Cheryl, Julie, Darren, and Kai. Those are our teacher personas. Have you written curricula before with a team like them? Can you imagine being on a curriculum team with them? I hope so! Perhaps they are coming to this collaborative curriculum team aspirational with the best intentions for a comprehensive curriculum that adheres to requisite standards. Maybe they are driven by a hope that this time, the curriculum created will match their pedagogy and beliefs about good teaching practices and content interest areas. While we consider the members of the curriculum writing team, also keep in mind the students—the ones who will be learning via the curriculum outline; they are Zach, Emma, and Adrian at the secondary level or Jay, Antonella, and Jocelyn at the primary level. How might the curriculum be designed to reflect their interests, skills, community, and needs?

STEP 1 IN OUR DESIGN PROCESS IS TO IDENTIFY A PROBLEM OR GOAL

Our goal is to develop a new curriculum guide. Step 1: Check! When curriculum is being written, or rewritten, usually it is because there is an opportunity to fill a niche or update how a school approaches student skill development and content mastery. Maybe a new course has been approved in your school or new standards have been released for your discipline or a new standardized assessment is being introduced at your grade level. Either way, a somewhat external factor has forced your team to reconsider what you do, how you do it, and what you ask students to do.

As part of curriculum writing teams over the last three decades, I have seen two possible outcomes to the well-intentioned and focused work of these teams: creating something that looks and feels a lot like what we already have and do (staying in our comfort zone) or shifting how we think about our students' processes of learning and demonstrations of learning, which results in something new, untried, and either exciting or scary depending on the mindset of the teacher who receives the curriculum and is charged with implementing it. Granted, there is a middle ground between these outcomes. Maybe the new curriculum is comprised of three familiar, rehashed units from pre-existing documents and one new, "out-there" unit. Maybe the team consciously chose to write only one risky unit, because they thought about the teachers who would be implementing it and decided any more than that one unit would be too hard to sell. That unit alone might be asking a lot. I think you get the idea: writing curriculum is an opportunity to reexamine what we do and why we do it. It is an opportunity to stop and reflect on who our students are as learners, today, which differs from the students we had five years ago, ten years ago, and certainly differs from whom we were as students back in our primary and secondary years. It also requires us to confront ourselves and ask of ourselves and each other, what are the limitations in our point of view when it comes to this process? Like Julie, are we invested in connectedness yet reticent to see and use technology for collaboration? Or are we like Darren, comfortable with technology but worried more about the political maelstrom incited by some of the content. Or perhaps we come to the team like Kai, experienced, with lots of ideas, yet feeling like an outsider on multiple levels. We design as a team so each of us can push other people past their comfort zone while allowing ourselves to be pushed out of ours.

STEP 2 IS TO DEVELOP EMPATHY WITH THE STAKEHOLDERS IN OUR PROCESS

The students are significant stakeholders in our work. Yes, the teachers, administrators, parents, and boards of education are as well. Students outnumber them all. Students are the direct recipient of the learning experiences our new curriculum enables. So, who are they? What do they think and feel about school? What do they say about the processes and content of their learning? What do they do—both at school and in their free time? Choose one of the student personas to examine, and use the "brain" organizer on the next page to guide you in unpacking who this student is as a stakeholder in the curriculum we are going to write. You will find a blank organizer that you can reproduce and use with your design teams (bit.ly/SHorganizer) as well as the completed one that can serve as a model (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2).

Figure 4.1 Understand Your Stakeholder

Figure 4.2 Student (Benjamin) Completed

Now, with all the prognostication about the unknown jobs of the future and the rapidly changing skill sets necessary for that future, we might then keep in mind that we are writing curriculum to be delivered to students whose skill sets and needs will be evolving in ways that we can't necessarily predict. The curriculum must evolve just as the students must develop habits of mind that include flexible thinking, adaptability, comfort with ambiguity, intellectual curiosity, and creativity.

Are you starting to see a problem? Moore's law has come to education. Gordon Moore (cofounder of Fairchild Semiconductor and CEO of Intel) made a prescient observation in 1965. In a nutshell, Moore said that the capacity of integrated circuits was going to double every year. Which means the computing power doubles every year while the cost goes down. Whether you were in elementary school in the era of the dial-up modems or the era of the iPhone, you have witnessed this exponential change. In education this means that the acquisition, processing, and conveying of information is changing at an exponential rate. And we are trying to write curricula that have relevance and staying power. This is a blessing and a curse.

OK. So we have a problem. It's messy, unpredictable, and complicated. And if you walk around inside it for a while it's also exciting and provocative. Can you see that? Can you feel the potential inherent in the challenge? We are going to write curricula to satisfy standards and tests we didn't create to be delivered to students whose world is changing so rapidly we can't predict their abilities and needs. At Future Design School (futuredesignschool.com and @fdesignschool) they have a mantra for this step in the design process: "Fall in love with the problem, not the solution." That's what we are going to do now.

STEP 3 IS TO MAKE INTERPRETATIONS ABOUT YOUR STAKEHOLDERS AND YOUR PROBLEM BASED ON THE INSIGHTS YOU GAINED FROM YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

What assets have you identified? What concerns do you have? What surprises did you encounter? When you consider all of this information, you can build a problem statement and then build the key to problem solving: your "How might we . . ." question.

If you are using this text to guide you through your curriculum writing process, you need to identify the constraints within which you will be designing. Usually, we think of constraints as limiting and reductive of what we could do without them. Let's shift that mindset. Constraints are what will prompt us to think beyond our go-to measures and find wild, outlandish ideas that just might be the key to our new curriculum being a vibrant, relevant, and living document. So what is a constraint? To start, standards are constraints. So is the length of the school year or the duration of a course. So is the budget. Here is a template (bit.ly/ProbAssetQ) that you can reproduce and use to guide your team through the interpretation phase: identifying and describing your problem, incorporating your assets and insights, and the first draft of your "How might we . . ." question. As with the previous organizer, there is also a completed version of the template to serve as a model for you (see Figures 4.3 and 4.4).

Figure 4.3 Problem Template

Figure 4.4 Problem Template Completed

You might already have noticed that Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of this book are introduced by a question that begins with the phrase "How might we . . ." and I think it is important to examine the construction of that question stem. "How" is inherently a problem-solving orientation—it puts us in a solution-seeking frame of mind. "Might" is mighty. Please don't use the word "can" in its place. Might has an important impact on our solution-seeking frame of mind. It opens our thinking to possibilities, not current realities. "Can" asks us to consider what we already know how to do. "Might" helps our thinking diverge to a range of ideas that are unexplored and ripe for innovation. And "we." Design, as we have discussed, is a collaborative process. No one person is responsible or able to do this alone. Parts of the process (as we will see with brainstorming in the ideation phase) are about divergent thinking, so the more diverse the team the better. Others are about convergent thinking so the team has to hash out ideas to reach agreement. It is the combining, rehashing, recombining of insights, talents, experiences, and ideas of the team members that results in a solution that exceeds what any individual team member could accomplish alone. How. Might. We.

At this point, you have a few drafts of HMW questions. Now we are going to refine them by considering how the needs of our stakeholders and our constraints intersect. For this step, there is another reproducible template for you to use with your design team (bit.ly/HMWCopy) as well as a completed version to serve as a model (see Figure 4.5). Between those two illustrations you will find a list called "The Fourth Word" (see Figure 4.6). We've already unpacked how, might, and we. Next is the fourth word, and your choice of verb for the fourth slot will unleash your assets and insights to overcome your constraint (see Figure 4.7).