Redoing GOKiC

Introduction

Geeking Out Kids of Color (GOKiC) is a non-profit dedicated to teaching BIPOC and underserved youth in the Greater Seattle area about technology and social justice. Partnering with school districts and community centers, they run after-school programs, reaching hundreds of students from elementary to college each year. 

GOKiC runs multiple after-school programs in tandem quarterly. When I joined, the plan was for every single site to use the same curriculum, just scaffolded to different levels. This proved to be a challenge as the curriculum designer because not only was there a huge skill gap between our students, as I taught elementary students while some of my coworkers taught high school students, but I only had a few weeks sometimes to develop and scaffold an entire curriculum, on top of still teaching a class.

Research Methods

Surveys

We administered surveys to the students at the start and end of every quarter. Questions on these surveys included asking about how much they knew about problem-solving, computers, and how well they felt represented at school. Post surveys would also include sections for students to give feedback about their experience and to tell us what kind of curriculums they would like to see in the future, helping give us a sense of what students are looking for when they come to our programs.

Field Studies

As the curriculum designer, I had the opportunity to go to my co-workers’ sites and directly observe how the curriculum they were teaching for the quarter was going. This gave me direct information as to how well the students were resonating and engaging with the curriculum as well as seeing how prepared my co-workers were to be able to teach it.

Market Analysis

Before building out any curriculum, I would analyze existing, similar programs to ours across the country, focusing on what topics they were teaching and how much money they were spending on their curriculum. This analysis guided my process by giving me a sense of what was relevant to teach as well as potentially providing resources for our future products.

Personal Narratives

When thinking about the students’ experiences in our program, the employees that knew best about how they felt would be their educators. In talking to them I learned about the nuances of each site and the limitations and challenges of teaching there.

Takeaways

Curriculum

After a few quarters of designing curriculum, it was clear that the one curriculum scaffolded in different ways was not serving any site or student well. There was more overlap in the skills that middle and high schoolers had than any other group with elementary schoolers. We also found that it was easier to scaffold curriculum down, going from a high school level to a middle school level, rather than the other way around. 

We also quickly realized that slide decks were not doing the job. Initially, each class day had its own dedicated slide deck that we had to build out before we started teaching a new quarter fully. As we taught though, we quickly realized that this was overkill. To be always having to look at a slide deck was not how students wanted to be engaged and some days, the nature of the classroom demanded a different lesson to be created on the spot. This meant that a lot of the slides created were just wasted work.

An example of what the old curriculum slide decks would look like

Building Process

It also became apparent that how we built curriculum was going to be consistently inconsistent due to the nature of the breaks between quarters. Before the initial fall quarter, we had a month of summer break to build the curriculum. We had winter break and another week afterward to build the winter curriculum. But, we only had one week of spring break to build and prep for the entire spring quarter. This always left us in a bind as we tried to apply the same curriculum-building process to every quarter. We had to figure out a way to plan accordingly for the year.

Training

Within the organization, I was the only one with a computer science background. While all my coworkers brought an incredible, diverse pool of strengths and skills, it means that teaching technical knowledge was on the lower end of our collective strength. We found that some students would have a higher baseline knowledge of the curriculum than some of my colleagues. However, none of our organization's grants allowed for a budget for professional development (PD) in technology training for the employees. And while we could ask for that in future applications, we still needed present training.

End Result

Curriculum

I pushed for the idea that each site needs its own curriculum. My coworkers know their sites and students best, and their voices need to be included in the curriculum they use. Moreover, even though two of our sites serve middle schoolers, those students will still like the same things and learn in the same ways. This meant that developing curriculum went from a mainly solo task of mine to a coordinated group effort with myself as a focal point of support. While I could provide guidance and bring ideas to life, the initial idea would be curated by my teammates and their observations on what their students want and are capable of. We also removed the requirement to have an entire slide deck per lesson and kept only vital information on slides.

This result, while a lot more to coordinate, gave a lot more meaning and personality to each our sites. Educators were teaching things they and their students actually wanted and cared about. They could put their own personalities in them by customizing physical materials and overall lesson plans. We gave ownership to each educator. It truly became their site, their students, their curriculum.

Building Process

With our takeaways on how different the time we have to build curriculum was between quarters and how scaffolding curriculum works best for us, I came to a few conclusion that would dictate the building process:

  • We would start making notes on which programs would be prioritized in having brand new curriculum and which programs could revamp or recycle previous curriculum.

    • High school curriculum was easy to scaffold down so I decided to prioritize giving the high school students new curriculum for the year.

    • For future quarters, we can scaffold that curriculum for the middle and potentially elementary school programs to use.

  • We would do the bulk of the work in creating brand new curriculum for all the different programs between summer and fall programs.

    • Not only do we have the time, it would give the hours of work to us hourly employees who have bills to pay.

    • This starts the year off with everyone having their own lessons to be proud of, but it also increases the bank of curriculums that can be revamped and reused.

    • Due to the limited time, we would revamp and reuse previous curriculums that would be new for those specific sites for the remaining quarters of the school year. 

By frontloading building brand new products in the month between programs, we could ensure that our students receive a new curriculum they haven’t seen from us before while also setting us up for success for the remainder of the school year.

Training

Due to the fact that I was not singlehandedly building out the curriculum with dozens of slide decks, I could build out training documents specific to each curriculum for my coworkers. In these documents, I would list out how to set up the technology and what programs needed to be downloaded, go through all the code that curriculum goes through, and have a section on common errors and other frequently asked questions. These documents serve as instructions so that even though I’m gone, others can come in and have a foundational understanding of the curriculum they are teaching. 

Here is an old version of a training document that I created