I’m excited that I was asked to co-facilitate a graduate level class next year with a colleague. The course is meant to be an introduction into curriculum and instruction and instructional leadership, and it is the initial course in a framework that provides potential leaders with the ingredients to move into a variety of different administrative roles.
The course has been taught by a number of different facilitators, and therefore, one of the first steps for my current co-facilitator and I was to acquaint ourselves with the layout of the course via the past syllabus. The next step? To design learning outcomes.
We both believe in the importance of starting with the end in mind, so we spent a number of hours today during a great planning session considering and finalizing our thinking for learner outcomes. If these work for the frame of the program, then we’ve basically built the skeleton for our course (thereby giving us the foundation for drilling deeper into the assessments and class-by-class explorations).
In thinking about the planning session, two ideas occurred to me. First, it was a reminder of the value of truly planning ahead. While the course doesn’t begin until September, we both value timely prep, and see the merit in laying things out way ahead of time (including a class meeting schedule, which we worked on as well).
The second idea was the fact that starting with outcomes is the only way to truly plan. Sure, we can build off of great activities, but in doing so, we make it impossible to build the continuum from start to finish, and therefore, don’t do justice to a focus on growth in content and skills.
After leaving this planning session, I realized how much I’m looking forward to this opportunity, and I also have a clearer picture of where we hope to be going!