In the old story, the curriculum was designed around the idea that the teacher was the instructor and students were the containers. Many classes that I took in my educational path had similar patterns in their curriculum. In EDUC 4P19 we are taught the new story way of designing a curriculum. For each unit, there is 4 major steps that must be considered in order to ensure optimal student engagement, learning and development. What is most important about these 4 steps is that in the new story they actually can be changed and altered to fit a specific unit in terms of the teacher's own experiences. For example, for a challenging unit in Math or History that students seem to historically struggle on every year, these steps can change in accordance to the students in the specific classroom. So for one class you may teach the unit one way but different in another, yet you are still getting the exact same information out of the unit in both situations. This is the flexibility of the Backward Design as although it is relatively linear the context can be altered. I think understanding these four points is critical for a future educator as
The pre-step involves knowing your curriculum and knowing your students. This involves scanning through the introductory section of a document with the KDB guiding the scanning process. Here you would look to see where the Know Be and Do fit into the curriculum. In the old story there wouldn't be much in terms of scanning as the KBD wasn't nearly as emphasized as it is now. The most important things you can gather from the scanning all relates to newer educational styles e.g. constructivist teaching, democracy, social justice etc. The second major part of the pre-step is knowing your students. You need to focus on what course you are teaching, whether it is optional or compulsory, academic or applied as this all alters the curriculum you will make. For example, as a prespective geography teacher I know that grade 9 geography is compulsory so the student motivation and academic proficiency will vary compared to a grade 12 advanced functions class. I need to be able to conduct a diagnostic and understand where the students are in terms of geography and alter the unit to that class. For example instead of completing a non-engaging task of creating a map of Canada with capital cities and colouring it in, why not have the students use open source computer-based mapping programs and download data and create their maps online. This will not only improve their knowledge of Canada but also improve their computer skills (building on 21st century skills)
The next step stage 1 is identifying the most important things for students to Know, Do and Be at the end of the learning period. This involves scanning curriculums of past grades to find critical learning in the mandated outcomes You then need to select a few broad-based outcomes that represent the organizing process and deconstruct the Know Do and Be from the chart. With this, you can construct the KDB Umbrella which was discussed in detail last blog post. It is crucial to incorporate the Big Ideas, Enduring Understandings and twenty-first century skills for optimal development.
Stage 2 involves assessment to demonstrate what the students have learned in the unit. I'm sure we all remember no matter what high school class we had, there was always a "unit test" at the end of each unit (about a month long). From my perspective I got very used to and very good at memorizing the night before a unit test as they were always structured the same. For example there was usually multiple choice at the beginning, short answers or short problems then essay style or long problems at the end. In the "new story" that we will be teaching in a lot of learning is skill based and complex which cannot always be tested. It is maybe better to demonstrate it by a performance and overall better assessed using qualitative feedback and not quantitative. For example, in a computer technology class, it would be a lot more beneficial to asses students ability at the end of a unit to design a basic game using a computer language (e.g. Python, Java, C++) more so then testing them about that language.
Stage 3 focuses on the daily activities that lead to student's understanding of the material. This is an extremely important step as truly understanding a unit will take a sum of the daily activities. The difficult part of this step is creating daily activities that students will gather information and yet stay engaged. For example, instead of teaching the children about latitude and longitude why not show them. An activity could be entering in various latitudes and longitudes into google earth and having them describe what landforms they see in the satellite images. This will not only teach students how latitude and longitude works but also help them understand Canada's landscape as they can measure features and look at them in a 3-d perspective
Overall, I believe these 4 stages are extremely important for curriculum development as they cover all the necessary requirements but also keep you organized for each unit to ensure a engaging and informative classroom for all students.
