Fox Curriculum
Curriculum and course design
A course that can survive questions about sequence, format, budget, and evaluation before a line of student-facing copy is written.
What it is
Curriculum built from the outcome backward. I start with what a learner has to be able to do at the end, write the check that would show it, and then design the sequence that gets them there: course map, scope and sequence, unit and lesson architecture, materials, and the assessments that belong to each unit. Every piece is aligned to the standards the course has to answer to, and the alignment is written down where a reviewer can check it rather than asserted in a cover letter.
The work ranges from a six-week suite to a full-year course, and from a design document your team builds from to a finished course a teacher can run on Monday.
Who it is for
- Publishers and edtech companies building courses, units, or supplements for schools, who need a design that holds up in a scoping meeting and in a classroom.
- Schools and districts adding a course from nothing, including courses that need external approval before they can be offered for credit.
- Programs with an existing course that is not producing what it was supposed to, who need it rebuilt around what students are actually leaving with.
- Teams designing for adult learners, where the room arrives tired, has heard a version of this before, and will not perform engagement it does not feel.
The route, in five steps
- 1
Discovery
Discovery establishes what the learner has to be able to do, who is in the room, what already exists, and what the constraints are: calendar, budget, format, approval.
- 2
The map
A design document specific enough to defend in a scoping meeting: the outcome or compelling question, the standards it serves named on page one, the week-by-week progression with the demand each week adds and the scaffold it removes, the print and digital split, the production schedule, and the evaluation plan. You push back on the map before anything is built.
- 3
The build, in reviewable stages
Units, lessons, materials, and assessments, with the exit check written before the content in every unit. Universal Design for Learning is designed in from the first draft rather than added as an appendix: the standard does not move, the route to it does.
- 4
Approval, when the course needs it
The submission package and the revisions to carry it through, whether that is a University of California a-g review, a district course adoption, or an internal review board.
- 5
Handover
The course in the formats your team uses, with a teacher or facilitator guide written so that someone who was not in the design meeting can run it, and someone who inherits it next year can revise it.
Standards and frameworks
College Board course and exam descriptions for AP World History: Modern, AP United States History, AP European History, and AP Psychology. California Visual and Performing Arts standards. Common Core State Standards for ELA and Literacy in History/Social Studies. The C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards (National Council for the Social Studies). Universal Design for Learning (CAST). University of California a-g course criteria.
If your course answers to a standard not on this list, I read it before I quote the work.
How it is scoped
Discovery is one conversation. The map can be scoped on its own, so you can stop after the map if the project changes. Builds are scoped per unit or per course. Approval work is scoped by the review it has to pass.
What arrives on handover day
- A curriculum map or design document, the piece that gets reviewed before building starts
- Scope and sequence, with the standards alignment shown unit by unit
- Unit plans, lesson plans, and student-facing materials, at the level of detail the scope names
- Assessments and scoring guides for each unit, built to the stated outcomes
- A teacher or facilitator guide
- The approval submission, where the course needs one
- An evaluation plan: what evidence will show the sequence worked, and what decision each piece of evidence drives
Where this is not the right service
- If you already have a course and want to know whether it teaches what it claims, start with Assessment and alignment.
- If what you need is a slide deck to accompany a textbook, I am not the right fit, and I will say so in the first conversation.
- Elementary curriculum outside the performing arts, and courses in mathematics or the sciences, sit outside the range I will claim.
Courses that were built, reviewed, and run
Digital Music and Production
A full-year visual and performing arts elective for grades 11 and 12, designed from nothing for a school with no music program to build on, with a California VAPA and Common Core alignment matrix across four units and a 20-day minute-by-minute plan for the first unit. Submitted to University of California a-g subject-area review and approved on the first attempt with no revisions.
Read the proposal (PDF) →What Do We Give Up?
A six-week interdisciplinary suite on trade-offs in civic and economic decision-making for grades 8 to 12, mapped across all four dimensions of the C3 Inquiry Arc, with Universal Design for Learning as a design constraint, a week-by-week scaffold-removal schedule, a print and digital component spec, an eighteen-week production schedule with external collaborators named, and a four-question evaluation plan.
Read the map (PDF) →College Prep Intensive
A ten-session program for graduating seniors, built backward from one outcome, admission to a postsecondary institution, and written so another instructor could run it. Run for two cohorts and rebuilt in full between them, with both versions kept. 90% of participants were admitted.
Read the facilitation guide (PDF) →Ten courses in total
From quarter-length arts courses to a two-year literature sequence and a semester course in Holocaust literature. Each one was checked against a source document before it went in the catalog.
Read the project catalog (PDF) →Tell me what you are building.
Courses, assessments, a product that has to teach something. Send what you have and I will tell you what it needs.
Start a project →