourself what you will do differently the next time you teach.
It may help you sketch out the process using a graphic organizer that puts all six planning categories on one page so that you can see at a glance if one or more categories are too empty or too full. Once you’ve brainstormed ideas into each of the boxes, you can expand as necessary.