Tuesday, July 9 at 4:30pm
Presenters
Trish Cloud & Melody Lam
Summary
We covered how as a large urban K12 district (140,000 students, 20,000 staff) -- Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools -- ensure that our stakeholders (students, staff, parents) get access to an equitable curriculum, especially after what we learned about blueprinting after the pandemic.
Details
As a district, we found that during the pandemic, we had varying levels of quality to our blueprinted courses. Some of our curriculum designers were creating blueprints on the fly, causing issues with teacher courses as blueprints shifted around items during flight. Some gave us the kitchen sink, the plumbing, and the whole house in the course, while others gave us barely anything, which caused issues with courses loading or teachers not getting the resources they needed to facilitate the course. Games of telephone were played with expectations for blueprints.
During the 2022-2023 school year, our district embarked on a large project to ensure consistent, equitable blueprints. We first moved all curricular materials into a shared drive -- so if someone left the district, the items were still accessible. Next, we established a consistent home page, provided Instructure lead training for our curriculum specialists so that they had a baseline knowledge of effective course design, and ensured that all courses met our district expectations. Finally, we instituted a process to blueprint courses in a sustainable way to ensure that as courses got created teachers got content in a timely manner.
Conclusion
We found that this process was effective in ensuring equitable curricular materials were being provided. Teachers were more likely to use the blueprint in teaching their courses, as they were provided with their materials to facilitate instruction in the classroom and also had easy access to teacher resources as needed. This especially helped in situations where a long term sub or new teacher was stepping into the course mid year. Materials in both Canvas and Google Drive were now secured and safe. Having clear communication and expectations allowed for the process to be completed mostly in a timely manner.
Our future considerations include being able to blueprint earlier, working with our Student Information Systems (SIS) team to ensure an early rollover process, and blueprinting other required but not SIS created courses to ensure that they also have an equitable curriculum.
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