​Once upon a time I had a summer job at a Girl Scout camp on Martha’s Vineyard, and my first season there was happiest of my life to that point. I found a community, good and lifelong friends, and an ethos of caring for an ideal, an enterprise of the heart and soul, that introduced me to the ways that “mission-driven” and “values-aligned” can shape lives.

I was staggered to discover, on the last day of the season, that the final night campfire of the final session was one of the most emotional events I had ever experienced. Later, when my late spouse and I worked together at Girl Scout camps she directed, this closing ritual, with weeping campers and weeping counselors, remained a powerful, often wrenching reminder of the strength of a community of purpose. As the last embers of the fire died out, the words of one song would hit me especially hard, and they have stayed with me: “This is so long, but not goodbye.”

For the Independent Curriculum Group, this newsletter is our final campfire. It’s a time to remember the great times we’ve had, to express our gratitude and deep affection for those who have supported us, and to make a wish. It’s also a time to look forward, to reassure ourselves that the mission and values of “independent curriculum” abide—not just in our hearts and minds, as touchstones of what the future of education ought to look like, but in the ongoing work and purposes of our new partners at One Schoolhouse.

So thank you, thank you all: to the educators and friends of education who have found resonance in our ideas; to the schools whose leaders have seen fit to join in our work; to those who have worked with us at our events and made common purpose with us; to all those whom I have gotten to know at Academic Leaders Retreats, at our conference presentations, and through our correspondence and conversations on policy, practice, big questions, and big ideas.

I also thank those who have given of their time and energy over the years first as the steering committee behind the body that became the Independent Curriculum Group and then as members of our board. Without your dedication, I would not be writing this almost twenty years after the idea of independent curriculum was born.

Above all I thank my predecessor, Bruce Hammond, whose idea the ICG was and who as executive director molded a loose bunch of starry-eyed idealists into a strong and purposeful nonprofit that has contributed much to the educational conversation. Along with Mark Salkind, our founding board chair, Bruce made the ICG a reality.

And in the spirit of looking forward, I must thank Brad Rathgeber, head of school at One Schoolhouse, and the One Schoolhouse board for recognizing our common bonds and for your willingness to help sustain our ideals into the future.

In accordance with final night campfire tradition, I offer a wish: I wish that our highest ideals as educators and their essence as expressed in the ICG’s Principles of Independent Curriculum might one day come to define the educational experience of every child, in every kind of school, everywhere.
The Vineyard Sailing Camp is closed now, but when old campers or staff get together we remember and honor what made the place and our times there so special. We can still sing the songs and feel the power of their words to take us not backward but deeply into ourselves and the sources of lifelong hopes and dreams that still energize and give purpose to our lives today and will continue to do so as long as we live.

This is so long from the me at the Independent Curriculum Group, but this is in no way a goodbye to the community of purpose we idealists have been and will ever be.

You will hear from us (and from me) and our ideals again, through One Schoolhouse surely, and perhaps even in the songs from your own past that still bring you hope and joy.

When we began our work online, we saw it as an opportunity to expand opportunities for students.   Instead, we learned early on that it was possible to use this new medium for faculty, too.

We quickly found five major benefits to doing so:
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1. Offering flexible timing.  Everyone who works in schools is incredibly busy! We can’t just drop everything and go to conferences when our 9th grade English class needs us, or attend webinars at the same time we need to have an urgent parent meeting. That gets frustrating, because educators are also immensely curious and want to continue developing their craft. Working in an online space provided educators with flexible opportunities to engage when they are able. It’s no surprise that our data shows that most work done in PD courses is done in the evenings and on Sundays!
2. Training on the job. Typical PD involves going to a conference and then trying to bring back an idea or two to implement.  Online PD is different--it happens over a longer time frame while the educator  is doing their regular job.  This allows online PD to be job-embedded, giving educators a chance to simultaneously employ skills they’re learning online, often while they’re getting real-time feedback from their online instructors.  That’s powerful.
3. Connecting schools. In independent schools, culture is king.  That can translate to a reliance on the way we’ve always done it at our school.  By connecting schools across the country and around the world, we’ve found that we can break down this barrier and help educators see the multiple ways of “doing school.”
4. Breaking down misperceptions of online learning.  When we teach faculty online, they learn that online learning can work… something many faculty are skeptical of, creating a willingness to experiment more in the platform.
5. Lowering costs.  PD can be expensive, especially when travel is involved.  Online professional development allowed us to bring deeper and richer experiences to educators at a lower cost.

As we started to get involved in PD, we learned how many great partners support the independent school community. They wanted to build the skills necessary to bring great content and learning experiences online. So we partnered with them. Over the years, we’ve built courses with NBOA, NCGS, the Independent Curriculum Group, Folio, the IBSC, NAIS, and many state and regional associations.  We’ve even helped bring schools’ PD programs online.

The connections we make with independent school educators every year have grown into a rich and rewarding web of relationships. We’ll continue to expand our professional development offerings over the next number of years because we’re committed to supporting the worldwide community of  independent schools.

​Boost your experience, connect with colleagues and learn from nationally recognized mentors this summer! With courses designed for new faculty, classroom teachers, administrators and department chairs, and topics on leadership, "big picture" school finances, goal setting, and relational teaching - this is your chance to learn something new: 

I spent a good decade of my career differentiating instruction for students with learning differences.  Drawing on the wealth of research, I dutifully created lessons with a range of learning modalities and designed units where all students had at least a few activities that suited them best. I’ll bet every teacher has done something similar. Here’s why this isn’t the best approach:  every student learns differently so differentiated instruction is highly inefficient.  

We all know the problem with differentiation:  all students -- regardless of whether they have a diagnosed learning difference or not -- still have to do a lot of activities that don’t all meet their needs, and the teacher exhausts herself to create a range of activities in the hope that there will be something for everyone.  But in reality, every student is unique. Even creating a robust station rotation won’t enable a teacher to meet every single student’s needs. Differentiation is a recipe for both student and teacher fatigue.  

This challenge is exacerbated by the reality that sometimes what we label as “learning styles” are not even innate, but are actually learned survival tools.  Lisa Damour, in her new book Under Pressure, describes a student making 50 flashcards for a test when she actually only has 10 words she doesn’t know; still, she reviews all 50 repeatedly because this is how she has learned to do school and because it earns teacher praise. (This example gets even more frustrating when you consider the research on the relative uselessness of flashcards in general!) There’s nothing innate about flashcard studying.  What is actually innate is the way we are hardwired to learn most effectively and efficiently; for most, it isn’t flashcards, but in a differentiated model, we honor difference by teaching every student to use every tool, regardless of usefulness to their unique learning needs. 

While well intended, ineffective activities (i.e.: flashcards) are compounded by the inefficiency of the learning routine in the differentiated classroom.  Some students need to read an overview to understand the context of a new skill, while others are better served by diving right into an activity and then learning the skill by trying it out, failing, and trying again.  Why should the student who likes to read or study first and then do problems have to do 20 problems to show she knows the new skill?  After reading and studying, maybe she can show mastery with just five problems.  And why should the student who would rather work through a problem set -- getting it wrong and reverse engineering the answer until she masters the skill -- have to read the chapter in the book before starting the problems?  Because, as dutiful differentiators, we do all things for all students and in return we ask all students to do all things we’ve designed.  

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.   Teachers can create pathways where students access new content and skills in the way that is most effective and efficient for them.  And a side benefit of these personalized pathways is that all those differentiated lessons transition nicely to optional pathways in a personalized paradigm, so this will be a housecleaning exercise for teachers making the shift.   

Learning Pathways -- where teachers design alternative pathways for efficiency, acceleration, and remediation -- motivate learners because they prevent stagnation, plug holes, and minimize inefficiencies.  They do this by giving students choice in what they learn and by inviting student voice into how they learn.  (It’s not as scary as it sounds.)  This keeps students engaged in their learning, ultimately increasing mastery, because they aren’t wasting time on things that don’t help them learn.  Pathways allow teachers to meet a range of learner needs because they give students multiple onramps to new content and skills. 

Any teacher with some basic edtech knowledge and access to the Google Suite or a LMS can create personalized pathways that leverage all the tools that the teacher has in her differentiation toolbox to make the students do meaningful, useful work via learning pathways.  Want to try it out?  Take a stale lesson, write every single activity on a separate sticky note, stack the sticky notes that essentially accomplish the same things (for example, listening to the lecture and reading the textbook), and let students choose just one activity from each of the stacks.  By personalizing instead of differentiating, you’ll gain 30 minutes here, 45 minutes there -- for you and for the students -- that you can now reallocate! The first time you do it, use that time you gained to ask the students to share their thoughts on the change.  

Differentiation had its place - it taught us to recognize that all students learn differently, and it helped us move away from the sage on the stage model.  But it’s time to move on from differentiated instruction.  When you stop differentiating and start creating personalized pathways for learning, you will infuse new life into your curriculum.

​Data should help you ask good questions. And, in our case, one of the first questions came in regards to an assumption that we made about time spent in online classes.  The chart above is from our student survey in October 2010.  We asked students how much time they had spent in their online course in the previous two weeks.  We were hoping to see alignment between student time and the expectations we had set with faculty (that coursework take approximately 7-8 hours per week or 14-16 hours over a two week span).

Certainly, much of what students reported was in line with this expectation.  But, much of it wasn’t too… About 30% of students reported spending either less than 10 hours or more than 18 hours in their online course.  We were expecting almost all students to be in one of two categories… what we got was a quick lesson that (duh!) students learn at different paces. When we dug deeper, we realized that there was no real connection between time spent and grades achieved either.  That helped us come to an understanding that became an advantage of the online learning space: time was more flexible than in the classroom learning space.

​We learned about other advantages of learning online early on, too.  This is Erissa, then a sophomore at Harpeth Hall School in Nashville.  Erissa enrolled in one of our first Alpha test classes, Genetics.  In late fall 2009, I travelled to Nashville with Erissa’s teacher to have conversations with administrators at Harpeth Hall, and understand their impressions of the test courses.

When we sat down with the Upper School Director, Erissa’s teacher noted how exceptional she was, telling the administrator that Erissa was the leader of her class, and that she was particularly impressive as a sophomore in a class where all other students were juniors and seniors.  The Harpeth administrator thought we were mistaken: “You must be talking about Katherine or Julie?” No… we were sure, Erissa was the leader. “Erissa never says a word in class,” the administrator told us.  

This was our first of many lessons that the online learning space was particularly good for introverted students.  Online learning spaces offered time for reflection, and for students to engage when they were ready to, instead of when the teacher wanted them to.  Erissa had the time and space to reflect and engage on her terms, and thus blossomed as a leader.

We’ve continued to learn and grow over the years, as we’ve reached more and different types of students -- from younger learners, to students with learning differences, to boys (yes, we did start without an all-gender division), etc.. This month, you’ll continue to hear our lessons in this regard, and learn where we’re going to continue to grow.

School desperately needs a design revolution.  Since Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe published Understanding by Design in 1998, we’ve been on the slow boat to backward design. (Even though the term was coined in 1949 by Ralph Tyler, classroom teachers have only really been thinking about it for two decades). The problem is that most teachers believe they are designing backwards already.  But designing for what teachers think should be taught yields very different outcomes from designing for what we want learners to learn.  So why do schools still build march-through-the-content syllabi when what you design backwards from is as important as the process itself?  

At One Schoolhouse, our teachers do not start their course design process by creating the course syllabus.  The first thing they do is create a course map, where they develop three to five competencies that students will master.  A competency is an aptitude (or collection of skills) that captures our values and is measurable. The next step in course mapping is to determine the skills to be scaffolded and the evidence that will show measurable progress towards mastery. Our teachers also design assessments that result in the creation of authentic artifacts of mastery and determine pathways students may take in each learning cycle.  One of the last things that they do is backfill with the content needed to master the course competencies.  Does the subject-specific content still get learned? Absolutely, but it isn’t the design-driver because amassing knowledge is not a competency in most of our classes.  

Let’s take a moment to address those courses where the lower level Bloom’s skills -- “to know” or “to understand” -- do show up in one of the competencies, and explain that we are secure with the belief that knowledge is absolutely essential at some point in every course.  When committing facts to memory needs to be elevated (in Art History, for example), the teacher uses project-based learning techniques so that the knowledge attainment is a necessary component of the process. When knowing specific content needs to be a measurable outcome (in classes culminating in an AP test, for example), then the skill of standardized testing may show up as a piece of a competency.  

As a supplemental online program, most students are attracted to our courses for the subject-specific knowledge they hope to attain. Our goal is to leverage that curiosity into enduring ways of thinking and doing -- rather than transitory exposure -- so that we can send students off with a lifelong skill.  This is the essence of designing backwards from competencies: turn passion into permanence by designing backwards from that which abides.