Yesterday, I met with Elba and Jen from the Lifespan Religious Education Committee to come up with a curriculum plan for next church year. We were all a little apprehensive, but it turned out to be a relatively painless process. Partly I think it was painless because we had done the hard work ahead of time. In the last meeting of the Lifespan Religious Education Committee, we spent an hour going over the learning goals for the coming year, and that was the hard work.

More and more, I am convinced that the right way to go about planning curriculum is to start with the overall goals for our learners. And recently, I have been reading “Understanding by Design” by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, a book donated by Audris G., one of our church school teachers. Wiggins and McTighe confirm what I’ve been thinking. They say to begin by identifying the desired results. Then they contend the next step is to determine what the acceptable evidence will be that learners have reached the desired results. Only after that should we plan learning experiences and instructional methods.

But the way we usually go about things in a church school is that we pick curriculum books or programs that we like, and use them. For example, the most recent conference of the Liberal Religious Educators Association, the professional association of Unitarian Universalist religious educators, presented four different ways you can plan learning experiences. In other words, they were starting with the learning experiences and instructional methods, and skipping right over setting goals and determining how we know learners have learned anything. The way I see it now, that’s really all backwards. But that’s the way we’ve always done it.

Here in our church, I think we’re moving towards a better approach. The Lifespan Religious Education Committee is working at further refining the learning goals for all ages. We have begun to figure out good ways to determine if anyone is actually learning anything. We’re slowly breaking the old habits of planning things backwards. And it’s starting to pay off for us — curriculum planning was much easier than we had expected this year.

For more about “Understanding by Design,” visit the Web site of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum design at:
http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/menuitem.b66696ac45f924addeb3ffdb62108a0c/