Cynthia Ahlquist

Editor • Content Designer • Word Nerd

High School Curriculum

Situation

Our organization had curricula for early learning through Grade 8, but not for high school, so we built this program to fill that gap. The development process for the program was challenging, and five months before it was slated to launch, new instructional designers and researchers were added to the team. They determined that the structure of the program and lessons wouldn’t work and that the scope and sequence needed to be revised, which meant that the entire program needed to be revised.

Task

I was asked to join the team to collaborate with the researchers and instructional designers as they rewrote. My roles were to edit the program, coach the instructional designers and researchers on language issues and help them if they got stuck, write UX copy, and serve as content manager.

Actions

  • I worked extensively with the instructional designers and researchers to ensure the program language was accessible, age-appropriate, and consistent with the other products in the line.
  • I collaborated with instructional design, research, and the visual designers to create a process for moving all the content through production and ensuring that all checks were done.
  • I edited the entire program, from the lessons to the research and citations to the video scripts.
  • I created a detailed style guide for the project.
  • I led a workshop with the product team to create a voice guide for the product
  • I documented rules for UX copy in tandem with UX designers.
  • I added, organized, and managed program content in the CMS/LMS.

Context

The program included three types of activities:

  • Schoolwide practices (led by administrators and done throughout the school)
  • Educator practices (done by educators to increase their own efficacy)
  • Student activities (done with students to support skill use)

Activities are divided into collections, and each of the activities consists of three main sections:

  • Why This Matters (research behind the activity)
  • Instructions (how to do the activity)
  • Guiding Questions (reflection questions for after the activity)

To see more of the program than what’s captured below, check out the program description page on the org website and a webinar created by the education partnerships team.

What I Did: Collections

I collaborated with the instructional designers to write short copy describing the purpose of each collection and what activities it held.

Web page showing the activities in a collection, along with descriptions of each one

Positive Self-Talk Educator Practice:
Guiding Questions

I worked with instructional designers to ensure these questions were relevant, not repetitive, and would inspire thoughtful answers.

The educator-facing section of a student lesson on positive self-talk. It asks educators to reflect on three questions.

Data-Collection Modal

Schools and districts need to know how many of the activities are being implemented for data-collection purposes. Often this is tied to funding. I worked on the UX copy for this modal. We needed a quick, easy, nonjudgmental-sounding way for users to report the extent to which they used the activity. The “most” and “some” buttons required some explanation, since those terms mean different things to different people. In the final version, “skipped” wasn’t capped in the last button, and there were no quotation marks around the name of the activity.

A modal in a high school curriculum with buttons for educators to use to indicate the number of classes in which they used an activity called Positive Self-Talk. The button choices are "All," "Most," "Some," and "I Skipped It."

Results

In spite of reorganizing and rewriting the entire program, we hit our deadline and began to get data. At the time of my departure, data hadn’t been collated yet.