The Minimalist Educator Podcast
A podcast about paring down to focus on the purpose and priorities in our roles.
The Minimalist Educator Podcast
Episode 063: Mastering Curriculum Development with Jill Cross
Join us for a compelling journey into the art of curriculum development with our brilliant guest, Jill Cross, a National Board Certified Teacher and seasoned curriculum director. Jill shares her diverse experiences across various educational settings, from small Catholic schools to innovative museum schools, and her current role at an independent Jewish day school in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn how she deftly balances teachers' passions with the ever-evolving needs of students and standards, and discover invaluable strategies for effective curriculum changes. Through Jill's stories, we highlight the power of building strong relationships and fostering open communication with faculty to drive successful educational outcomes.
The episode also navigates the complexities of efficient classroom management and organization. We discuss personalized teacher interactions, highlighting the use of digital tools like OneDrive and digital calendars to streamline tasks. From maintaining a daily top-three task list to the art of chunking time for larger projects, we explore practical techniques to enhance productivity. Jill emphasizes the importance of blending structured plans with spontaneous demands, all while nurturing a supportive culture through informal classroom visits. Tune in for practical insights and strategies that will transform how you approach time management and school organization.
Find Jill on social media @JCrossEdu or at https://jill4learning.com/
Jill Cross is a National Board-Certified teacher and ASCD Emerging Leader with 20 years of experience in public, charter, and independent schools. Jill has coordinated curriculum development in public and private schools and frequently presents across the country on teacher leadership, object-based learning, personalized professional learning, and curriculum writing. Jill is a Colonial Williamsburg Master Teacher and the co-author of Living History in the Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy. Her passion is supporting teachers in planting seeds of change that have the capacity to transform education. Jill is the Director of Curriculum & Instruction at Bornblum Jewish Community School in Tennessee.
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Welcome to the Minimalist Educator Podcast, a podcast about paring down to refocus on the purpose and priorities in our roles with co-hosts and co-authors of the Minimalist Teacher Book, Tammy Musialski-Borneman and Christine Arnold.
Speaker 2:On this week's episode, our guest is Jill Cross. She speaks with us about curriculum development and lots of factors to consider depending on what context you are in development and lots of factors to consider depending on what context you are in. Jill Cross is a National Board Certified Teacher and ASCD Emerging Leader with 20 years of experience in public, charter and independent schools. Jill has conducted curriculum development in public and private schools and frequently presents across the country on teacher leadership, object-based learning, personalised professional and curriculum writing. Jill is a Colonial Williamsburg Master Teacher and the co-author of Living History in the Classroom Performance and Pedagogy. Her passion is supporting teachers in planting seeds of change that have the capacity to transform education.
Speaker 3:Jill is the Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Born Bloom Jewish Community School in Tennessee. Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of the Minimalist Educator podcast. Today we are interviewing Jill Cross, who is the Curriculum Director at a school in Memphis.
Speaker 4:Welcome to the show, Jill Hi, thank you for having me.
Speaker 3:I'm excited to talk to y'all. Thank you, how are you today, christine?
Speaker 2:I am very well. I'm excited to have a chat with another curriculum person and get into good discussion.
Speaker 3:Yeah, me too. So, jill, in your role you've got a lot to manage. But before we get to all of that because it's a big job can you just give us a little bit of background of how you got into the role around?
Speaker 4:curriculum, actually never thought I would be in education and ended up doing it. I thought as a way to pay for grad school and started part-time teaching art and discovered I kind of liked it and so I started teaching in. And actually I started teaching in a small Catholic school in Florida. And I have no education background, my degree is not in education. I had no idea what I was doing. I actually wrote at one point an apology letter on my blog to my first year students because all the things that we don't know when we start right.
Speaker 4:And then I ended up going to public school and I was there for a long time and I was at a K-5. I was a classroom teacher but I was serving as a magnet time and I was at a K-5. I was a classroom teacher but I was serving as a magnet lead. So we had a big magnet program in the district where I worked and I had a magnet program called academic enrichment that I just could not sell because it was like standards based instruction, which really wasn't new and innovative in like 2007, you know. So I heard about museum schools at a magnet meeting and my background is in humanities and the arts and so I immediately was like we're doing that? And so I went to the district, I convinced them to include us in a DOE grant for that. We were awarded $1.3 million over four years and I shifted into a role as curriculum specialist. So I built the program from the ground up, working on an integrated museum kind of well, I call it. Museum learning is sort of what I call it. And so we were partnered with eight local cultural institutions and the University of North Florida College of Art and Design, and it was in that role that I kind of learned everything about how to work with people with curriculum and how to kind of manage the. You know teachers are very married to what they do and so how to negotiate that and be a cheerleader and kind of how to give gentle nudges when it comes to curriculum.
Speaker 4:And so after that I ended up you know that was a grant funded position so I shifted into independent schools and I found I really liked independent schools because we have a lot of freedom in our curriculum. And so I did this at another school 612. And now I am here, I wanted to get back towards the South. And now I am here, I wanted to get back towards the South. I'm at a great K-8 independent Jewish day school, so our challenge is that we teach 100% of what we call general studies curriculum in two-thirds of the time, because our students spend a third of the day in Jewish studies. So all of the work that I did at the museum school and everywhere else on integration has become super important, and all of the curriculum work that I've done has been, you know, distilling the curriculum down to essential has been super important in this role. So, yeah, so that's how I ended up here in Memphis, tennessee.
Speaker 2:That is quite the journey, jill. I really like hearing about that you were talking there about. You know about teachers being married to their work, and I think that's something we come across all the time is that it really becomes a part of our identity and how we know ourselves as an educator. So how does that fit in with curriculum, especially when there's curriculum changes? If you're messing with people's curriculum changes, if you're like messing with people's identity. How have you found that experience?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so it's it. That is always a challenge, and trying to find the balance of allowing people to have their passions and to teach in in the way that they feel really passionate about, because, you know, that's also important just for faculty retention and also so to kind of take that along with, like, okay, here's what our graduates need to be able to do, you know, or here's what our fourth graders need to have mastered by the end of this year, and so that's always an interesting balancing act For us. I think the you know I am we give a lot of freedom and autonomy with our faculty, and so we it's a lot of relationship building is that's a big, huge chunk of it. You know a lot. I'm in a small school, luckily, and so there's a lot of conversation happening, informal conversations, and I always kind of tell our teachers like, even if you're in the faculty workroom talking to somebody about curriculum or talking to someone about redoing an assessment or watching a TED talk to get content, background knowledge, all that's PD and we need to look at it like that.
Speaker 4:And so, yeah, it's a lot of relationship building. It's a lot of finding. There's a lot of like psychology in it too, so it's like finding what it is that's going to be the thing that's going to push someone to think differently about the curriculum. You know, one thing I also run into all the time is teachers will say my curriculum, I have to cover this in my curriculum, right, and I hear that a lot, and to which I want to say it's the school's curriculum, you know, and so that I think, really speaks to like how people they have internalized it. You know so much. So, yeah, it's a challenge. I enjoy it because it's like different every day.
Speaker 3:It's just so interesting to hear, um, yeah, how, how teachers really do get attached to their, to the curriculum, which, I mean, says a lot about a teacher as a person. Then, right, because you know that they really want to know it, they want to teach it well. Because you know that they really want to know it, they want to teach it well. Whether they know how to is another thing, so there's that piece to it as well. So what do you find? What do you find Because you mentioned kind of some of the challenge there what is like the hardest part of get kind of like getting teachers to like step back and look at the bigger picture of it? Maybe like, how do you navigate that?
Speaker 4:yeah, yeah, and that is hard right, because, you know, I think one thing I enjoyed about being a classroom teacher was I would go in my room and shut the door and I could do my thing right.
Speaker 4:Um, and I don't think I really understood until I moved into a curriculum or role, like, oh, there's a whole ecosystem that is outside of this right, and how everything works together, and so I think for us we really push peer observation here and so the you know, I really believe that visiting classrooms is like another great form of PD, right, and so the more that we can get our teachers into other spaces and other classrooms and see what's happening as far as the curriculum expectations go, or student behavior, or you know what is this teacher doing that's really working for this or that, the better it.
Speaker 4:You know it helps us to help them see the big picture. We also kind of talk to them about and this is something that our advancement director started doing is talking to our teachers about how we're sort of the air traffic controllers in our school and the teachers are kind of the pilots, and so, you know, trying to figure out how we can help teachers to shift to sort of think in that way. That is something that we work on a lot. We also open up all of our faculty meetings in a teacher's classroom and we ask the teacher to share something from their lesson, either a really interesting lesson resource or like why is the the space the way that it is? So our middle school teachers are going down to the kindergarten classroom and they're sitting in the kindergarten chairs at the start of our faculty meetings before we move into other things. So that also has been really helpful have you?
Speaker 2:have you found that you can use the same sorts of strategies to build that trusting relationship between peers and with the teachers and yourself at all of your different locations that you've worked in, because you've been in a similar role in different places?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's different everywhere that I go. So it really is different everywhere that I go. Yeah, I work with a really great, flexible faculty here, but the strategies some of them are the same. You know, kind of the gentle nudges that I still do, or being a cheerleader, making sure that you know I leave little notes in boxes from time to time, like thank you, even for simple little. You know you filled out a PD form. Thank you for being so conscientious to fill this out because it helps me do my job right. That's always a strategy that is helpful. But you know, it's really just like a classroom and every, every interaction I have with teachers has to be so individualized. And that goes back to that getting to know them and getting to understand like what makes them tick and what their passions are. I wish I could say there was like a really great strategy that would work across all contexts, but I don't know that.
Speaker 3:I found that yet across all contexts, but I don't know that I've found that yet. Yeah, it's a work in progress for sure, you know, because you're navigating so many pieces to a big puzzle. So my question is kind of related to that. So, even though you don't have, like maybe the answer, but what are some structures or systems that you do have in place to be able to like effectively and efficiently visit classrooms and talk with people and things like that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I a lot of. I've really shifted. The last time I switched roles I got rid of all of my paper files when I moved and it was painful, um, because I had like years of paper files. But I have really found that I kind of live and breathe off my digital resources now and my OneDrive folders and my digital calendar and all of all of those things kind of you know, if it's not on my calendar, like it just doesn't really exist in my world at the moment now, and so I'm really good about calendaring. I also will you know, I used to use a full focus planner and I found it wasn't great for me for note taking. But what I did take away from that was the kind of idea of the top three. So in that you know you have your to-do list and picking out your top three for the day and so and I find a lot of power in like writing that down and checking it off or crossing it off, and so I do that kind of every day I revisit that and figure out what my top three are going to be for the day.
Speaker 4:The other thing I do is I kind of look at, I don't have a grand plan for how I'm observing teachers, because we're kind of small and I'm like all around all the time. But what I do do is I kind of look at the day and the schedule and I make a list, just on a post-it note, of classes I plan to visit that day and the times when I know things are happening, and I stick it in my pocket and even if I, you know, because we do a lot of informal observations, I'll just pop in for just a few minutes. That has helped me a ton, just you know, and some days I don't get to it right, and but then I have other days where I'll have a list of like six people I want to visit that day, you know, and so that is super helpful. I also kind of chunk my time. So if, because I do work on a lot of kind of bigger initiatives and longer term projects that I obviously can't finish in a day or a week, and so I will kind of calendar and chunk my time to work on that, so if you know, for instance, like our capstone project, it requires some work from me, and so I make sure to kind of put that in my calendar for, you know, even an hour.
Speaker 4:The other thing that I find super helpful is I have really short, specific meetings with teachers with action items and a list when I go into it and Tammy knows this from our board like I like to be super efficient and so I find, you know, just having, like you know, some I will schedule 30 minutes, but a lot of times it's just like a 15 minute meeting by the end of it, cause we're you know, I, I know how valuable our teacher's time is. My time is valuable too, so I try to keep it short and specific. The other thing I do a lot of is I email stuff to myself. So if I have things that I need to get done or I'll, I just email it to myself because I know that I will see it uh, you know in when I'm going through my emails. So that's another thing that's kind of been helpful.
Speaker 4:We have, we all of our general, so I oversee all of our general studies curriculum and so all of our general studies curriculum lives in OneDrive, in folders and all of that, and we've done I've done a lot of work to help our teachers and also help me, because we're trying to fit in 100% of the curriculum in two thirds of the day on integrating. And so, you know, we adopted a reading program, reading writing program, and so, to help us, I rewrote and adjusted our science and social studies, because it was a heavy knowledge building curriculum. I rewrote our science and social studies to match it, because it helps us get at everything and anytime we can integrate it. You know it's not only good for the kids, it's, you know it's. It helps the teachers feel like they're accomplishing more. Yeah, so that that's a few few of the things that that I kind of do to keep myself moving.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you, you mentioned lots of different roles and responsibilities that you that you have at your school, so I would love to know a little bit about you know the percentage of time that you spend on different tasks, like, are you full-time in this role? And, obviously, like I do, the top three priorities for the day as well, but my top three priorities were way out the window today at work. So I know that you know we're talking in an ideal world here, but I'd love to hear about how you divide up your week with all of these different roles and responsibilities that you have.
Speaker 4:Let's see. So I work on our curriculum, I work on teacher, teacher, teacher coaching, I work on our design thinking program. I teach in our design thinking program on Thursdays. I teach in our design thinking program on Thursdays, and then I have leadership responsibilities and new initiatives and partnering with the advancement director on things that are happening, or, you know, our grandparents day and all you know.
Speaker 4:So I, what I know, a lot of people work differently when it comes to this, but I kind of do things as they come. I still have my lists right, but if I have, you know, I try to respond to emails kind of quickly because I will lose them, you know, in a long list of emails later. You know if somebody comes to me. You know, a teacher just came to me and asked me for something and I had a minute while I was in the office, so I went and found it right. So I try to kind of do things as they come, which helps me a lot. I guess that's the best answer to that is that I do things as they come. I don't know that I have a grand plan for dividing my week.
Speaker 4:I kind of know what's coming long term ahead and, like I said that, putting it, things in the calendar and chunking time for certain days. Like I know, thursdays is our experiential day for our students and I know that Thursdays is going. I don't really have a Thursday right, I'm going to be in that space with our middle schoolers all day on Thursday and so so I just plan my week around that. And same with our leadership meetings. You know our leadership meetings are count. You know we kind of say like it's an hour, but sometimes they go much longer and and so I just sort of know middle of the day, monday, I'm not probably going to be getting much done and so those things I can plan around and I sort of know they're coming, but for the most part I'm taking things as they go and working.
Speaker 4:I try not to take a whole lot home with me. I've gotten better at that Now that I've been in the role. This is my fifth year, so I'm much better at kind of not doing that and I really advocate for our teachers not to do that. But when report cards are coming out, which they just did, I had to spend all weekend editing report card comments Right, but that sort of stuff is stuff I can do at home in my pajamas while I'm watching Brit box, and you know that kind of thing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure. Um, I so it's one of your task list things. You mentioned having, you know, a little list is stuck in your pocket with you know spots where you want to potentially stop for the day, and so, like having that system of like just the informal pop-ins, how do you build the trust with your staff, just so they know that, like, this is what we do, this is, you know, this is just how it's going to be. I'm just going to pop in whenever and you know, like, how do you establish that culture?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so that took a little bit of time and I think you know, at the start of every single school year, you know we have the faculty that have been, that have been here since I've been here, they're they're sort of used used to that happening. But we're such a small school and our leadership are always popping into classrooms so that you know that that's just sort of the culture of our school. But I still have teachers who get get anxious right, and I'll get a text after I've come in. And what did you think, you know, if I haven't sent the email, the informal form, to them? But at the beginning of the year I pop in without doing kind of official note taking, and I just pop in and I send a text afterwards. That's like a positive thing, and so I do that for a little while at the start of the year, just so that people don't feel like it's. You know it's never a gotcha, but some people still feel that way, right? So if I can make sure to point out all the positives from the start, it helps when I have to say, like you know, have you considered this right?
Speaker 4:The way that our informal feedback form works is it's all digital and it has, like the Danielson, you know, a bunch of indicators that we've decided from Danielson that are important to our context, and then a box at the bottom for me to write comments and whatnot.
Speaker 4:And I always try to ask a question. That is going to sort of require somebody to either respond to me or come pop by my office and talk to me. So that sort of helps me to build that relationship and also helps me understand better what's happening. If I, you know, didn't understand something, I also very frequently will after an informal kind of share a resource or a tool or an idea that might be helpful for whatever it is that they were doing. But I also go into classrooms a ton and teach. So I go in if teachers need help with. You know we do grade level programs, we have curriculum fair that we do at our school. You know I have my bunny Moffat that goes into kindergarten every week to read a story. So I'm in the classroom a lot also just like teaching or helping. So that sort of helps, I think, as well.
Speaker 2:It gives you such a good perspective of that whole circle of what curriculum is right. It's not just what's written on the paper, but you're actually supporting the teachers to do it, modelling how to do it, giving them feedback on how they're doing it. It's this huge big process and cycle, so it's really cool to hear that you're able to put all of those pieces together in your role. That's really cool. So, jill, when we are saying goodbye to our guests, we always ask for a pare-down pointer, so it could be building on something you've already mentioned or something completely different. Just a little tip or strategy for our listeners.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So I was thinking about this ahead of us, talking and thinking about something that actually helps our students, which I thought might be helpful to people we started and also really helps with organization, which I think is we're always trying to figure that out and also trying to teach and equip our students to be able to be organized.
Speaker 4:We started doing in our middle school a few years ago, color coding, and so our classes are color coded, and so that means that anything that's happening, like the English folder is blue for six, seven and eight. Right, the red folder is this subject for six, seven and eight, and it helps the kids organize themselves a ton, and so I'm actually thinking this year we're going to start to like push it down into our lower school and start having our four and five students do it, and so when I was doing this as a teacher, I actually also use it as my organization tool because it made it super easy. If I needed okay, I need blue English, let me just grab the blue folder, right. And so that, I think, is one of those super simple things that, like almost anybody can, can do and implement that is hugely effective and just productivity. So that would be like my teacher and student tip, I think.
Speaker 3:I love that you're doing that as a school system because you know a lot of teachers do that. I did that as well and I think, even just taking away that decision the teacher has to make on their own where it's like what color am I going to use this where you're especially newer teachers right, where they might not have that system yet, but just like across the school everybody's English is blue, like that's just super helpful to think about. That.
Speaker 4:Usually a classroom system as a school wide system, just for overall organization, I love it, yeah, and we've found that a lot of our kids that when they go to high school they use the same colors. Oh yeah, no, that's so. They move on and they keep the colors yeah that's awesome.
Speaker 3:I think that's forever imprinted in my mind because my reading was always red, reading red writing blue. Yeah, math was green, I don't know. No, science was green. That made sense. Nature, yes, well, thank you so much for your time today, jill. That was an awesome conversation.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thank you. It was good for me to chat about it and actually kind of made me reflect on all of it. So, thank you, I'm really happy to share and I hope what I, any some of what I said, was helpful to people. Yes, for sure. Thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Thank you. Today's episode was brought to you by Plan Z Professional Learning Services forward-thinking educator support. Find out more at planzplservicescom.
Speaker 1:Be sure to join Tammy and Christine and guests for more episodes of the Minimalist Educator Podcast. They would love to hear about your journey with minimalism. Connect with them at planzPLS on Twitter or Instagram.
Speaker 3:The music for the podcast has been written and performed by Gaia Moretti.
