Curricular design is incredibly important to me. It is the landscape on which I build my practice. In the smaller contexts of my academic discipline and my classroom, curricular design is the structure or foundation upon which things rest. Curriculum, both intended and implemented, is the path that my colleagues, my students, and I continually get to create and re-create, design and redesign. Professional development, while more abstract, is space in which I seek to improve my practice as both a teacher and a school leader. As I mention numerous times within the context of this portfolio, teaching is a collaborative act, as is professional development.
Curriculum & Discipline Design |
The Right Questions, Learning by Doing, and Making Connections
Understanding and Navigating the Modern World
Over my career at EPS, I have taught 18 different courses and 10 distinct seminars, along with mentoring 20 independent studies, and 3 senior theses. Currently, I teach a series of trimester-length courses focused on theory and application. These courses include Undercover Economics, Evolution of Society, and Topics In Urban Planning & Community Design. Each of these classes is interdisciplinary in nature and ask students to think about theoretical models that frame human experience, and how exploring those models might help them better understand and navigate the modern world.
With the exception of Evolution of Society, which I wrote with Jonathan Briggs and the, American Studies Program which I constructed with Elena Olsen, I authored and designed each of these courses (see table). As the school’s student and faculty populations have grown, I have had the opportunity to collaborate on each of these courses with different colleagues, introducing them to the core content and skills for each course. My assumption, expectation, and experience have been that collaborating with my colleagues on these courses brings them to the next level of quality and relevance.
At the core of each of these classes is the understanding that students need to understand and be able to navigate the world in which they live if they are going to improve it. This is a direct reference to the school’s vision statement, Inspiring students to create a better world. Because of their relevant nature, these courses rarely look the same from term to term, or year to year. While there are core and foundational ideas and content that students are focused on, often class design and experience are explorations of what is happening in our current, contemporary context.
Pedagogical Tenet #1: Inquiry
As mentioned earlier in the Pedagogical Effectiveness section, when designing and implementing courses like the ones referenced above, I utilize unit/module plans. On average EPS courses meet 24 times per trimester, and within a single course, I tend to build two to three units/module plans that vary in length between 8 and 12 class periods.
Module plans afford me the opportunity to think thematically over a span of class sessions, and tactically about what each class might look and feel like for teacher and students. As Socrates is known to have said, “questions cause a tension in the mind.” In this vein, several learning theories purport that students are more genuinely engaged when they are pursuing and asking questions that are worth answering.
I design module plans that are focused on central or guiding questions like, What are the elements of and obstacles to high quality urban design? Guiding questions inform my decisions on what topics, concepts, or skills will be engaged over a number of class periods. Underneath the central or guiding question, I use more granular questions to guide weekly topics, specific class sessions, and in-class activities. (see image)
Pedagogical Tenet #2: Experience
When thinking about student experience in the classroom, I often map back to a question asked by one of my long-time friends and colleagues, Adam Waltzer. Years ago, Adam shared with the upper school faculty that one of his guiding questions in curricular design was, What are students doing? He explained that this simple question takes the onus off the teacher as central in the classroom, and places that focus on what students are doing as they construct their own understandings of course content and mastery of course methods.
In each of the courses I teach, I employ this question to ensure that during each class period students are engaged in actively constructing their own knowledge. In Undercover Economics, students participate in a simulation for a market for crude oil, and in another class period engage Garrett Hardin’s 1969 text, The Tragedy of the Commons, in the context of a student-led Socratic seminar. In the Evolution of Society, students construct punctuated equilibrium diagrams on topics they self-select. In Urban Planning, students start each class presenting on different topics from Biomimicry in Urban Design, to case studies comparing different cities in different historical contexts, to constructing urban segment designs based on GIS data.
Pedagogical Tenet #3: Integration
When thinking about integrations/connections I approach them from three levels:
- Connection between course content/skills and what students are interested in or have potential to become interested in;
- Connection between the course content/skills and the modern world outside of the bounds of school;
- Connection between course content/skills and other academic disciplines and/or EPS classes.
Concepts are the building blocks of language, and one of the most powerful currencies for integration on any of the integration levels articulated above. In my classes, I focus on helping students build strong conceptual understandings to establish foundational ideas in each subject area, and to create opportunities for connections inside and outside of the classroom.
To introduce the method of concept formation, I often use the simple, familiar concept of a shoe to simplify for students how concepts can be thought about, constructed and deconstructed, and connected to other concepts or contexts. When examining or building a concept, I ask students to think about what the primary function of a concept is, and what the essential and non-essential attributes are.
For example, a shoe’s primary function is to protect the foot. The essential attributes of a shoe are (1) a sole that has the function of protecting the bottom of the foot, and (2) a fastener or upper, that has the function of fastening the sole to the bottom of the foot.
I then identify non-essential attributes of shoes like heels or decorative elements to emphasize what is essential and non-essential. We then apply the concept formation process to better understand concepts that are core to our course, modules of study, and daily class experiences.
In the context of environmental economics (see Card 1), I model for students how I deconstruct the concept of The Tragedy of the Commons by identifying more essential concept attributes like:
(1) actors
(2) actions, and
(3) positive and negative outcomes
I then ask them to apply that conceptual framework to new scenarios in their personal lives using analogy to reinforce the concept.
Module Design Workshop
In the 2018-19 school year, I began using design forum sessions in the context of the EPS Curriculum Committee, where we invited faculty to bring major assignments and/or modules of study to get feedback from colleagues. When modeling this feedback process, I used the module progression in the Urban Planning course. Originally, this course was designed in three separate modules; with the third module focused on a Major Assessment (MA: Urban Segment Design/Redesign) nested in the final three weeks of the class.
During this design review session, the group of colleagues reviewing my modules, dialogued on what might make the course better. The conclusion was that the MA: Urban Segment Design/Redesign should not be a postmortem assessment in the final two to three weeks of the class but should span the entirety of the course; the project could become a term-long module running concurrently with the two other modules. This would give students the opportunity to work on different elements of the project while we were taking on those elements or topics in the course.
This approach raised the course design and student experience to a next level of complexity, where students were able to both explore core course concepts and apply them to their perception of lived experience in specific parts of the City of Seattle.
Once I made this adaptation in my course design, the result was student products that were a far more thoughtful, nuanced, and integrated set of urban design segments.
Current and Future Practice
| Indicator | Area of… | |
| F.1 | Designs and implements courses that reflect teacher mastery of their academic discipline and its teaching methodologies | Strength |
| F.2 | Designs and implements courses framed by the school’s pedagogical tenets – inquiry, experience, and integration | Strength |
| F.3 | Collaboratively designs and evolves course curricula that are reflective of their academic discipline’s philosophy and derivative of the school’s overarching philosophy | Strength |
| F.4 | Updates course content to reflect the contemporary world | Strength |
Reflection
Curricular design is one of my strengths. One of the reasons for this is that my design of course modules, projects, and class experiences is rooted in my personal and pedagogical values; and in turn, these values are aligned with EPS’s pedagogical tenets.
As an educator and leader, I am a constructivist who believes that true knowledge is lived. Where I found little in my own high school experience that helped me understand the world, how it works, and how to navigate it, I work daily to make sure EPS students are asking questions that are worth answering, learning by doing, and making connections between their course experiences, their personal interests, the world outside of school, and other academic disciplines and courses in the EPS curriculum. My future plan is to continue to leverage this strength to grow domains that I have determined are areas of improvement in this portfolio process.
Program & Professional Development |
Professional Development
I have been organizing and coordinating Program Development Days (PDDs) at Eastside Prep since the 2008–09 school year. To date, we have used the moniker program development to capture on-campus work and collaboration done maintaining, sustaining, and evolving course curricula and program elements. In the early years at EPS as we worked to build out a full school program, program development was the lions share of what we focused on, including smaller faculty collaborations, academic discipline group work, and program development days. During these years, a primary part of my role was constructing PDDs and presenting during them on topics from inquiry, to assessment, to differentiation, to integration.
In tandem, we have used professional development, the more traditional concept used in schools, to define the development of each individual faculty member and their teaching craft. In the early years at EPS, professional development was referred to as individual faculty development that was done off-campus. As our faculty has grown and the program has come into greater form, we have started to dedicate more time to on-campus teacher development. Examples of this are Evolution of Instruction Presentations and the work done by portfolio feedback teams connected to the Professional Development Project (PDP).
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT (ON-CAMPUS)
Evolution of Instruction Presentations
One of the mainstays of teacher development at EPS are Evolution of Instruction Presentations, a term coined by Jonathan Briggs. The purpose of these presentations is to cross-pollinate our professional community with new ideas and techniques.
One of my favorite things about teaching is the creative process connected to developing new classroom methodologies and activities that reflect current cognitive research, and activities that are rooted in students building their own concepts, skills, and working understanding. I enjoy the challenge of presenting to my high-bandwidth and creative colleagues. The positive pressure of a performance moment and the robust feedback that they provide keeps me in a growth mindset as I am looking to continually improve my practice and craft.
Visiting Thinkers
Over the last 16 years, I have had the opportunity to interact with and hear from a number of prominent thinkers. Sometimes they have been thinkers that we have invited to the EPS campus as part of our Visiting Thinker Program, and at other times, visiting different thinkers at venues in the Seattle area.
Each of these experiences has improved my thinking and my teaching practice. With regard to how I think about how students learn in the classroom, John Medina’s lecture at EPS connected to his book, Attack of the Teenage Brain, had the most substantial impact on how I think about teaching and learning. His lecture at EPS was incredible as he spoke about his research findings and employed those findings in the structure of his talk.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OFF-CAMPUS)
Over the course of my 16 years at Eastside Prep, I have attended and/or presented at a number of external conferences. Attending external events and connecting with professionals in education and other industries off-campus has a fourfold effect for me, providing opportunities for:
- Connecting or re-connecting to a professional community or network beyond our professional community at EPS;
- Establishing tighter connections with EPS colleagues with whom I attend conferences;
- Introducing me to new theories and approaches to classroom teaching and school leadership;
- Sharing and crystallizing my own professional concepts and approaches when I present at conferences.
Leadership & Innovation
| Title | Organization | Location |
| Academic Leadership Retreat | The Independent Curriculum Group | Seattle, New York City |
| The Design of Business | The Business of Design Conference | Design Observer | MIT, Boston |
| Presenting Data and Information Workshop | Edward Tufte | Seattle |
| NAIS Yearly Conference | National Association of Independent Schools | Seattle, Las Vegas |
| NWAIS Fall Educators Conference Presenter: Academic Program Design (with Sam Uzwack) | Northwest Association of Independent Schools | Tacoma |
| The College Board Yearly Conference | The College Board | Seattle, New York City |
Teaching and Learning
| Title | Organization | Location |
| NEXT Conference Presenter: Building Experiential Learning Opportunities (with Jonathan Briggs) | Northeastern University | Seattle |
| Innovative Learning Conference | Nueva School | Bay Area |
| Learning and the Brain Conference | Learning & the Brain | San Francisco |
| NWAIS Fall Educator’s Conference | Northwest Association of Independent Schools | Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Redmond |
Working in an independent school like EPS is an intense and rewarding experience; and it is essential, at points, for me to leave my own headspace to disrupt and evolve the patterns of thinking in my professional practice. I have distinct memories of each of the conferences listed above and the specific ideas that I absorbed and brought back to EPS to improve my practice, the EPS school program, and EPS as an educational institution.
Current and Future Practice
| Indicator | Area of… | |
| I.1 | Participates actively and constructively in Program Development Day activities | Strength |
| I.2 | Presents during Program Development Days and conferences | Strength |
| I.3 | Takes advantage of professional development provided by the school | Strength |
| I.4 | Identifies and pursues professional development opportunities appropriate to enhancing effectiveness as an educator | Strength |
Reflection
As our faculty and its collective knowledge has grown, I have had the opportunity to move from a primary presenter on PDDs to a session participant who learns from and with my colleagues. The number of faculty members who present during PDDs is now a metric for the success of those days.
I am a lover of new and innovative ideas and approaches; they are essential for the evolution of my practice, and my students’, engagement, growth, and improvement. I look forward to continuing to learn and improve from my colleagues on-campus at EPS, and in the broader world of education and other spheres beyond EPS.