USD 365 is excited to announce that we are transitioning from Build Your Own Curriculum to a local Curriculum Mapping Process housed in Google Sheets.
Build Your Own Curriculum is a Web-based curriculum development program that allows the district curriculum to be live and accessible to everyone at any time. BYOC was specifically designed by educators to meet the needs of students, parents, administrators, and teachers. Parents have the opportunity to view curriculum, assignments, and standards from home, work, or the library. Students can look at the standards they're expected to learn and master, see class activities, and retrieve the resources they'll need to complete their work. Teachers can locate current curriculum requirements and resources, to easily update and customize their lesson plans in alignment with district standards and expectations. Administrators can gain instant access to the learning paths in each building, grade, and classroom—and view this information by standards, by teaching objectives, and by key concepts.
Transition from BYOC to Google Template Information
In order to increase meaningful engagement with the curriculum development process, in Spring 2024 the District Curriculum Team voted to transition from the Build Your Own Curriculum (BYOC) platform to a Google Template which allows for the same components that were offered in BYOC but used Google Sheets as the structure.
The ELA teachers in the district piloted the Google Template along with the textbook adoption in the 2023-24 school year. The teachers working with the pilot found that the Google Template was much easier to work with and still allowed for collaborative conversations as they built their curriculum. With their input, in the Spring 2024 the District Curriculum team voted to make the transition from BYOC to the Google Template. The Transition Team, which includes administration and staff from each building in the district, met in the summer of 2024 to finalize the Google Template and ensure each of the components in BYOC was represented in the Google Template. The template is locked so staff cannot edit or delete required fields.
This transition aims to increase engagement from Certified staff with the curriculum development process and create a more parent-friendly model. The District Curriculum Team felt the BYOC system was an impediment to both the staff completing the lesson planning and the administration monitoring implementation. We are confident that a different structure will help with implementation.
This rollout will have a three-year implementation period:
Year One: Documenting what is happening in the classroom to promote consistency both in learning outcomes and teacher pedagogy.
Year Two: Attach lesson plans to standards and assess how well each of the assigned learning targets was covered and any gaps in learning that might exist.
Year Three: Assess student learning with mastery data to determine what impact the time we spend on each learning target is having on student learning and how student learning is represented in assessment data.
The expectation is that by the end of Year Three, all Certified staff that teach content to students will have lesson plans attached to updated standards, along with mastery data to verify the fidelity of the curriculum each teacher has built. This process allows for more collaboration and conversation than BYOC was offering our staff while remaining teacher and parent-friendly.
If you have any questions about this new initiative, please email Nicole Stevenson at nstevenson@usd365.org.
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