Curriculum Writing Tips: 9 Important Points

Designing a curriculum can be a challenging task for educators. If you plan to develop a curriculum, whether you are a first-year or experienced teacher, you may find yourself overwhelmed with various books, syllabus, how-to articles, curriculum building software, and much more. Curriculum writing is a demanding task, whether it is for graduate-level or preschool students. Nevertheless, understanding what to expect and preparing for your curriculum writing process in advance will be of tremendous help.

What is a Curriculum and Why Does it Matter?

A curriculum refers to a group of learning objectives, assignments, assessments, and other educational content taught by a professor in a learning institute, program, or course. With this in mind, a typical curriculum usually comprises the following parts:

• Purpose Statement: What does your curriculum plan to accomplish?
• Topic Framework and Pacing Guide: What topics will you teach and when?
• Learning Objectives and Competencies: What can the learners do with the learnings provided?
• Standards Alignment: How well does your curriculum stick to national, state, and school standards for your chosen course?
• Strategy Framework: What pedagogy approach do you plan to use?
• Assessment: How will you determine the student’s degree of mastery of the learning objectives?
• Capstone Project: What conclusive achievement will your learners use to confirm what they’ve retained in your class?
• Essential Resources: What learning resources do you use to teach your students, and what will they learn?

A thoughtfully designed and well-planned curriculum is significant in helping the school, students, and teachers succeed. When a strong and viable curriculum is presented by qualified and well-prepared teachers, it guarantees learners will accomplish worthy learning outcomes.

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Tips for a Solid Curriculum Writing

Whether you are planning to revamp your existing curriculum or begin from scratch, here are some tips to  follow when drafting a comprehensive learning curriculum.

• Determine the vision and intention of your curriculum writing.

Work with your overall purpose in mind and Identify what you aspire to accomplish from your curriculum.  Sometimes, educators skip this step. They proceed directly into drafting teaching topics without an explicit goal for the entire process.  This can lead to a misaligned, disjointed curriculum with missing parts. To ensure that your learning curriculum is comprehensive, envision what the curriculum will look like, who will use it, and what its flow should be.   Consider your educational institute's requirements for your curriculum document, but ultimately, your goal is to build a curriculum that fulfills the learning needs of your students.

• Place students first.

The ultimate goal of education is for students to learn and achieve.  As you plan your curriculum, it is important to keep your students as your first priority as you create a high quality set of in-class tasks and projects. The documents and academics of curriculum planning should not distract from meeting the needs of your students and ensuring they learn, understand, and apply the taught topic learnings in and out of the classroom.

• Collaborate.

Teaching is a complicated task and no matter how much experience you gather, you always benefit from collaborating with others.  As you begin to design your curriculum, collaborate with others.  Seek out those in your school or institution that teach a similar course or grade level.  If you do not have teachers with a similar course load locally, consider collaborating remotely with a member of the worldwide educational community.  Communicate with expert educators and ask for their perspective regarding your curriculum.  In addition to working with experts and experienced teachers, don’t minimize the contributions of less experienced teachers.  The more perspectives and expertise you can access, the better your curriculum will become.

• Review external standards and other required objectives for the course.

There are typically a variety of state and local standards and learning objectives required for any particular course or grade level.  If so, you and your students will be held accountable for these external standards through mandated assessments.  As you get started in the planning process, carefully examine and consider inclusion of any mandated standards and objectives to ensure your curriculum is well aligned with accountability measures.

• Scope and sequence: Outline the topics/units and timeline for instruction.

Once you are clear with the intention of your curriculum, begin to outline the topics or units and the learning objectives.  When paired with the timeline for teaching these units, this will become your scope and sequence document. Begin by analyzing the standards and learning objectives and how you may create themes or important topics that would be meaningful for students.  Collaborate with others in this work and review someone else's previously designed curriculum to help generate ideas for how to outline your curriculum.   Create a unit order that builds upon prior student learning throughout your course.  

With these units established, align the learning objectives and set a timeline for the length of time for each unit.  Consider how each of the learning objectives may fit best with a particular unit.  Some learning objectives may need to be spiraled, or introduced early in the course and then re-presented later to deepen mastery of the learning.  Anticipate the time your students will need to master the learning objectives and adjust your timeline accordingly.  As you select the order of curriculum topics, consider the pace and rigor of learning from your students' standpoint.  An overly rigorous pace can undermine the mastery of learning and be demotivating to students.  

Collaborating with other teachers continues to be important.  Coordinate with teachers in other subject areas to make the learning more engaging and meaningful to your students.  For example, if you are teaching a history unit on World War II, coordinate with the sociology teacher’s teaching of symbolic interactionism, the art teacher's presentation of Thomas Hart Benton’s work, and the literature teacher’s use of Night by Elie Wiesel.  Considering cross curricular connections can make learning more engaging and meaningful for your students.

• Create or add a variety of assessments for the lessons.

Using your framework and learning standards, begin to create the assessments of student learning.  To make the most out of your curriculum, include diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments. The creation of assessments will help you further analyze the specific learning performance you are expecting from your students.  As you create the assessments, continue to collaborate and reflect upon your previous work.  Continue to consider the alignment of your work to the objectives and external standards and make adjustments as necessary.  The more tightly aligned your curriculum is, the better your students will learn what is required.

• Write the lessons to deliver a comprehensive learning experience.

After outlining the topics, learning standards and creating your assessments, you can begin writing lesson plans that outline the learning activities you will use to teach your students. When writing the learning lessons, continue to keep alignment in mind and focus on engaging your students by utilizing various educational strategies.  Utilizing a standard lesson plan format that incorporates the critical lesson components is helpful.

• Schedule planning time.

Creating a curriculum requires time. It is crucial to schedule planning sessions to build your curriculum. After you have developed the initial framework, units, and assessments, consider working on the lesson development in sections with your colleagues.  Not only does this make the planning more manageable, but it also allows you to adjust your lesson planning according to the needs of your students.  

• Get feedback from your students.

Much like the collaboration with teachers, feedback from students is another part of the curriculum development process.  As you progress through your course, you will be monitoring student performance.  In addition, establish time to interact with students about what they like in the curriculum and what they don't. Create an environment that encourages students to speak openly about how the curriculum was helpful, difficult, or could be improved.

The Bottom Line

Curriculum writing is a crucial part of the teaching process which can be very complicated.  Creating a big picture for the direction of a course and working down to the discrete portions of learning expected for students helps teachers develop a better learning experience.  Collaboration around this enormous task is highly important to not only share the workload, but to ensure that your curriculum is well-aligned and engaging for students. By being student-centered, the primary focus will be on how well your students understand the lessons presented.  

No matter where your district or campus is in the process of curriculum writing, Embarc is the optimal tool for the work. With intuitive features that promote collaboration, transparency, and a “living document” environment, integrating your curriculum into the Embarc platform ensures a centralized, consistent curriculum for the school district and stakeholders.