Curriculum Revision Support Tools

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Well, hello and welcome back to another episode of Artworks for Teachers. I’m your host, Susan Riley, and today we’re gonna be diving into curriculum design. Now, at the time of recording, we are headed into the summer months for teachers. And now whether you’re listening to this at the time of recording or months from now or even years from now.

Depending on when you’re listening to this, you may be ready for a curriculum overhaul. You may be looking to just kind of refresh your curriculum, or you might just be looking for a way to figure out how to insert your arts integration lessons. Either way, I’ve got you covered in today’s episode. So in today’s episode, we’re going to get tactile. I’m going to give you some very specific examples of ways that we can make your curriculum pop in the years ahead. And the reason that I’m doing the episode now is because during the summer months is oftentimes when curriculum planning occurs. So whether you’re doing this on your own or with a team, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. I used to lead these huge curriculum workshops for county level teams where we would have curriculum teams at every single level for every grade. I think we had like 500 teachers at one point in the same building all working together for a week at a time. And I used to coordinate all of that for the entire county. And so if I can get that done, I promise you that I can get this done for all of us. And so today’s episode, I want to reassure you that no matter if you’re looking at doing this as a huge piece and you’re coordinating something like that for your district, or if you’re just sitting down with your own curriculum and you’re looking at this as a first year teacher and you’re thinking, I don’t even have a curriculum. This is gonna work for you. I’ve been there too. As a first year teacher having no curriculum at all, where do you start? So let’s get to it, shall we? So let’s talk about the curriculum overhaul just in general. Now we have an entire article on this site that will walk you through how to write a curriculum from start to finish called the Curriculum Writing Checklist. I’m not going to go through that entire piece because literally it walks you through every single step. It gives you a curriculum writing checklist. I will show it to you on if you’re watching on YouTube. If you’re not watching, don’t, if you’re driving or something, don’t worry. You can go back and watch the video at another time. But if you are watching, you’ll see there’s this checklist.

You can always come back to this episode. We’ll include it in the downloads for you so that you have a link to this so that you can kind of see it. But it’s a really handy checklist that walks you through the process. Okay. Again, that’s going to be included with your episode today, but that’s also in the original post. That post, I just want to point you to it because it’s really helpful if you have to think about rehauling a curriculum from scratch or if you have to write one from the beginning. Because it’s gonna guide you through that process. There’s eight steps to it of thinking about getting a vision for what you want, thinking about how you have to outline what’s coming up. What do you want included? The topics that you wanna have in there, organizing those topics in a timeline, writing the lessons and assessments to fit within those topics and timeline through the year, determining the materials and the resources that you need for the lessons and the assessments that you’ve written and then pulling it all together. And then assigning those roles, it goes all into that. It gives you some examples and some models and it gives you the checklist. So if, for example, you’re coordinating a curriculum writing event, that piece is going to be helpful for you. If you’re writing a curriculum from scratch, that checklist is going to help you to just kind of knock everything off of your list moving forward in the summer ahead.

Either way, use that particular post. We’ll link it in the show notes. Okay. Now, what if, for example, you don’t necessarily want to write a curriculum from scratch? Okay. Now, if you do, that’s great. By the way, let me offer one piece of clarification just around arts integration itself. Remember, my friends, that arts integration is not a curriculum. And this is a very common misconception.

Remember, arts integration is to be used when it makes a natural fit. So oftentimes I hear arts integration curriculum being used interchangeably with supplement. And the two are very, very different. Remember, curriculum is what we’re going to be using on a daily basis, right? And you don’t necessarily use arts integration on a daily basis in every single class because it doesn’t necessarily fit for every single class and arts integration is an application of learning. So you actually have to learn the skills and overall information explicitly in the other content areas first before you can use arts integration as that application of learning. So for example, I can’t use an arts integration lesson connecting math on angles and dance using angles if I haven’t specifically taught obtuse and acute angles in math first, right? Do you see that difference? So I can’t write an arts integration curriculum because I’m not teaching arts integration all the time. I can write an arts integration supplement and I can write places in my curriculum where arts integration can live. And I’ll talk about that a little bit later in the episode.

But I just want to add that little caveat in here because we are advocates of arts integration. We want to include arts integration. But please know that if you are writing curriculum, you are writing a curriculum for the content area for which you teach, and you are advocating for including that arts integration in that curriculum where it’s appropriate. And we’re going to explain how to do that in today’s episode. But you’re not including arts integration in every single lesson all the time because it doesn’t necessarily work all the time because it’s not a natural fit all the time. I hope that makes sense. Okay, just with that little bit of asterisk in there, we’re going to move forward. All right, so what if you don’t need a complete re -haul of your curriculum? You just kind of want to insert those arts integration spaces or you want to take out the lessons that are currently not working. For example, a lot of us after COVID,

There are places in the curriculum which no longer are serving our students or there are lessons that are just no longer working. Either they’re out of date or our students are not yet at the level that they were prior to COVID when they came to us at that grade level. There’s still a gap there. And so there needs to be either a retaught lesson or they need an arts integration lesson to move into that space because they haven’t yet mastered that skill and they need another application lesson in order to get to that mastery level of skill. And so we need to be able to find areas in the curriculum where we know it’s not working. And so we need to revise those pieces, right? The whole curriculum doesn’t need a rehaul, but we do know that there are spaces that they’re not working and.

It’s just frustrating. It’s frustrating for us as a teacher. It’s frustrating for the students to have to sit through those lessons because we know they’re not working. And it’s a waste of time for everyone, right? And I think that is more applicable right now across the board where a lot of people are than having a complete rehaul because I think it’s a better use of our time. If that’s the case, then I have a couple of suggestions for us moving forward that we can take a look at today. The first one is around theme -based learning. Now, we talk a lot about the arts integration continuum, and theme -based learning is the second step across the continuum. We start with arts enhancement, which is arts integration strategies that make things sticky, but that we’re not connecting standards yet, right?

Theme -based learning is one step over from that. We’re stretching that a little bit because we’re connecting two areas, a content area and an arts area, through a theme. And so one way that we can take a look at our curriculum and maybe re -haul it a little bit or refresh it a little bit is by taking a look at the bigger picture and seeing can we reorganize some of this around themes across the year to make it a little bit easier for us to integrate the arts at various spots throughout the year. Because sometimes our curriculum is just kind of put together in a way that makes sense skill -wise. But if we could rearrange that and still make it make sense with the skills, but rearrange it just in timing around specific themes so that there’s an alignment between ELA and math or social studies and math or science and math that it makes sense across big ideas. That makes the integration process a little bit easier and it makes learning a lot more relevant for students because they can carry their learning from one content to another and it starts to click a little easier. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen students walk from one classroom to another and even my own daughter will say, I learned about that in chemistry and now I’m learning the same thing in math. And so it made it so much easier when I got to math class because I was just whipping through that because I had already learned about it in chemistry. Right. So being able to apply the learning that they did in one class to another makes that so much easier. And we can do that if we coordinate a little bit and look around common themes. So I want to share my screen a little bit so that you have some a picture of what some theme -based learning can look like and why we would even take a look at it. So just for some basic understanding, theme -based units usually integrate curriculum areas around a topic. So you could also take a look at a big idea. So even if it’s not a theme, but it’s just a big idea, you can easily take a look at your current curriculum and just kind of chunk things that currently exist around the current big ideas that are in there.

And you may need to make some modifications. You may need to just take a look and see what I currently have in here. And then what does currently exist in another content area? And are there any overlaps? That’s the first thing to just kind of take a look at. When we do this, it links curriculum strands and it automatically hooks student interests. And then when that happens, there’s inquiry that can happen. So we start to engage curiosity and communication is activated, right? So we start to engage the ability to engage conversations between not only students and what they’re learning in classrooms, but us as teachers as well, which also results in higher student engagement and higher teacher engagement, right? Now, when we’re taking a look at theme -based instruction, here’s one example of that. So for example, if we looked at the big idea of transformation,

Right, here’s one way that that could be applied across a lot of different areas. So if we happened to take a look at the idea of transformation, because it keeps popping up in a lot of spaces in science, and it happens to be popping up in math, and it happens to be popping up in ELA, here’s how we could take a look at that, right?

Here’s transformation, we’re seeing it in character development in ELA. We’re looking at transformations in math because we can see that in the angles. We’re looking at transformation in metamorphosis unit in science. We’re seeing the social change unit in social studies. We’re looking at dynamics in music. All of that is centered around the idea of transformation. So when we can see the big ideas, see the themes, we can start to ping like, yes, I address transformation in that in my content area this way, right? So that’s why having these themes is so important. Now, that doesn’t naturally happen on its own. It’s important that we identify what the themes are and then share that out with our teammates, our peers, if at all possible, because they’re gonna naturally be able to see how those themes present themselves within their curricula. So identify it in yours first, share it out and say, hey, does this happen in anybody else’s content area? We have a really great tool that will help you do that. It’s called the Scope and Sequence Planner. It’s a spreadsheet that has every grade level on it and it does it by quarter. So all you have to do is fill in your own and you can share it very easily via an email link to anybody else in your school and everybody can just plug in theirs.

And once you’re done plugging it in, which takes like 30 minutes or less, because everybody has their own curriculum, everybody can then see everybody else’s big idea or themes for the whole year, which so makes it easier during the curriculum planning time to go look at it and go, I didn’t know social studies was working on transformation in second quarter. I’m doing that in third quarter, but I could really easily just move that one piece over at the end of second quarter so that it aligns. Sometimes that’s not possible, but sometimes it is. And all it takes is a little coordination to see it visually line up. Okay? Another way that we could take a look at this is to just, again, categorize those buckets. So for example, in the lessons that we have in the accelerator that we provide for our accelerator members for them to use within their curriculum supplements, we use the following themes, reasoning and evidence, perseverance and grit, characters and communities, cultural identity, and symbols and traditions. And we have written all 300 lessons that we’ve provided for K through five around those five themes. And so it doesn’t matter if it’s a math lesson, a science lesson, an ELA lesson a social studies lesson, it doesn’t matter. Every grade level, every content area has at least one lesson in each of those themes. So that when we’re working together around those themes, not only are we looking vertically across the grade levels so that we’re aligning themes, now we’re also looking across the way horizontally, that every class is also working on a theme as well. So social studies, science, math, and ELA all have a lesson on reasoning and evidence. They all have a lesson on perseverance and grit. And all of that is an arts integration lesson that could fit in. And also, we selected those themes on purpose because many of curriculums out there address those themes at some point, right? Making it easy. Here’s another set of themes that could be something that is relevant to you and your school or your students that you might want to investigate. Urban design, energy, neighborhoods, social justice, identity, globalization, or natural resources. These are all things that your students could investigate and could look at around a theme and you could investigate in as part of your curricula. And that’s another thing that I wanted to point out is that when we’re looking at theme -based learning, sometimes we want to also ensure that it is relevant to our student population. If I’m working with students at a Title I school in New York City, rural farming is not something that’s going to be relevant to my students. So encouraging urban design theme for them is going to be much more relevant and is going to engage them in a different way than perhaps rural farming, not to say that they shouldn’t learn about rural farming, but having that as a theme to learn around needs to be something that maybe we take a look at in a different way. Maybe having farming in urban design, right? How does farming look like in the city? That might be something that we take a look at instead. So again, how do we take a look at themes within our curriculum that address our populations. That’s really important. Okay, so when we’re looking at our curricula, if you’re looking for just a revamp, a quick easy way to do that, that other than having to do a rehaul is to just coordinate by themes. And again, we’ll link that scope and sequence planner into our show notes for today so that you can download that and start to use that as an easy way to coordinate with your staff members. Okay.

Now, if you want to expand that one step further, let’s say you already have your curricula coordinated by theme and you’re happy with those themes, but you want to expand your curriculum and extend it a little bit, then my suggestion for you is to take a look at inquiry -based learning or look at how you can deepen those themes by attaching some essential questions or inquiry to each of those themes, some core questions around each of those themes so that students can develop some curiosity and creative ways of engaging with those themes. So adding some driving questions is a great way to then build some opportunities in your curriculum that don’t currently exist. Some offering new opportunities for additional lessons or alternative lessons or even revamping some of the lessons that are currently in there to rearrange them around the driving question. You will be amazed at how innovative your lessons will become just by adding a driving question that maybe you hadn’t thought of before. So I wanna share with you some driving questions that we have. Again, we’re gonna link these in the show notes as well. We have a list of 99 driving questions that connect with the arts that I think…

Some of these, if you just take a look at your current themes and add these to the themes that you already have, they will prompt some really wonderful discussions and even some adjustments to the lessons that you already have. So let’s take a look. So in this list, we have a list of anchor standards as well as some essential questions that go along with them in each of the arts areas. So for example, if you wanted to connect with music, or visual art. We have a list for each music, visual art, theater, and dance. So for example, here’s a question. How do musicians improve the quality of their performance? That would be a great one if you were listening to a performance or engaging students in a performance. How do you then improve that performance? Or when do you know that creative work is ready to share? So if you’re working on a project, that doesn’t even necessarily have to specifically be engaging around music, but if you’re working on a creative project with students in a theme, how do you know when it’s ready? How do you know when to stop? That’s a huge question and something that lots of artists struggle with, right? Lots of us struggle with when to stop when we’re working on a project. So these kinds of driving questions are wonderful ways to adjust the lessons that you already have that might not be working that can just rearrange the lens that we’re looking at those lessons in. Now, along with those driving questions, we also have a list of some project ideas or project seeds that you might use in each of the arts areas connected back to a content area. So for example,

The driving question, connection between music and science, the driving question is how can the formation of the three different types of rocks, sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous be communicated through an original piece of music? And then the project seed actually gives you the lesson idea that students will use music creation software like GarageBand to create eight measure compositions, one to represent the formation of three different rocks.

Students will then use the elements of music to effectively communicate to the listener how each type of rock is formed. So using those ideas to pivot into a different lesson seat. So again, we’re going to give you these ideas just to kind of think about how you might be able to adjust some of the lessons that aren’t working to pop in something that might be a little bit different to revamp some of what you’re already working on. Okay.

Now, my last idea for you in this episode is if you’ve already got lessons that have driving questions in them and you already have some themes that you’re happy with in curriculum, but you still want to kind of refresh your curriculum a little bit, still feels a little bit stale, then here’s where my slice and dice surgical technique comes in.

One thing I want you to think about in your curriculum and this applies to everyone and I don’t care how good your curriculum is. At some point in your curriculum in each quarter, I guarantee you there is at least one lesson that is flopping or that doesn’t work or that your students still struggle with. That you have multiple lessons to teach a concept because it is just such a hard concept and your students continuously struggle with it. And when you get to that section of the curriculum, you dread it because you’re like, it’s like pulling teeth to get students through this section of this of the curriculum. It happens in every curriculum. And this is what I call the surgical technique. I want you to take to review your curriculum. And when you get to those sections and there’s at least four, one per quarter in each content area at least once, at least once a quarter. That is where I want you to pull out one of those review lessons, at least one. If there’s multiple review lessons, you can pull out multiple review lessons, but at least one. Pull it out and replace it with an arts integration lesson that connects that content area to an arts area in some way and allows for an application of learning. Now, this is where you’re going to have to get creative. So,

You can create an Arts Integration lesson here. You can go to our site and try to find one. You can go to the Kennedy Center site, try to find one. You are welcome to become an accelerator member. It’s only $37 a month. And we have this awesome AI tool that will build you a lesson around standards. All you have to do is put the standard in. You can tell it what you’ve done before. And you can tell it, create for me an Arts Integration lesson that applies these two things and gets students to this point and it will build you the best Arts Integration lesson you can possibly have. Like seriously, it will do that for you. $37 a month my friend, artsintegration .com forward slash accelerator. I’m not even sad or upset about telling you about it. It’s the best thing ever. Go in there, get yourself an Arts Integration lesson and put it into that space where you had that lesson that was not working. Do that in each quarter in your curricula. Okay, this is that surgical technique. Remember, I don’t want you to have arts integration all the time, because that’s not what arts integration is. Arts integration is meant to be very targeted, and it’s meant to be very purposeful. When you’re putting it in there in replacement of the review lesson, first of all, you’re not adding one more thing to your plate. You are replacing something that’s not working with something that will. You’re actually saving yourself time because you’re removing the extra time that it would take you to review and replacing it with something that students can engage with and actually build their learning and be more successful with it. And you’re allowing them to improve their achievement because the Arts Integration lesson is going to solidify it for them.

Okay, it’s going to allow them to grow deeper in their learning around that topic. So my challenge to you this summer is that no matter where you are in your curriculum redesign process, if it’s a complete overhaul, if it’s adding some themes and coordinating it, organizing it a bit around themes, if it’s enhancing it with some inquiry -based driving questions, or if it’s replacing the things that don’t work, with some Arts Integrated lessons instead. My challenge to you is to make your curriculum the thing that you want it to be for next year. So that when you walk in the doors next year, you’re excited and you know that your curriculum is something that you want to teach and it’s going to work for you and your students. So head on over to artsintegration.com forward slash artworks. Go ahead into this episode.

Grab all those wonderful resources that we have for you in today’s episode. We’ll have a list of all of the links that you can download to get all of those wonderful resources. And happy planning, happy curriculum planning. It’s a wonderful time of year to do this. And I am so glad that you are in charge of this process for our students because you deserve it and so do they. All right, until next time, I’ll see you on the next episode of Art Works for Teachers.

Curriculum Writing Checklist 

99 Driving Questions

Arts Integration Lesson Insertion