Curriculum Design

Tools to improve individual lesson plans or build entire curricula from the ground up.

Reach out to schedule a free preliminary consultation

Devin.Farkas@gmail.com

My Design Process in Three Steps

Identify the learning goals that meet your mission

  • The ability to provide effective feedback to peers and implement feedback received from others requires understanding our, and our peers emotions, needs, perspectives and strengths.

  • Learning about our complex environment is most impactful when it is focused on our relationships the non-human neighbors in our own backyards.

  • Mental health coping skills, accessible ways to be physically active, tools to navigate the essential systems within our communities.

Build Activities to maximize learning

  • Reflective activities to draw lessons from previous experiences

  • Opportunities to experiment with generalized reflections

  • In-the-moment sensory and emotional experienced while actively experimenting with generalized reflections on previous experiences

Apply Tools to assess learning and demonstrate value

  • A students own descriptive appraisal of their competency or understanding is a valuable measure of their learning. For social emotional learning goals, this may be our best form of assessing learning.

  • Some learning outcomes can be easily assessed when students demonstrate their proficiency at any point during a program. This is especially true for Life Skill learning goals.

  • Educators need to provide feedback to each student to validate or correct their self-assessments and demonstrated levels of proficiency.

Example Courses

communicating the Impact of outdoor and Adventure Experiences through Writing and Public Speaking

  • Four Credit hour course at St. Lawrence University

  • Effectively communicating outdoor adventure experiences to a broad audience.

Outdoor Education through Community Based Learning

  • Four credit-hour course at St. Lawrence University

  • Developing experiential teaching skills through mentored opportunities in the community

Modern Outdoor Recreation Ethics

  • Two credit-hour field based course at St. Lawrence University

  • Critically analyzing outdoor adventure by examining a shared experience through various ethic lenses

Social Justice in Outdoor Education

  • Two-hour modules that can be stand-alone or combined into a three-credit-hour course.

  • Designing and implementing outdoor education programs to increase access to a diverse community

Outdoor Leadership

  • Two-hour modules that can be stand-alone or combined into courses of various lengths: a Four-credit course at St. Lawrence University, a 90-hour co-curricular course at Bowdoin College, and a 90-hour co-curricular course at the University of Vermont

  • Backcountry living and travel skills, leadership and communication skills, critical thinking and decision making, mental health first aid and conflict mediation.

Outdoor Leader Instructor Development

  • 90-hr mentorship opportunity, building skills while teaching an outdoor leadership course

  • Lesson planning, experiential education, assessment, and feedback.