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Design Backward, Check Often, Know the District
Teachers turn curriculum into a day that works for thirty different people. Backward design starts from what students should understand and works back to the lessons. Formative evidence checks often and changes the next lesson because of it. And a school board decides what a district actually makes available: the books, hours, and people behind every plan. Former teachers and people who work for school boards are among the family members who have reviewed my laminated folios since I began iterating on the process in 2024.
Principles
Backward design
Understanding first, then evidence, then activities. The curriculum modules are built this way.
wiki: backward designFormative evidence
Frequent, low-stakes checks that change what happens next are one of the strongest levers a teacher has.
wiki: formative assessmentWhat a district makes available
Plans meet budgets, calendars, and staffing at the board table.
nsbaParallel and Competing Theories
Competing answers to what a school is for: a Brazilian challenge to lecture-and-memorize teaching, and schools built for distance and for freedom in Australia and India.
Freire’s critical pedagogy
Paulo Freire, teaching adult literacy in Brazil, argued against the "banking" model in which teachers deposit facts into students, and for learning through dialogue about the learners’ own world.
wiki: Paulo FreireSchool of the Air
Since 1951, children on remote Australian stations have attended class by two-way radio, now by internet: distance education as public infrastructure.
wiki: School of the AirTagore’s Santiniketan
Rabindranath Tagore opened an open-air school in Bengal in 1901, later Visva-Bharati University, teaching through nature, art, and freedom rather than rote.
wiki: Visva-Bharati