HEC-TV creates curriculum for new productions, in order to more fully connect the station with K-12 students and schools. But, what is curriculum and how is it developed? Most of us think of curriculum as a set of courses offered by an institution such as a school or university. However, for us it is the collective teaching, learning and assessment materials that are available for a particular course.

Educators know that quality curricula must relate to the Show Me Standards or Grade Level Expectations. The Show Me Standards define what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate from Missouri’s public high schools. GLE’s, or Grade Level Expectations, apply these standards to the knowledge and skills that need to be acquired in each grade level.

Led by scripts and background information provided by HEC-TV producers on programs in development, we build a framework to wrap curriculum around for each show. For example, we were able to create cross-curricular materials that not only covered Black History but also discussed the differences between primary and secondary sources, for our episode of “You Are Here: The Underground Railroad.”

Each curriculum starts with an overview of the lesson, time allotment, and most importantly, the learning objectives. We list the standards or GLEs which are being addressed. The learning objectives tell teachers what tasks the students will be able to perform after completing each unit of study. We also include the lesson plan to be taught.

Needs for each student and class are different, so after the body of the lesson is accomplished, we offer teachers several different types of learning activities, all which reinforce and assess the lesson. Teachers may pick and chose the activities that best support the many different learning styles of their pupils. Students may be tasked to role play a skit about conflict resolution, calculate the ratio of rain runoff to surface area or to create a multimedia presentation. And, since we’re teachers, each lesson plan is equipped with a bibliography of the sources used to create the curriculum.