 Welcome to five more minutes useful videos and five minutes or less that support the teaching and learning of all students I'm your host Shelly Moore today's episode is called California dreaming. Nope. Just kidding curriculum dreaming Okay curriculum, you know the stuff It's all the goals and learning outcomes that society tells us we need to teach to the children What I didn't realize was that it is really important to not just know the goals in the curriculum I also needed to know how those goals in the curriculum were organized now If you aren't totally immersed in education You may not be super familiar with curriculum models and organization, but let's compare this is something that we might be more familiar With I want you to think about the self-help book sections that support us to become our best selves in many of these books There are great strategies. There's one that's referred to that's considered a habit of a highly effective person That strategy is called keeping the end in mind or an education is called backwards design Okay, so here's the idea You will have a better chance of meeting a goal if you a know what the goal is and B If you make a plan to meet it before you start so for example If I had a goal to go to California one day because everyone has a goal to go to California one day The chances of me getting there will be way higher if I know Where I'm going when I'm going how I'm getting there where am I gonna stay how am I getting home You quickly start to see how important the plan is if you want to meet a goal But you also realize that there's multiple answers to these questions in life and in education There can be multiple pathways to the same goal Which is great and it makes it responsive to the person who's trying to meet the goal This is a much more effective strategy than say if I for example Just decided to leave my house in Vancouver and just start walking north Hopefully finding my way to California backwards design is a strategy used every day and it ranges from travel goals to weight loss Schools, it's also used in many curricular organization models But here's the thing this is not a linear process and backwards design It's trying to aim to be responsive to the person meeting the goal But curriculum is often interpreted as the opposite very linear and not responsive It's totally standardized how I used to think about curriculum was like this Curriculum isn't a giant big red binder and in September I start on page one and when I'm done with page one I move to page two and then I get to June 20th, and I have a hundred percent pages left Well, what if I told you there's another way to read curriculum that better aligned with backwards design big ideas I want you to imagine that the curriculum is still a book, but the book is not a binder. It's a flipbook Do you remember these books? I love these books the flipbook It's still the same for everyone, but how it's read depends on who is reading it There are many ways to read the same flipbook So to make sense of this for curriculum The first thing we need to do is understand what the pages of the flipbook are These pages represent the different types of goals in the curriculum in British Columbia We have three kinds of goals. We have content goals. These are the goals about knowledge We have curricular competency goals, and these are the goals about skills and processes And we have core competency goals and these are cross curricular goals that support the development of the people that we need to become so that we can be Contributing members of the world all of these goals are organized around a big idea and these are the things We need to understand Although the book is the same for everyone the flipbook pages we choose can reflect the kids We are teaching and can be responsive to both their strengths and their stretches as Educators backwards design helps us to keep the end in mind by deciding what the goals are for a unit and how we can Teach them in responsive ways that allow students to reach these goals in multiple ways. I think this calls for some professional development in California Okay teachers parents students if you're watching this video I want you to go find your local curriculum, and I want you to look at how it's organized If you're not in British Columbia, these goals might be called different things But you will probably find that there's a lot of similarities And then I want you to think about how we can start to translate these goals to students and families So that they can see what they're learning because they're the ones who are meeting the goals They also need to know why we're going to California. Okay teachers Here's your job and do this together number one I want you to go choose some goals that reflect your students needs number two I want you to make a plan with multiple pathways so that all kids can meet those goals and number three I want you to share those goals with students and families so that they know what the plan is So that was our episode curriculum dreaming head on over to the website to see some examples of plans and stay tuned for the Video strategy about backwards design coming soon. Don't forget to subscribe to the email and the YouTube channel and the Podcast so that you don't miss any content. I'll see you soon friends