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).

FIGURE 4.7 HMW Model

On the model you can fill in the last blank with whichever standards you are addressing. Whether you are applying a dimension of the inquiry arc from the C3 national social studies standards, the Next Gen science standards, the AASL standards, Common Core . . . you name it.

How might we transform our new curricula to help digital age students who need interactive, real-world experiences to demonstrate mastery of the AASL Curation standard?

Notice that the HMW question now includes our goal (new curricula), our assets and insights (digital age, interactive, real-world) and our constraint (the standards). With a little reframing of our mindset and a different fourth word we could use the standards as an asset. Try this version of the HMW question on for size:

How might we leverage the AASL Foundation: Curation to help digital age students who need interactive and real-world experiences to become engaged in their communities and take informed action?

These questions were derived from an examination of one of the student personas. Consider how the questions might differ if the assets and insights that inform its development were derived from one (or more) of the other student personas? How might we synthesize the students' strengths and the needs of multiple stakeholders to inform a comprehensive HMW question for our new curriculum? The more scrutiny of our stakeholders we undertake, the more potent our question will be for unleashing our creative ideation.

This model isn't intended to replace your curriculum mapping template. It is intended to help your team think divergently to consider and ultimately choose ways to complete that template that are unique and transformative of teaching and learning in your district. Whether you use a phenomena-based approach or essential questions and learning targets, a design thinking mindset and model will help you entertain learning experiences you might not have considered otherwise. It can also help you to think differently about the standards that are the basis for your units. Furthermore, the HMW question stem can help you to frame questions in ways that inherently invite student participation in not just finding, but executing an answer. Instead of a civics question such as "How are decisions made in a democracy?" Students could ask, "How might we include more diverse points of view in the decision-making process?" Now they aren't bystanders to decision making, they are decision makers.

STEP 4 IS TO DEVELOP A PROTOTYPE OF OUR BEST IDEA, FOLLOWED BY STEPS 5 AND 6 WHERE YOU TEST AND ITERATE ON THAT DESIGN BASED ON USER FEEDBACK

Applying this part of design to curriculum writing is likely the biggest departure from the processes you have previously used. Working in a space with your collaborative thought partners surrounded by white boards full of ideas, post-it notes, and sharpies, the idea on which your thinking has converged seems awesome. This moment of collective excitement about where your problem solving is headed is a priceless one because at this moment, after all of your research and brainstorming and yes, and-ing, it is hard to imagine someone—anyone—not liking what you are building. This is why a prototype, or a minimum viable product (MVP), is so important. This most basic model of the product you vision is necessary so that before you are too far down the development path you test your idea on real users; you find out if they want what you are designing and if they will use what you are building.

Prototypes can take many forms. Perhaps what comes to mind when you read that word is a new version of a backpack made from cardboard or the pipe cleaner and popsicle stick models from a makerspace. Maybe those makerspace models are animated with Little Bits. If you are old enough to remember Fred Flintstone's car, that too, is much like a prototype. A prototype is a model of an idea that gives beta testers an understanding of how the final product will function or the service it will provide. A prototype is meant to be discarded. A prototype for an app can be a paper version of the possible screens; when a beta tester taps the icon for the button on the paper screen, the designer presents the paper version of the next screen that would appear. The designer can ask questions of the tester: Why did you click there? What did you expect would happen? Or even, is that button where you expected it would be? Later in Case 11 you will read about Jen De Lisi-Hall's app and her beta test versions. Her first MVP was just a Google Sheet!

Think back on a recent curriculum writing experience you had. After you had identified the standards you would address in a unit, the unit essential question, learning targets, etc., could your team have benefited from stakeholder input? If you were revising the curriculum for a currently existing course, how might the process have been positively influenced by testing it on students who had completed the curriculum in its previous iteration? If you were writing a new course, who might the stakeholders be, and what kind of insight might you gain from testing a prototype with them?

A curriculum isn't a car or a backpack. You can't build a tangible thing out of cardboard or Legos. Unless you are building an online learning experience, a digital prototype or paper app screens aren't the way to go either. So how might a curriculum prototype work? Another method of prototyping is to create an experience. Create a video commercial for your course. What would the course "movie trailer" look and sound like? What highlights of the curriculum would you emphasize to show stakeholders you created this learning experience with them in mind? Could you create a mock lesson and role play how the curriculum would be implemented and show how learning is engaging and the content has real-world meaning and application? Even if the curriculum you are writing is being mandated by a higher educational authority, that is simply a constraint. Where in the design process can you find room to reflect the needs and interests of your stakeholders, and when and how can you get their feedback?

The purpose of the feedback at this stage in your design is to iterate before you deliver the product. On an episode of the podcast, Clever, when interviewing David Schwartz of HUSH studios, Designer Amy Devers commented that you can't cut a board and make it longer! I found that to be an amusing adaptation of the old proverb, "measure twice, cut once." Wisdom that applies to the built world, applies to our design as educators as well. User feedback—from parents at open house night, students in our classrooms every day, colleagues with whom we collaborate—is an essential component of purposeful responsive iteration. Feedback as part of a design cycle is not criticism or judgment. Design is messy and challenging. Candid feedback is the fodder for increasingly effective problem solving, for deeper empathy, and building the creative ideation muscles we all have.