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When a curriculum doesn’t recognize the needs of learners’ lived experiences, it sets them up for failure. Everyone in a college classroom comes to a learning experience with, for better or worse, prior experiences in learning and current experiences that they’re living. If they’re not being treated like humans living lives, because we know that emotions are connected to learning and motivation, they are less likely to succeed. By goal setting definitions and also institutional ones, we can design for learners to the best of our knowledge, but unless we are actually in that classroom with them, the best people to adapt a curriculum for individual students is in fact their instructors.
Designing a shared curriculum in ways that leaves space for adaptation to the lived experiences of students is paramount to student success. In order to create learning experiences that benefit and support successful teaching and learning, we need to consider designing not just for the content or for our students, but also for the person teaching as well. And that means leaving space for instructors so that they can adapt based on their own previous experiences. Tapping into their expertise and experiences can really promote instructors to share their excitement with their students. At minimum, letting instructors incorporate their own stories and examples will provide material for socio-emotional connections between instructors and students. And you can do this by having explicit instructor note sections with suggestions for areas where they can add their own things, building that you could bring your own experience here in an instructor manual. This might look like providing samples, but labeling them with this is an example. This is trying to explain this to students and why finding resources that are credible is so important. Feel free to use your own, just be sure that it has the same goal of driving home the importance of credibility in sources.
So this is an example of how you might take a sample and identify to instructors where they might fit because instructor autonomy is critical to good teaching. Leaving space for instructors to make shared curriculum their own, in a way that doesn’t drown them in additional labor, is sound teaching and solid administrative practice that will really overall improve the teaching and learning processes in our classrooms. That might be a tall order, but there are key pieces that will help create those flexible and adaptable instructor spaces.
Things we design, whether that’s the next big TikTok trend or a full-blown curriculum, are going to be used by other people — and it’s highly likely they won’t be used the way we intended. Recognizing that people are on the other end of our curricular designs raises an obvious question: who are they? Shared-curriculum users largely fall into two categories: learners and instructors. Knowing this gives us the ability to design with them in mind.
Curriculum is sometimes designed around WHAT needs to be learned rather than WHO needs to learn it. Focusing on the who means wondering about learners’ contexts, how their previous experiences shape their learning, and how they will experience the curriculum. Most activity-based lesson plans do this well: they design time and space for students to do work and ask questions tied to the overall course goals, scaffolding students toward what they are meant to get out of it.
But curriculum designed around who is learning doesn’t always account for who is teaching it. We’ve both spent years teaching at community colleges, and we’ve lost count of how many national conference sessions assumed we had computer classrooms — access that’s still far from guaranteed, just as it’s a mistake to assume every student owns a laptop. That gives us two main principles for designing shared curriculum:
- (Re)design with the end users (at minimum the instructors, ideally the students too) in mind; and
- Account for a variety of users by building in flexibility and adaptability.
Instructional design scholarship increasingly acknowledges the need for user-centered design. Much of it, though, focuses on instructional designers collaborating with individual instructors while treating the student as the primary user (Phommanee et al., 2023; Troop et al., 2020). With shared curriculum, both the instructor and the student are end users, and both should be consulted in a robust user-design process (Mitchum, 2023; Mitchum & Rodrigo, 2021). In the next lesson, we’ll explore some practical considerations of user-centered design in more detail.
Instructor Autonomy
Emphasizing the need for instructor autonomy in shared curriculum is something we’ve studied and published on for a number of years (Mitchum, 2023; Mitchum & Rodrigo, 2021; Rodrigo & Ramirez, 2017; Tsetpsura & Rodrigo, 2024). First, and foremost, instructors need to be able to adapt both the course design and the course content to the specific context of their course. They need to be able to connect course content to the contemporary realities of the world (Öztürk, Yaylak, & Zayimo?lu Öztürk, 2021; George & Aasi, 2024) as well as provide individual students with flexibility (Troop et al., 2020). Providing flexibility might look like adding placeholder text with “you might change X to Y, or Z or A.” It might look like offering multiple built out assignment options and giving reasons to assign each one. It might look like giving instructors space and tools to accept late work from students. And obviously, providing flexibility includes suggesting when and where to provide personalized announcements. There’s a lot of ways that providing flexibility might look. Thankfully, general scholarship about good teaching necessitates the need for instructors’ adaptability in supporting student success.
George, J., & Aasi, P. (2024). WWC: Leveraging extreme events in teaching. Information Systems Education Journal, 22(4), pp 73-83.
Mitchum, C. (2023). Promoting instructor agency & autonomy with pre-designed courses. In J. Borgman and C. McArdle (Eds.), PARS for writing programs (pp. 208-223). WAC Clearinghouse.
Kendall Theado, C., NeCamp, S. (2021). Working with and against Shared Curricula. Perspectives from College Writing Teachers and Administrators. New York, United States of America: Peter Lang Verlag. Working With and Against Shared Curricula: Perspectives from College Writing Teachers and Administrators (pp. 29-44).
Ozturk, T., Yaylak, E., & Zayimoglu Ozturk, F. (2021). Use of current events in teacher education. Journal of International Social Studies, 11(2), 11-35.
Rodrigo, R. & Ramirez, C. (2017). Balancing institutional demands with effective practice: A lesson in curricular & professional development. Technical Communication Quarterly, 26(3), 314-328.
Troop, M., White, D., Wilson, K. E., & Zeni, P. (2020). The user experience design for learning (UXDL) Framework: The undergraduate student perspective. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 11(3).
Tseptsura, M., & Rodrigo, R. (2024). FAQ: Developing & maintaining shared curriculum. Writing Program Administrator Journal, 48(1), 30-46.
Discussions
Share an experience when you had to pivot away from an assignment or course plans you had already developed. Why did you need to change the assignment/course? How did you change the assignment/course?
Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.