Systems thinking; UK, IB, ADDIE, UDL

My first international position as an educator was for a British international school in Tianjin, China. I worked for the Tianjin Rego International School for four years from 2004 until 2008 and left two months before the Olympics began in Beijing. I was the Music and English as an additional language teacher for the middle and high schools and when I first started, the school had implemented the Cambridge curriculum.

My own education had been the Cambridge exams; I learned and was assessed in this curriculum from K - 12. However I never felt that it was well adapted to the new learning environment when it was exported from the UK. I spoke with the school managers and requested to assess and evaluate the other curricula available. The Edexcel curriculum at the time catered more to an international viewpoint and it allowed for more flexibility so in the end this was the best option for our students.

These were important to consider as some online resources were not available in China due to the Chinese government policies for communication. It was also incredibly expensive to import foreign educational resources and there was a lot of paperwork and fees. As a result it made sense to choose Edexcel over Cambridge as there were aspects of internationalism built into the curriculum.

When I went from China to Thailand, I moved educational systems from the British to the International Baccalaureate. The differences between the two systems were clear in the way they envisioned knowledge, the transfer of this to skills and competencies and how to assess these. The roles of each group; learners, educators, managers and parents were also different.

I worked in this system for seven years in Thailand and in my subsequent contract in Lima, Peru. In both these schools I analysed the existing curriculum and considered the host culture and resources available. There were elements of diversity and inclusion and a necessity for sensitivity to different cultural lenses that needed to change as I moved continents from Asia to Latin America.

Over my three year contract in Peru, I designed, developed, implemented and evaluated new units of study and lesson plans. When my contract ended and I began my immigration to Canada, I uploaded all my music unit plans to the I.B. teacher forums, giving any I.B. educator access to six years of complete music curriculum. As an aside, the design process for creating curricular work in the IB system aligns very much with the ADDIE model that we use in instructional design.

Fast forward a few years to Montreal, Canada where I am working as the Curriculum Developer for Concordia University’s Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP). In this role I am working with the Quebec curriculum for middle and high schools as well as technical college courses which are known here as CEGEP.

As this role is a new one in the centre, I had the capacity to bring experience and knowledge from my previous work and integrate this with the latest information in instructional design and technology. Working with a variety of courses, instructional design and training for adolescents and adult learners has given me a renewed appreciation of how to use systems thinking for performance improvement.

I will follow up with more posts of the work I am doing so subscribe to read more!