Hello

I began my teaching career covering another teacher's maternity leave. The next year, I moved to a brand new high school in the second-largest school district in Illinois. As a new teacher at a new school, I was given the opportunity to develop my own lessons and activities with little knowledge of what was happening outside my classroom in the rooms next door. Over the years, though, I learned the importance of collaboration. I learned the benefits of seeing how other teachers interpreted the content and the satisfaction of helping new teachers as they entered the classroom for the first time. Eventually, I began to lead a team of Geometry teachers at my large school. We would create and adapt tests and materials in order to have cohesive content across our classrooms. I found I enjoyed sharing my lessons and ideas with the group, and I found that they truly appreciated my contributions. 

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As Common Core standards were rolled out in Illinois, I spearheaded the adaptation of the standards at our school before there was much content available for the standards. This meant it was on me and my team of 8-10 teachers to interpret the standards and develop curriculum and content that would align. This was a huge learning opportunity. I began to work tirelessly to adapt old lessons, but also develop new lessons that highlighted new connections emphasized within the standards. I realized that while the old Geometry standards emphasized traditional proofs, the new standards had a focus on transformations as the basis for proving several components of Geometry, while still leaving room for traditional proofs as well as constructions as methods used to support what we found to be true in the transformations.

 

After adapting the content at our school for several years, I was asked to collaborate on a district team. The administrators at the district level wanted to make sure that all five high schools were correctly aligned with the standards and that we were creating equally rigorous content. Our goal was to create common rubrics and assessments for each unit. We began our task by diving into the standards at a level that I had not previously seen. We broke apart the standards into action words and created levels of understanding. As a math teacher, I appreciated this logical approach, and my knowledge for curriculum development grew, as did my interest in it. 

 

As the district curriculum team was finishing its work and winding down, the pandemic hit. Instead of curriculum writing, my new focus was changing all of my printed material to digitial-friendly formats and creating engaging online activities. I found I enjoyed the new challenge of digital content creation as well. I found a freedom in the creativity of developing new methods for teaching online. I had a passion for learning new technologies and sharing them with my content teams. I looked forward to creating digital lessons and seeing how my students would explore and engage with them through different collaboration tools.

 

As we moved back to in-person learning, I began to feel a pull from outside of the classroom to a place where I could continue to focus on curriculum creation. Instead of curriculum creation and digital content being one aspect of my job, I decided that I wanted it to be my main focus. I feel like my experiences seeing the evolution of the standards through the years and the change in technology are the things that have driven my interest in focusing on Curriculum Development, but they are also the things that have made me a great Curriculum Developer in the past as well as giving me the skills to be a great Curriculum Developer outside of my district.