Episode 79: Behind the Scenes at a Curriculum Development Agency

In this episode, I take you behind the scenes of what it's like to work at and run a curriculum development agency. I started the Educator Forever agency a couple years ago, after being asked to take on very large projects that one person couldn't take on on their own. For example, I was asked to create a whole year long curriculum for all grades pre K to five in all the subject areas. That's not a project that one person should be doing. So I realized a few years ago, oh, I could bring on other curriculum writers to help me with these projects and create our own curriculum development agency.

So listen in as I walk you through what it’s like starting this agency and working with lots of different educators turned curriculum writers. I realized that there were some key skills that educators need to learn in order to be successful in curriculum design. We are always learning new things when we work in curriculum and when we do anything else.

Join our curriculum program here!

 

Topics Discussed:

  • How we cater our curriculum to teachers’ needs

  • All the different kinds of skill sets needed for creating curriculum

  • The importance of style guides

Resources mentioned:

Related episodes and blog posts:

 
 
 
 

Read the transcript for this episode:

Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.

In this episode, I take you behind the scenes of what it's like to work at and run a curriculum development agency. I started the Educator Forever agency a couple years ago, after being asked to take on very large projects that one person couldn't take on on their own. For example, I was asked to create a whole year long curriculum for all grades pre K to five in all the subject areas. That's not a project that one person should be doing. So I realized a few years ago, oh, I could bring on other curriculum writers to help me with these projects and create our own curriculum development agency. And that process has really been super rewarding. Because not only do I get to take on large scale, really cool, engaging curriculum projects, but I also get to mentor and support different curriculum writers. 


So today I walk you through what it’s like starting this agency and working with lots of different educators turned curriculum writers. I realized that there were some key skills that educators need to learn in order to be successful in curriculum design. And we are always learning new things when we work in curriculum and when we do anything else. 


But starting off, I realized that I was training people on the same things over and over and over again. So that's really why I started our curriculum development Foundations program a couple of years ago: to train educators how to be curriculum writers. And now many other graduates of the curriculum program we bring on to help us on the agency side of our business. With these curriculum projects, knowing that these people have already been trained, they have already gone through the process. So that's all to say, a huge part of working out our agency is mentorship, but is really training educators to become better writers and is making sure that our curriculum is really aligned to what we believe and know about education. 


The first question that I'm going to answer is just what do we do? What do you do at a curriculum development agency? At our agency, we take on large scale curriculum projects. So those projects could be creating 500 lesson plans, creating 200 slide decks, educational slide decks, creating 1000 Worksheets. Some projects have included creating a year-long curriculum for an edtech site focused on homeschooling families, developing supports for multilingual learners for a textbook company, and creating social justice oriented lessons for a nonprofit, as well as many other projects. But often we work with nonprofits. So we work with larger educational organizations, we work with edtech companies to meet their curriculum needs. And in everything we do, we provide solid writing skills and pedagogical foundations. This is really where the experience of being a teacher is key. Having that knowledge of what works in the classroom is the best foundation to be able to create curriculum from everything else you can learn. You can learn the writing skills, you can learn the curriculum frameworks, you can learn the different approaches. But having that base of educational knowledge is such a key part.


At our agency, we love to create lessons that inspire kids to love learning, are based on research and are supportive to teachers. Because we know that when we have strong curriculum, it makes a teacher's life easier. So then thinking about who do we work with on the client side, I've kind of covered that. But our clients run the gamut from ed tech companies to school districts to educational publishers, nonprofits, but our team actually includes far more than just writers. We also have editors on our team who work with the writers and provide feedback, and who really edit the product so that they can go out there in the world and be high quality and cohesive. And honestly, when you have many different writers working on a project, it's the editors job to make to make it seem like these lessons or curriculum were written by one voice, even when they may have been written by 15 different writers. And so an EndNote really holds all of that they really think about the project cohesively. 


They communicate all that information and style guide stuff but to writers, you might not know what style guide stuff is. So let me tell you real quick. When working on curriculum projects, you often will have guidelines that tell you exactly how to complete the project style guides that tell you about how to write it in a way that will be cookie except for the project. So sometimes that might be bold that the first time that you mentioned this title, or it might be, “hey, we always include this table for standards, or we italicized when teachers talk.” So these things vary from project to project. And when you come on for curriculum projects, you will get on boarded and oriented around all these guidelines and style guides and all the things which can feel overwhelming at the beginning, but actually are really supportive and necessary. So I digress to tell you about style guides. 


 And now we'll go back to who else we work with on our team. So we have Adler's we have writers, we also often have graphic designers that we work with. So for example, if we're taking on a project that includes creating lots of different worksheets, we do not expect that writers will be able to design these worksheets. We have a whole team of graphic designers who make the editor or the writers vision come to life. And those graphic designers really are a key part of creating a polished product. I know when I started in curriculum design, I was intimidated by this idea of graphic design, because I'm not naturally inclined to do graphic design. And luckily, in my entire 15 years in curriculum design, I have never had to do graphic design. So if you feel like that's not your skill set, it's not something you're interested in, don't worry about it, you could still totally be a curriculum writer or a curriculum Edler. And know that you can collaborate with designers to really bring your vision to life. We also have project managers, those project managers keep everybody on track. They assign different assignments to writers and editors and graphic designers. They hold deadlines from our clients and make sure that we are on track. So know that if you join a curriculum team, you will have support from many different people playing many different roles. You don't have to do all those roles yourself. But if you're interested in working on in curriculum, you could think about which roles feel like the best fit for me, would I like to be a writer would I like to be an editor would I like to be a graphic designer would I like to be a project manager, or some combination of these things, you really get to decide. And so thinking with that, where you might want to land within a curriculum company, I want to dive into a day in the life. And so a day in the life of working out of curriculum development agency is probably going to be a little bit different depending on the role that you play. But given that there many simultaneous projects going on, you're a day in the life might look a little differently every day. I like that because I get to take on a different project one day, move to another project the next day. But just know that varied nature is pretty common. A lot of your time as a writer will be spent heads down writing, really getting things out writing it, I want to say pen to paper, but not done on pen and paper or writing it on your computer. But really spending a lot of time crafting your work, a lot of time to is spent implementing feedback. And so you will get feedback from your editor, you will get feedback from your clients. And they will give you guidance on how to make your writing better. This is sometimes a learning curve when you transition into curriculum design. Because as educators, we are not used to getting feedback in this way. And it can feel hard not to take that feedback personally. But feedback is truly how we grow. And getting that feedback is so essential to growing as a curriculum developer. So really normalizing that process, there's always going to be constructive feedback, you are always going to be able to make your writing better. And that is part of the process. 


And so a day in the life is a mix of working independently and collaborating with other people. And the ability to hop around maybe if you're working on several different projects that can keep things interesting. So if you're interested in working in curriculum development, there are agencies like our own, who take on many different projects and hire curriculum developers. There are also ed tech companies and educational publishers and nonprofits and school districts who hire curriculum developers directly. And if you're interested in really building your skills to be successful in curriculum design, I would dive into curriculum frameworks and pedagogy and research that align with your educational philosophy. So you can get clear on why you would develop curriculum in the way that you're you would you know, be able to talk about it be able to understand the bigger why and implications of the way that you're crafting your lessons or your curriculum. I would also


really work on developing some samples that show your work that align with your beliefs about education, and that you can really use as examples when you apply for jobs in curriculum. If you want support with both of these things, our curriculum development Foundations Program was created just for that to really support educators to transition from working in the classroom to working in curriculum design. You get feedback from expert curriculum coaches through the program who give you guidance on the samples you create, and really make sure they're stellar, so that you can use them to find and land jobs beyond the classroom. We get into all sorts of curriculum frameworks and approaches and research and pedagogy so that you can build off of some of the amazing thinking that's gone on around curriculum design, and really create informed intentional lessons and pieces of curriculum. So we'd love to have you check it out. If you're interested, you can go to educator forever.com/curriculum And I will also put the link in the show notes


Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Lily Jones