Teaching can often feel like climbing Mount Everest. There’s just so much to do, and sometimes it can feel like an insurmountable job!
When I first started teaching online, I created my own curriculum. I used YouTube and Google Docs to kludge together something that worked: Here’s the oldest video that I still have online from 2010. It’s pretty bad!
I loved building curriculum, and despite the clunky construction and poor-quality videos, it worked pretty well. During the years I used it, I kept updating and improving it, putting in untold hours of work on this passion project. I was always striving to make it great, but never quite arriving.
And then, the district I worked in significantly rewrote the curriculum expectations and the type of students entering my classes changed. This was a tough blow because my custom-built curriculum just wasn’t going to work anymore.
This felt, to me, like the efforts of George Mallory to climb Mt. Everest in the 1920s. He attempted to ascend to the summit three times, getting closer each time. He may have even made it on his last attempt, but unfortunately, he died on the mountain. There are those who argue that he may have been the first person to make the summit, but we just don’t know for sure because he didn’t survive the return trip.
In the decades since George’s attempts, more than 6,500 people have made the summit of Mt. Everest. So what has changed?
Lots of things — better gear and clothing, more ladders, dedicated sherpa guides — but one key is the starting point. When climbers go to Mount Everest, they will start at one of two Base camps. South Base Camp is in Nepal at an altitude of 5,364 metres (17,598 ft), while North Base Camp is in Tibet at 5,150 metres (16,900 ft).
The summit is at 8,849 metres (29,035 ft), so climbers now start more than halfway up in terms of elevation. These base camps allow climbers to rest for several days and acclimatize to prepare for the climb.
Without these base camps, far fewer climbers would succeed.
So, how does this compare to my writing curriculum? When I had to change my curriculum, instead of starting from the bottom and slowly working my way up again, I went and found my base camp to help me climb my Mt. Everest. I found StudyForge courses and used them as my starting point. It made a world of difference. Instead of having to suffer through those videos I made with a lousy camera, with me using a marker and drawing on a desk, my students got to experience better quality video, clearer audio, and more pedagogically sound teaching. On top of that, there were more auto-graded quizzes. Instead of having to wait for me to mark quizzes, students got instant feedback. I also got feedback more rapidly and with less of a time investment than what I had from my old course.
By starting with a pre-made curriculum, I began way ahead. I was halfway up the mountain from day one with a Sherpa guide: StudyForge. I was still able to bring all my experiences and teaching talent to the table since the courses were fully customizable, but I didn’t have to create everything from scratch.
Here are a few examples of what this let me do:
- When I was building my own curriculum, if I created a sub-par lesson, my students were stuck with it. I didn’t have the time to address the problems because I had to make sure the next lessons were ready. When I found a weak lesson in a publisher-made course, I had the capacity to supplement it with additional resources, or even, in the case of StudyForge, I was able to edit and customize lessons based on what my unique students needed.
- When an event or topic was current or timely, I could spend the time researching to add it to the course. The best example was when we were studying civics, and an election was running in my jurisdiction.
- I could take one topic from the required topics that I was passionate about and invest in the lessons to ensure students had the best experience possible. For me, this was the foundational elements of Algebra.
- By using a published curriculum, other voices and perspectives besides my own widened the experience that my students had. They were no longer limited to only what I knew or thought.
- I spent more time and energy giving students rapid and timely feedback on their work, allowing them to learn more.
In the end, my students benefited — which felt like getting to the summit of Everest to me.
I was afraid of using a premade curriculum. Only when I was forced to make the change did I discover how powerful it was to have the advantages of using a combination of pre-made curriculum and my own best work to make a great learning experience.
Don’t be afraid to use a pre-made curriculum to give you a leg up; you, too, could reach the mountaintop.
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