When Critical Friends are the best friends
Imagine a virtual book club in which education stakeholders from across the country (think: teachers, school leaders, policy-makers, and parents) convene on Zoom to love on great books, deliberate the merit of these texts, and connect around key themes. Welcome to a Novel Critical Friends Book Club, where literary works are appreciated and dissected before “going to press” as the core texts in actual units. Scheduled after school hours, these 90-minute Zoom calls are precious opportunities to build relationships over books and elicit the parts of a text worth teaching, analyzing, and interrogating with students. Though Novel Book Clubs follow a deceptively simple discussion protocol, the Friends’ enthusiastic engagement in these conversations raises collective learning and investment in books that will ultimately become the heart and soul of our novel-based units.
At Novel Education Partners, we are deeply committed to living out the principles of Liberatory Design as we create high quality, culturally responsive 6-12 ELA curriculum. Core to our organization’s design process is the role of our Critical Friends, cohorts of teachers, leaders, and book-lovers from diverse backgrounds and educational contexts, who engage with designers at critical phases of unit and lesson development to influence decisions in areas of text selection, key questions and tasks, learner supports, and teacher usability. Novel’s Critical Friends are invaluable ideators and reviewers, who interface regularly with units as they are built to ensure we are creating high quality instructional materials (HQIM) that drive at ambitious and equitable outcomes for all students. To learn more about how we leverage the experience and ongoing feedback of our Friends in our design process, keep reading!
Organizing for Critical Friends Design Cycles
One challenge with a centrally designed curriculum can be the limited worldview of a given curriculum author. While their technical talent and practical bandwidth is of tremendous import to our process, any of our designers would agree that more mirrors and windows into the range of the human experience are crucial to producing units that honor the complexity of the text while making it culturally relevant and accessible to all learners. A typical Critical Friends design cycle looks like a unit book club 3-4 weeks in advance of the designer writing the unit plan, followed by two additional engagements for unit plan and lesson review. All in all, a Critical Friends group is actively shaping the direction of a unit as it is being drafted, a process that typically lasts 6-8 weeks.
Critical Friends Engagement 1: Unit Book Club
Before a unit is even built, Critical Friends groups read and analyze the core text selection(s) independently and then meet virtually for a 90-minute Book Club. Club. Book Club attendees include the Friends, the unit designer, and a design manager who facilitates the discussion. At the outset of the call, the group checks in personally and regrounds in a set of equity norms to support generative and asset-based collaboration. From here, the facilitator routes the conversation to the book at hand, asking questions like:
What did you like about the book?
What are the meatiest sections of the text to unpack with kids?
Which themes or commentaries from the book could we elevate?
What kinds of background knowledge will students need to access this text?
Often, the discussion becomes organic, as the group builds off each other’s comments and introduces new ideas and connections into the mix. The end result is a robust set of notes for the designer to leverage as they draft the unit–and, as you might expect, renewed excitement around the promise of what students will get to learn and experience by reading this book.
Critical Friends Engagement 2: Unit Plan Review
Approximately 2-3 weeks after a Book Club, the designer submits a draft unit plan to the Critical Friends for thorough review. Friends are encouraged to read the unit plan closely and comment directly on the document–no question or edit is too small to capture! From here, they roll up their feedback in a survey using Liechert-based and open-ended questions to collect quantitative and qualitative data on critical components of unit design, including essential questions, the culminating performance task, calendar of lesson objectives, and alignment to learning standards. The Friends’ input in these areas catalyzes key revisions to the original unit draft before the designer proceeds with writing assessments and then lessons.
Critical Friends Engagement 3: Lesson Review
About 4-5 weeks into a unit’s build, the designer releases a set of draft lesson plans for the Critical Friends to review. Once again, Critical Friends leave comments directly on lessons and take lesson surveys to elicit feedback in areas critical to lesson efficacy and usability. Friends’ engagement at the lesson-level helps the designer calibrate the structure and content of lessons to best support students in accessing complex texts and grappling with unit ideas.
The Power of Collaborative Unit Construction
At any given time, we have 4-5 sets of Critical Friends hard at work as we build out units at different grade-levels. Whenever we start a new unit build, our Critical Friends restart the same cadence outlined above. Think of the collaborative power being harnessed all at once–our curriculum is a marvel of co-construction that celebrates an array of identities and experiences, not only through its text selections but through its collective authorship. In closing, we would like to thank our Critical Friends for the immeasurable impact they have on our design; Novel’s curriculum would not be what it is without you!