A Ten-Step Process For Developing Teaching Units C

GEOFFREY BUTLER, SIMON HESLUP, AND LARA KURTHUnited States and QatarA Ten-Step Process forDeveloping Teaching UnitsCurriculum design and implementation can be a daunting process.Questions quickly arise, such as who is qualified to design thecurriculum and how do these people begin the design process.According to Graves (2008), in many contexts the design of the curriculumand the implementation of the curricular product are considered to be twomutually exclusive processes, where a long chain of specialists includingpolicy makers, methodologists, and publishers produce the curriculum in ahierarchical process, at the end of which lies the teacher.The teacher’s role is to implement thecourse and use materials received from thespecialists. One weakness of this specialistmodel of curriculum design is a misalignmentbetween materials and the classroom in whichthey are eventually implemented (Graves2008). Common examples of these sortsof materials are the coursebooks that manyEnglish as a foreign language (EFL) schoolsand institutions rely on as the sole basis oftheir course syllabus (Cowling 2007). Whilecoursebooks can fit this role adequately whenthey are a suitable match for the contextand meet student needs, issues of alignmentarise when they do not meet the needs ofthe students and the goals of the institution(Cowling 2007).Mass-market coursebooks may not be asuitable match for a given classroom. Teachersmay supplement such coursebooks with theirown materials for a variety of reasons, amongwhich are concerns about methodology,content, language, or the balance of skillsnecessary to meet learning outcomes(Cunningsworth 1995). Coursebooks mayalso place a financial burden on students and2ENGLISH TEACHING FORUM2 01 5teachers (Richards 2001) to the extent thatthey may be too expensive for their targetaudience (Mack 2010). What, then, canteachers do when faced with a mass-marketcoursebook not specifically tailored to theirteaching context or possibly no coursebookat all? The answer, based on our experience,is that teachers in either situation can act ascurriculum designers themselves.There has been a movement in recentyears by teacher-practitioners to exertgreater agency over curriculum analysis anddesign (El-Okda 2005; Jennings and Doyle1996). Kumaravadivelu (2001) advocates apostmethod pedagogy where teachers “acquireand assert a fair degree of autonomy inpedagogic decision making” (548). He arguesfor a pedagogy that “is responsive to andresponsible for local individual, institutional,social and cultural contexts in which learningand teaching take place” (Kumaravadivelu2003, 544). While teachers should be awareof principles and practices from the field,“they rely mostly on context-sensitivelocal knowledge to identify problems, findsolutions and try them out to see what rum

and what doesn’t in their specific context”(Kumaravadivelu 2003, 544). According toKumaravadivelu (2003), teachers would notonly have agency to create curriculum, butwould be in a better position to address theconcerns of the students and the institutionthan would an international publisher.From September 2011 to the present, a groupof teachers at the language center of a nationaluniversity in Seoul have embraced their roleas curriculum developers and collaborated onthe creation, implementation, and ongoingdevelopment of a wholly teacher-generatedbackward-designed curriculum that targetsour students’ collective needs. The curriculumis teacher-generated in that we have createdall our teaching materials without the use oftraditional coursebooks, and it is backwarddesigned in that we began by identifying needsand learning outcomes before making allother curricular decisions. In the process ofimplementing and continuing this project, wehave devised a ten-step development process(Butler, Heslup, and Kurth 2014), based ona backward-design approach to curriculumdesign, to facilitate the creation and revisionof five-week teaching units for our practicalEnglish conversation courses.As Kumaravadivelu (2001) suggests,experimentation is part of teaching. It can,however, be frustrating if one lacks a meanswith which to process classroom experienceand use those experiences for curriculumdevelopment. Reflection allows teachersto avoid making decisions based on mereintuition, impulse, or routine (Richards1990; Farrell 2012). For this reason, weincorporated elements of the experientiallearning cycle into our ten-step process.Without it, we would not have been able tolearn from our successes and mistakes andmake informed decisions on how to revise andimprove our completed teaching units.The purpose of this article is to describethe concepts that guided the creation ofthe process, to provide a description of theprocess as applied to our teaching context,and to offer examples from a teaching unitthat was created and revised using the process.We write this article in the hope that thistool and our experiences using it may helpguide other educators who wish to designtheir own teaching materials or units, eitherto supplement an existing curriculum or asthe foundation for a new, completely teachergenerated curriculum.MAIN ELEMENTS OF THE TEN-STEPPROCESS TO CREATE AND REVISETEACHER-GENERATED MATERIALSThe ten-step process to generate materials(1) is intended for use by teachers themselvesto facilitate the creation of teaching units,(2) incorporates a backward-design model,and (3) assumes the importance of reflectionin teaching.The ability of teachers to createtheir own materialsTeachers are fully capable of developing theirown course curriculum (Graves 2000; Jenningsand Doyle 1996), and it is preferable for themto determine what does and does not workthrough direct study of the classroom itself(Kumaravadivelu 2001; Kumaravadivelu 2003;Nunan 2004). At our language center, teachersfound that our coursebooks would meet someneeds well, some needs poorly, and someneeds not at all. We saw a mismatch betweenthe perceived needs of our students and thecoursebook content. Since the coursebookcontent was not a perfect match for ourstudents, we were often forced to supplementheavily with our own materials. Sheldon (1988,238) suggests that teacher-generated material“potentially has a dynamic and maximalrelevance to local needs” when compared tomass-market publications. Indeed, we werealready supplementing heavily and wereeffectively creating much of the material usedin courses at our language center.We saw a mismatch between theperceived needs of our studentsand the coursebook -forum2015ENGLISH TEACHING FORUM3

A further advantage of creating our teachingunits and materials was the belief that “peoplesupport what they help to create” and willbe more invested when they participate inthe design and creation of the curriculum(Jennings and Doyle 1996, 171). We feel that alack of investment in and satisfaction with thecoursebooks (upon which the curriculum ofany given semester was based) made teachersat the language center adopt and discard themon a regular basis. This led to teachers havingto develop a new curriculum at the beginningof each academic year, or even at the startof each semester (Butler, Heslup, and Kurth2014). At the language center, the hope wasthat allowing teachers to create their ownteaching units and materials would increaseteacher investment, with the result of a morestable curriculum.Teacher-generated curriculum andmaterials also can be tailored to the goalsof the institution. For a language program’scurriculum to grow and flourish, thereneeds to be a dynamic dialogue between thestakeholder groups of administrators, teachers,and students (Brown 2001). At the languagecenter, student feedback prompted the directorto request teachers to develop curriculum. Shealso provided guidance regarding universityexpectations in regard to testing and ultimatelyapproved the project for wider implementation(Butler, Heslup, and Kurth 2014). Whilethe development of the teaching units wasguided by collective student needs, the processwas also open to input by administrators. Indifferent teaching contexts, other stakeholdergroups might be involved.“issues related to the content of instruction”were resolved (Richards 2013, 8). Because aprimary concern of the curriculum project wasthe needs of all students, we moved from thisforward-design model to a backward-designmodel. According to Wiggins and McTighe,backward design calls for us tooperationalize our goals or standards interms of assessment evidence as we beginto plan a unit or course. It reminds usto begin with the question, What wouldwe accept as evidence that students haveattained the desired understandingsand proficiencies—before proceeding toplan teaching and learning experiences? Greater coherence among desiredresults, key performances, and teachingand learning experiences leads to betterstudent performance—the purpose ofdesign. (1998, 8–9; italics in the original)Our backward design began with (1) the needs,then proceeded to (2) learning outcomes basedon those needs, followed by (3) test tasksbased on the outcomes, and finally (4) contentbased on the language skills necessary toaccomplish those tasks. This is certainly notan uncommon approach, as backward design“is a well-established tradition in curriculumdesign in general education and in recent yearshas re-emerged as a prominent curriculumdevelopment approach in language teaching”(Richards 2013, 20). Because a main goal of thecurriculum project was to enhance and providemeasurable learning outcomes for students’oral skills communication, the backward-designmodel fit in well with the ten-step process.The significance of reflection in teachingThe application of a backward-design modelAnother main element of the ten-step processis its backward-design approach to materialsand curriculum development. Prior to thecurriculum project, teachers would (1) agreeon a coursebook before the beginning of asemester, (2) select which chapters to teach,(3) decide the learning outcomes based on thechapters, and (4) create test tasks based onthose outcomes. In this way, we were followinga forward-design model where “decisions aboutmethodology and output” had to wait until4ENGLISH TEACHING FORUM2 01 5Reflection is the third main element of theprocess. We were inspired by Kolb’s (1984)experiential learning cycle of concreteexperience, reflective observation, abstractconceptualization, and active experimentation.We integrated Kolb’s cycle into a processof reflection on teaching, evaluation ofthe reflections, and revision based on ourexperiences. As Farrell (2012) stated whendiscussing the origins of reflective practice,the purpose of reflection is for teachers “tomake informed decisions about their ing-forum