Fox Curriculum
Professional development
Adults are a harder room than teenagers. The session has to earn its time.
Professional learning for teachers and other adults, in three forms
Designed and handed over
I write the session, the materials, and the facilitator guide. Your own people deliver it.
Delivered live by me
I deliver it on site or over video.
Delivered online
It runs as modules people work through on their own schedule.
Every form is built the way a course is built: one outcome per session, the exit check written before the content, scaffolding that comes out on a stated schedule, and materials specific enough that a facilitator who was not in the design meeting can run them.
Adults arrive tired, they have heard a version of this before, and they will not tell you when you have lost them. They will start answering email. Designing for that means saying at the start what the session will make them able to do, cutting anything that does not serve it, and never spending forty minutes on something a handout could have carried.
Who it is for
- Schools and districts, for teacher professional learning that has to change what happens in a classroom on Tuesday, not only what people say on the way out.
- Edtech companies and publishers onboarding teachers to a product, or onboarding their own curriculum teams to a method.
- Organizations whose AI or technology training has become rollout: here is the tool, here is the login, adoption is up. Adoption is not capability.
- Faculty and staff being moved onto a system they did not choose. That is a trust problem before it is a training problem, and it is designed as one.
Topics the work draws on
From the room to the handover
- 1
Discovery
Discovery is on who is in the room and what they already carry. What adults already know is curriculum material, not a warm-up. A session that starts from what the room already carries covers more ground than one that assumes an empty room.
- 2
A session plan
The plan states the outcome, times every block, names every material, and states the preparation between sessions, so the next one can start on the assumption it was done.
- 3
The materials
The materials are decks, handouts, protocols, and a facilitator guide that includes the timing, the talk, and what to do when the room misunderstands.
- 4
A pilot where possible, then revision
A component cut by every pilot facilitator is a design problem, not a fidelity problem.
- 5
Delivery
Delivery is in the form you chose, with handover of everything so you can run it again without me.
In your hands at the end
- A session or series plan, timed to the block
- Participant materials and a facilitator guide, written for someone who was not in the design meeting
- An exit check for each session: what participants can do at the end, and how you will know
- For online delivery: the modules and the sequence between them
- A revision log after the pilot, naming what changed and why
Where this is not the right service
- A single session with no follow-through rarely changes practice. If one session is the constraint, we design what happens after it first, or I will tell you the session is not worth your budget.
- Compliance training that needs a certificate rather than a change in practice is not what this service is for.
How it is scoped
Live delivery is scoped by the day. Designed-and-handed-over materials and online delivery are scoped by the module. A series is scoped as one project with its pilot included.
Rooms of adults, and the guides written for them
A program written so another instructor could run it
Ten sessions for graduating seniors, every block timed, every material named, and the preparation between sessions stated. Run for two cohorts and rebuilt in full between them, with the six changes and the reason for each one recorded.
Read the facilitation guide (PDF) →Professional learning for practicing teachers
Multi-hour sessions designed and facilitated for teachers, the least forgiving audience I have taught, and an ethical edtech session delivered to school staff with a presentation outline, speaker notes, and a written reflection.
Faculty training at Haverford College
Teaching professors and administrators to use a student information system they did not choose. Nothing I said mattered until I could name exactly what the new system did for them, and until I had gone back and rebuilt the paper forms process so the thing they were asked to adopt was better than what it replaced.
Read the statement on colleagues and communities →Adult learners and new teachers
Two years advising adult graduate students online through entire degree progressions, and two incoming teachers mentored through their first year.
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 →