Raising the Bar: Crafting Engaging K-12 Curriculum Content that Educators Love
When it comes to K-12 curriculum, educators expect their curriculum providers to deliver to a higher standard. As they should! It needs to help students build mastery of concepts and skills, develop as lifelong learners, and be prepared to thrive in a competitive international job market. And it isn’t just about the students…teachers need to believe in the content’s value and be able to use it with confidence. To accomplish this, publishers of curriculum content need the right tools so that educators can build, manage and deliver standards-based instruction and assessment, and school leaders can gain insight on performance, progress, and engagement with the content.
We’ve come a long way from the 3 “Rs” of K-12 curriculum. Today it’s all about the 4 “Cs:” critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. What we now know now about different learning styles and objectives and how to deliver effective instruction and assessment has raised the bar in how curriculum content is created and prepared for use.
As content and curriculum authors, the movement for digital-first instructional materials has put powerful capabilities at your disposal in how curriculum materials are structured, aligned with standards, and designed for maximum student engagement. The schools and teachers that you serve have high expectations, and strong opinions, about how your content will fit into their instruction plans and students’ classroom experience.
With all that in mind, let’s talk about what makes good content for the K-12 curriculum in the United States.
Curriculum Mapping
The process of translating curriculum standards into individual lessons is an enormous amount of work, so even though teachers desire to engage fully in this process, the reality is, they don’t have the time. It’s one of the key reasons that curriculum publishers add value. Teachers need you - the curriculum developer - to make the first move. Your product is more likely to be used if it is a complete, sequenced, solution that is not simply aligned to standards, but built to them from the ground up.
The thought, expertise, and care you put into your content will be recognized and appreciated when teachers can find, categorize and build a cohesive, engaging curriculum map . Good content is organized from the start to be:
Built around the standards and other curriculum elements
Tagged with crosswalks and coherence mapping
Identified with prerequisites and post requisites, lateral connections and dependencies
Labeled with relevant metadata and tags
Easily populated with resources, notes, color-coding and grouping
If teachers are time-crunched before the school year, their free time disappears once school is in session. They need any curriculum they build to last the entire year. That’s why automatic updates to standards that are populated throughout the content will give teachers confidence that what they are teaching is aligned.
Student Engagement
What does an engaged student look like? Do they pay attention, take notes, listen, ask questions, respond to questions, participate, and react? And what role can the content itself play in fostering engagement?
Plenty of research has gone into understanding which learning activities increase student engagement behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively. When developing content, pay attention to these most commonly cited sources of engagement:
Meaning: If students do not consider a learning activity worthy of their time and effort, they might not engage in a satisfactory way, or may even disengage entirely in response (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). Any activity included in content will gain meaning for students if they can connect it to their previous knowledge and experiences.
Competence: Effectively performing an activity can positively impact subsequent engagement (Schunk & Mullen, 2012). For example, designing content to be only slightly beyond the students' levels of proficiency, and enabling students to demonstrate their understanding throughout the activity, will help strengthen student’s sense of competence.
Autonomy: When teachers hand over control to students, rather than promoting compliance, student engagement levels are likely to increase as a result (Reeve, Jang, Carrell, Jeon, & Barch, 2004). To support autonomy within content, consider including ways for students to share their opinions and ideas into the flow of the activity.
Interactivity: Today’s K-12 students have grown up in technology-rich environments, yet screen-fatigue is real. When students are encouraged to partake in hands-on activities like online quizzes, collaborate in document creation, and use components of technology like AR or VR to complete classwork, it changes the posture of learning from static consumer to active learner.
Assessment
For curriculum publishers it is not enough to simply provide educational content; students, teachers, and administrators need ways to gauge comprehension, measure progress, and inform instruction. Student assessment is an integral part of curriculum development and implementation and should encompass these elements:
Formative and Summative Assessment: Both formative assessments, ongoing evaluations used to track student progress and adjust teaching strategies throughout the learning process, and summative assessments, typically given at the end of a chapter or unit, are necessary to provide a comprehensive view of student learning.
Real-Time Feedback: Interactive assessment tools, like monthly tests of expected spelling words or a timed assessment to track the students' progress in math fluency, are particularly effective for learning. Delivered as part of digital-first content, these assessments can be completed and automatically graded online, saving the teacher time and delivering immediate data on student progress.
Adaptive Assessments: Adaptive assessments adjust their level of difficulty based on the student's performance. They are useful for providing personalized learning experiences and ensuring that students are always challenged but not overwhelmed.
Data Reporting: Publishers should provide comprehensive data reporting tools that allow teachers and administrators to track student progress over time. This data can be used to identify areas where students are struggling and adjust instruction accordingly.
Publishing System
How your content is published, not just what is published, will impact how readily it is adopted and accepted in schools. The publishing system you choose or build will need certain capabilities to enable you to meet the needs of a wide variety of customers.
The crucial curriculum mapping capabilities you’ll want to offer your customers need to begin as comprehensive product mapping. A product map is a planning tool that will allow you to organize and track relationships among every component of your offering and clearly see how your content works together or where work is needed to meet your goals and objectives.
Every K-12 serves a diverse and unique student population. You’ll want educators to have the flexibility to create custom curricula that include both teacher and student experiences. Building flexibility within your content, like having standards align down to the question level, will make it more useful to a wider range of teachers.
Good Content From the Start
The classroom experience, for the student and teacher, is more than memorizing concepts and passing tests. Your content is the jumping off point to gain essential skills such as problem-solving, teamwork, and digital literacy–skills that will serve them throughout life.
While it is true that alignment to standards is a crucial requirement in content development, the curriculum providers that go above and beyond this with curriculum that is:
Organized to work easily into a teacher’s curriculum map;
Highly engaging for every student;
Strengthened with assessments to mark progress and allow for lesson fine-tuning;
Delivered on a K-12-ready platform that meets the growing requirements for security, privacy, and accessibility
The expectations for curriculum are as demanding as they are complex, but by embracing a fulsome approach to curriculum design and delivery using the guidelines in this article, only then are we able to deliver content and curriculum to a higher standard.
