Curriculum & Program Development

Good instructional design is fundamental to performance outcomes and when paired with skillful facilitation, is an exceptionally powerful tool in upgrading learning and fostering change. Program development is a roadmap for building effective programs and an essential component of organizational effectiveness. Here’s what you can expect:

Curriculum & Program Development:

- ✓ Partnership from conceptualization to publication with clear agreements on materials to be developed as well as format of publication and handoff (e.g., offline vs online). In general, standard, straightforward curricula are crafted using word processing or graphic design platforms.
- ✓ A customized, professional curriculum based in curriculum design principles (e.g., balance, rigor, coherence) essential for achieving stated goals.
- ✓ Field testing of curriculum with the intended user audience for evaluation to ensure usability, reliability, and quality.
- ✓ The program development process employs a comprehensive planning strategy to identify goals and objectives, assess needs, set priorities based on findings, identify stakeholders and resources, design and implement an action plan, and evaluate and refine the program design.

Recent Curriculum Design Project:

Personal & Leadership Development Series: A Curriculum, Cultural Connections™

Glenda partnered with the leaders of Cultural Connections through many meetings across several months to design a pre-immersive curriculum rooted in an evidenced- based global competency model for the youth leaders of its Global Leadership Institute. Personal & Leadership Development Series: A Curriculum was designed to support the organization’s global education and civic engagement mission.

The co-founders recognized that many of their young emerging leaders required supplemental personal and leadership development in order to engage more confidently and meet the demands of civic engagement and global competency in global arenas, particularly within the rigorous, academic context of the World International Model UN (WIMUN). At the heart of the curriculum is the participants’ self-cultivation especially with regard to character strengths, leadership development, and global competency. The curriculum was customized for the spring 2021 UN Simulation conference with a program plan based on three, 2-hourlong modules for two distinct cohorts of youth leaders, high school and university.

Key Performance Indicator:

- ✓ When compared to the Institute’s other youth leaders who participated in subsequent UN events but not in the Leadership series (control group), the youth leaders who participated in the pilot Leadership series (experimental group) reportedly engaged in WIMUN with greater self-assuredness and global competency and even earned several distinctions in leadership and consensus building! The control group did not earn any such awards or distinctions.

Consulting Request

“In this process I have learned several useful strategies to face situations that may arise in life, such as breathing and being calm before starting something important, improve our teamwork regardless of whether we knew or not with those people and work more on our characteristics as a "Leader". However, what I think that helped me the most was (as I mentioned before) to realize my strengths as a person, and think about how I can use them to solve the problems that I face, knowing how to apply the exact amount of each of these strengths, especially in the future as a teacher, I think that being aware of these strengths will help me a lot to treat my students as people and follow the ideals that a good teacher should have.”
Youth Participant
“I found all the Leadership sessions extremely helpful for our lives, but I think the one about “THE ROLE OF CONSENSUS BUILDING,” was the best one. In that meeting, we were able to move into awareness to action, recognize and analyze other perspectives, communicate ideas and work together to develop a mutually acceptable solution. It was both challenging and interesting when reaching a unanimous agreement about a campaign in our context and I realized that every opinion matters even if it is different to mine.”
Youth Participant
“Self-concept is the image we have created about ourselves and my understanding about it improved significantly. First, I found [it] interesting being able to carefully reflect on myself throughout the topics we explored in the series like rituals for community engagement as well as the self-portrait. Second, knowing about my signature strengths can help me to accomplish goals and build meaning and purpose. Actually, I was surprised when I realized that kindness, a strength I did not know I had, was my first. Finally, I hope to continue gaining valuable insights about myself because it is essential to take into account that we are constantly changing and that it is up to us to make the most of our self-concept. And although I’m not 100% sure of who I am or want to be, this program put me in the right path."
Youth Participant