I love to write. I love to learn. I love to teach. For me, creating curriculum combines all of these things. As a teacher, I had many opportunities to write lessons and assessments, but I also found opportunities while working in business settings to create manuals and instructional materials that made processes clear, improved communication and increased productivity.
Instructional Design
Value: Essay Writing Unit; Technology Aide Training Manual; Student Enrollment Manual; Billing Manual; Grammar & Writing Curriculum
Role: Instructional Designer, Curriculum Designer
Deliverables: videos, step sheets, curriculum, assessments. syllabus
Essay Writing Unit
I was the 6th, 7th and 8th grade English Language Arts teacher at the Newark Digital Academy, a school that offered digital homeschool curriculum and virtual on-line learning. Based on data taken from standardized test scores and personal observation of my students, I saw a need for essay writing instruction. I created an essay writing unit that taught my students how to write a five-paragraph essay. The unit consisted of videos, lessons, projects and assessments. I hosted these on the digital curriculum platform that we were using called Odesseyware. The unit consisted of ten lessons that walked the student through the five-step writing process and writing each part of an essay. First, students learned what an essay was, then they learned what a prompt was and how to distinguish between expository and persuasive prompts, then they learned how to write an introductory paragraph, then a body paragraph, and then a concluding paragraph. Finally, they revised and edited their essay for a final product.
This is how the unit appeared in the students’ digital curriculum. Clicking on the title of the lesson opened the lesson and allowed students to begin working. Hosting my curriculum on Odysseyware required me to learn their Learning Management System. I learned how to write my lessons in their software, assign points to my lessons and assessment questions, and how to create different types of assessment questions, ie. short essay, multiple choice, true-false, multiple select. I learned how to upload the lessons, change the order of my lessons (6th graders finished this unit in three weeks vs. two weeks for 7th and 8th graders), and how to use the different assignment formatting, for example projects were formatted differently than lessons so they opened in a different order and the grading was weighted differently.
Research
Before I wrote my lessons, I spent a lot of time researching. I looked at how other curriculums taught essay writing. I looked at other middle school curriculum, but I also looked at college websites to make sure I was preparing my students for the future.
Videos
I created five videos: What is an Essay, What is a Prompt, How to Write an Introductory Paragraph, How to Write a Body Paragraph, and How to Write a Concluding Paragraph. Research shows that a student’s attention span starts to wander after five minutes, so I made sure to keep my videos around that length. Because my videos had to be short, I used concise, clear explanations. I also used visuals such as color coding types of sentences. I used the same colors throughout my video series which kept my instruction consistent and helped with recall.
Assessments
After watching the video, the students took a short quiz to assess their understanding of the video content. These are screenshots of how the quizzes appeared in Odysseyware.
Writing
The students then wrote the portion of the essay covered in the lesson.
I gave the students feedback on their writing, giving them the opportunity to revise and edit their paragraphs. By the final lesson, the students had written and revised a five-paragraph essay. After teaching this unit to my middle school students, I was very pleased to see standardized test scores rise. I was thrilled to see my students’ confidence in their writing skills increase, as well.
Technology Aide Training Manual
The Technology Aide position at Granville Intermediate School encompassed a host of responsibilities from working with students, to making presentations on software programs like Power Point, to proctoring standardized tests and caring for over 600 computers used for testing. I created a training manual that helped new technology aides know what duties were assigned to them and how to perform those duties, where to find resources, and how to use software programs.
Step Sheets
Teachers had access to a number of software programs but were not using them with their students. They didn’t know how to create accounts, navigate the programs or create exercises. I made step sheets for each program that gave clear instructions on how to use each application.
Student enrolment Manual
I was a GED instructor for the Licking County Joint Vocational School. When a new student enrolled in the program, there were a number of forms that needed to be filled out and tests that were administered to the student. There were no formal instructions as to how to enroll a student or fill out the forms. Each GED teacher was doing it differently. Required forms were not being submitted or they were being completed incorrectly. The school was losing funding because of this. I created a manual that put all the forms in one place with instructions on how to fill the forms out correctly. I also included instructions on how to test the students and place them in the correct curriculum.
Billing Manual
Communications Options, Inc. was a small telecommunications company that offered long-distance telephone services to its customers. Each service came with several options and features. Charges were determined by the combination and number of services and features ordered. The software program to enroll new customers was complex. There was high turn-over in this department and the Billing Manager was spending a lot of time continually training new assistants and answering questions. I designed a manual that walked the Billing Assistant through the process of enrolling a new customer, choosing the correct services, options and features and making sure each customer was charged correctly. Because of this manual the Billing Manager was able to decrease the amount of time it took to train an assistant from over two weeks to just one day.
Grammar & Writing Curriculum
I was hired to teach a grammar and writing course for the Central Ohio Technical College. However, when I received the course materials, I found that the syllabus did not teach writing in a logical manner and that the textbook was difficult to understand. I redesigned the course writing all of the lessons, exercises, and assessments and creating a new syllabus.