One of the priorities that quickly surfaced when I joined my current school was the need to document our curriculum. We had the default Understanding by Design (UbD) planner which Jay McTighe had left us when he ran a workshop here a couple of years before my time, but we hadn’t yet successfully documented our curriculum.
I’d been working with curriculum-related processes for years, and I have to admit I’m a documentation-nerd. I can’t stand bureaucratic documentation which is just there for the sake of it, but I love being able to take a look at everything when it’s a meaningful process and well put together, and get a sense of everything that is going on across the school. So, I met with my MS colleague (I was HS Principal at the time but almost all our staff were shared across the two sections, so it was essential we collaborate as much as possible) as he was in charge of the documentation process.
We planned a process for our limited faculty meeting time, leading people slowly but steadily through the task in bite-sized chunks, giving them enough time to be sure of where they were going each time and to get started enough so that they could work independently outside of this meeting. Rather than tell people to go away and focus on one unit at a time, as they’d been doing previously, we’d work through a whole year/course at a time, but stage by stage. We’d start with identifying all the unit titles and the Knowledge/Skills/Essential Understandings for each unit, and we’d document how much time each unit would need – that should be straightforward as it could come primarily from guiding syllabus documentation. Once that was done, we’d move on with the Essential Questions, and so on.
We knew we’d need to facilitate more meeting time to actually get the work done, but we anticipated some people would roll with it and we’d get some momentum on this project.
Yeah. That didn’t happen. Schools are busy places, especially when you’ve just arrived, and so many other things piled up. We kept slogging away at it, allocating time where we could, but no momentum built up and it was hard to work out why. But as I continued to learn and understand, it became clear that there were some fundamental conceptual elements to UbD planning that weren’t well understood, and people were struggling because of this. A step further back and a look at the overall situation, and I concluded that assessment was what was getting in the way.
Okay, new year, new focus. We’re tackling our assessment. Improve our understanding in this area, and we’ll get better traction with the planning process. I went away that summer, did the PTC Assessment Leadership in the International School course, and returned all fired up and raring to go…….
Working your way to the core of an issue always reminds me of ogres. Shrek, in particular. Issues/Ogres are like onions. Not because they smell bad, but because they have layers. The problem is that it can take quite a long time to find the core of the onion. They can be a bit like the TARDIS – bigger on the inside than on the outside.
I hadn’t yet found the core.
Writing to Think 
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