I believe that a course should have clear goals, excellent alignment from homework through assessment, and provide ample opportunities to practice skills in a motivating, real-world context. When I began designing my second semester Statistics course, I kept all of these parts in mind as I went through my design process.
First, I started with the standards. I printed out all of the ELOs (essential learner outcomes) from the textbook I we used in the previous semester. This gave me a baseline for any changes I wanted to make to the content. Then I looked at the national standard -- the AP Statistics curriculum. I found that the majority of the content standards were the same. Finally, I used the language from both sources, along with my own experience in statistics, to create a comprehensive list of content objectives for the course (down to the details such as "students will be able to find a random number using randInt() on a TI-83"). This document would prove invaluable once I started to move away from the textbook and its neatly laid-out content. (Below is a picture of my printed lists of ELOs that I would later cut up and move around.)
Next, I needed to have meaningful examples of how rigorous I would teach each standard. I had been unimpressed with the low-level thinking that many problems seemed to encourage from our textbook. However, I thought the AP exam did a better job asking students to think about the big picture. Thus, I started with the AP website and printed out every test posted on their website (along with multiple choice exams scattered across the web).
After this, I took out the scissors and went to work. I separated all of the AP problems into piles of how they fit together by topic. I did the same with the ELOs that matched up with each topic and put them together with the test questions.
I moved these piles around until I felt that I had coherent groups of topics that I could connect to a real-world project. I generated project ideas separately from the process above so that I could keep real-world activities without worrying if they would fit into the curriculum. Because of this, I had to move my piles around quite a bit until I have roughly even-sized units that taught the prerequisite skills for each project idea. Once this was done, the real work began: trying it out. Below are pictures from four different projects or activities I experimented with recently. The first is the Minute to Win It games that I used to teach statistical inference. The second is a cooking lab (with truly blind taste tests) to teach experimental design and 2-sample testing. The third is an introduction to surveying that I did in conjunction with a psychology teacher on the first day of the course. The fourth is an Ultimate Frisbee game that kicked off a data analysis project focusing on summary statistics.
Once I had the details in place and units taking shape, I took a step back to identify the major themes of the course. My end goal was to develop a comprehensive course assessment that measured the key areas of development in students -- things that related to an understanding of the big ideas of statistics -- but also things that measured effectiveness working with teams and communicating with data. With feedback from my PLC team, I have a working draft of the key themes and objectives of the course (embedded below):
The projects are only one component of course design. The majority of my time and effort has gone into the design of effective tests, quizzes, daily check-point quizzes, homework problems, and detailed solutions for all of these. I could have used our textbook or other free online resources, but in many cases, I found that the existing materials fail to build conceptual understanding or take students far too long to be able to use, taking away time from projects. In addition, when I am at worst "reinventing the wheel", I end up with an open resource that I can immediately modify and improve for later use. Because I have decided to freely give away my curriculum online, I am hopeful that other teachers will also iterate on it and improve it so that I can reuse their works. The up-front investment is enormous, but I am hopeful that it will pay off as I begin to iterate on this course. Some people may argue that it is best to wait until I have a summer or longer to fully develop a course like this instead of jumping in right away. However, this approach is flawed because it doesn't allow you to learn from your users (students) what is effective and what doesn't work, especially when trying radically new things. As a software engineer by training, I am a strong proponent of the common mantra "release early, release often" that goes along with the agile design process. To see this course in progress, complete with its new approaches and many first-run bugs, go to mrpethan.com.