A few years ago when I worked for New Visions for Public Schools, we created an open-source curriculum to support teachers with understanding and implementing some of the instructional and curriculum shifts the Common Core standards required. 8 years later, that curriculum was the 6th most popular curriculum in US high schools, with nearly 6% of high schools surveyed indicated they were using it. The leading curriculum in the US only had 6.8% of schools reporting usage. At this point, this curriculum no longer had a public website and had to be shared person to person in Google Drive.
Why was this curriculum so popular? It has features similar to the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum but that’s hardly unique. The curriculum we wrote wasn’t even totally complete as there was many gaps in content coverage in the Geometry and Algebra II courses.
My suspicion is that our curriculum was popular for three reasons. First, we were a solid and coherent curriculum and not just a collection of random resources. Second, we had designed flexibility and formative assessment into the curriculum. Instead of providing a single pathway for teachers, we provided a set of core resources and supplemental resources to allow teachers to “choose their own adventure”. Finally, and probably most importantly, we provided our resources in a format that can be edited and included a license that allowed edits. So many other curricular resources are locked in PDFs that cannot be edited and in some cases, cannot even be printed.
What I’m working on
I’ve been working on a project to develop a set of similar structured and free, open -source curriculum for the IB Middle Years Programme, aligned to the AERO international math standards. The goal is to provide a curriculum that educators can modify and adapt to meet their local needs by default. Where I will make a return on my time investment is by providing professional learning and adaptation services related to this curriculum to schools.
So far I have created a visual representing the connections between AERO Math standards, and grouped those standards into units for each course (Year 1 through Year 5). For each unit, I have broken the units into big ideas, representing a week’s worth of instruction, and broken those big ideas into daily goals, both carefully aligned to the standards themselves. Everything lives in Google Docs and is carefully linked and organized. My next step is to write assessments aligned to the MYP criteria (Knowing and Understanding, Communicating, Investigating patterns, and Applying mathematics in real-life contexts). Once I have the content in place, I will then layer in the key concepts, global contexts, and approaches to learning (and probably iterate on some of the assessments as a result).
The plan for licensing this work is to use a Creative Commons, Attribution Required, Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. This will allow educators to make changes and share those changes with others, but not to post the resources on Teacher’s Pay Teachers or create a paywall preventing access to the curriculum.
A call for contributors
If we look at other open source projects though, they benefit from collaboration from other educators. I’m putting out a call to all IB Middle Years Programme educators who would like to contribute to this project. Contributions can be small, such as testing out resources pre-publication, to being full editors and curriculum authors.
Contributors will get acknowledgement of their contributions, and with sufficient contribution, licensing agreements can be made to allow for authors to provide “add-on” services on top of the curriculum (such as consulting or curriculum adaptation services for schools).
If you are interested in contributing to this project or have ideas on how to make it better, feel free to contact me privately or leave a comment on this post. Everyone who expresses interest will be put on an email list, with the ability to leave any time.
