Program design process

These documents are normally required by donors, but they are also useful for explaining how the program works to stakeholders and team members. Below is a list of key documents that you need to complete, with links to templates:. I personally like to put all these key documents, along with the problem tree, details of stakeholders and Theory of Change into a single Program Manual. The most important thing to remember during implementation is to be flexible.

Photo by City of Seattle Community Tech. How to design a new program Designing a new program can be both challenging and rewarding. Find out what the problem is The first step is to understand what problem it is that you want to solve. Find out who the stakeholders are No program operates in a vacuum. By the end of the meetings you should be able to answer the following questions about each stakeholder you can record the answers in a table : Problem: What are the key problems they are facing?

Motivation: What motivates them? What are they interested in? Potential: How could they contribute to solving the problems identified?

Interaction: How can we best interact with them? Research which interventions are effective This is one of the most critical steps, and is also the one most often missed. Identify which activities are likely to lead to the goal Once you know what the goal and objectives of the program are, the next question is which activities are actually going to lead to the goal? Create the documentation The final step in the process is to create the documents that you need to describe the program.

Workplan: This shows all the activities involved in the program, who is responsible for each activity, and when the activities will be completed. Some of the programs may address a number of the criteria for curriculum programs outlined above; therefore, local design process committees may use some aspects of these programs — as well as adjustments to their own local frameworks — to help them construct coherence within and across grades. The draft framework indicates a possible assignment of standards to grade levels.

Examining the instructional materials informs the committee as to what is available at each grade level, how the standards are presented in the materials, and the prior knowledge students need before beginning each unit. After the design committee reviews information about the materials, it may find a need to revise some portions of the framework. Committee members should be selective about their review of material because they will not have time to review everything.

The committee may want to become acquainted with tools developed or under development by several national groups for the identification of ''exemplary" materials. Department of Education all are working to analyze and identify or to help local decision makers analyze and identify exemplary mathematics or science materials NRC, c; AAAS, ; and DoEd, The design committee may want to consider reviewing the materials currently in use. Even though some members will be familiar with these materials, all materials that have the potential for use in the curriculum program should be reviewed using the same set of criteria.

Then, if there is a decision to drop a widely used textbook, evidence will be available. Conversely, if a district chooses to continue using a program that is unpopular, how and why this decision was made may be more easily explained.

With the introduction of content standards, most districts will need to revise their process for reviewing instructional materials, employing criteria similar to those outlined in the second section of this report. The review process should be clearly defined and involve the use of multiple techniques that give teachers and others an opportunity to analyze the materials under consideration. Supplemental materials may play a role in this process and will be discussed later in this section beginning on pg.

A considerable amount of time is needed for careful review of materials. Setting up a two-stage process has some. The first stage can be used to eliminate the weakest instructional materials based on the criteria provided in this report and the design committee's vision of teaching and learning. First-stage "filtering" could involve analyzing the materials' instructional approach and quickly retaining those materials that support the skills and concepts needed for problem solving, but eliminating materials that, for example, emphasize confirmatory, pencil-and-paper activities or that would provide students with little or no experience in problem solving, data collection, and analysis.

In this first stage, the committee also could exclude materials that are collections of unrelated activities or short units on single topics not connected to others. This would allow members to focus in the second stage on materials that have the most potential to support the development of a coherent curriculum program.

In the second stage, reviewers need to begin by choosing a review instrument and then practicing with it. In the practice session, all reviewers should use the instrument to evaluate the same set of instructional materials.

The reviewers should discuss and agree as a group on the interpretation of each criterion to increase the reliability of the resulting reviews i. Working through this process also will give reviewers further insight into the standards that they will be using to judge the materials.

The results of the first and second stages of review should reveal strengths and weaknesses of each considered set of materials. The next step is to use this knowledge to refine the framework. The design committee, having worked with the policy documents goals and standards , developed and described its vision of teaching and learning, analyzed the current program, and reviewed and selected instructional materials, is ready to begin refining the curriculum framework.

Refining the framework involves 1 clarifying the growth of student understanding within and across years by assigning concepts to grade levels, and 2 identifying and addressing transitions and gaps in the framework, as follows:. Clarifying the growth of student understanding within and across years by assigning concepts to grade levels. Once instructional materials have been selected, concepts and skills can be assigned to grade levels.

When the design committee is focusing on the expected level of student understanding, they should describe performance expectations, not just specify topics. For example, a topic such as "introduction to photosynthesis" may be assigned to sixth grade. As written, this phrase can be interpreted in many ways.

Some teachers may have their sixth-grade students memorize definitions; other teachers may go so far as to have students design experiments to collect evidence that plants need light; and yet others will ask students to memorize the equations that summarize the chemical reaction.

In mathematics, a similar situation arises when a topic such as "length" is assigned to the first grade. Some teachers may feel that they should help students understand the concept of measuring length by using non-standard units; others may use standard units, such as centimeters or inches but not tools such as rulers and meter sticks; and yet others may go directly to measuring with rulers and meter sticks.

As discussed in the previous section on curriculum program components, the most significant difference among frameworks is their level of coherence. To build coherence into a framework requires clear descriptions of the content.

Necessary prior knowledge is identified, ideas sequenced, and connections among ideas developed. This process is facilitated by using "Growth of Understanding" tables similar to Figures 4 and 5 on pgs. To recap, Figures 4 and 5 illustrate how each year's instruction builds on that from prior years, with the concepts becoming progressively more complex.

Such a progression helps insure that students will be able to develop a solid understanding of the "big ideas" of the discipline. Although this progression has to be considered for each major concept, skill, and ability, every concept should not be addressed every year. This would result in too many concepts being addressed each year without adequate time for students to develop an understanding of anything, exacerbating the problem described in TIMSS reports Schmidt et al.

Typical mathematics and science curricula attempt to address far too many topics per grade level. Unnecessary repetition can quickly stifle both student enthusiasm and understanding, leading to low expectations. One of the most important lessons from international studies and analyses cited in the introduction to this report is the value of tightening the focus of our curriculum to address fewer topics each year, allowing for much greater depth of learning.

Attention must be paid to the development of themes, concepts, and skills from the beginning to the end of a school year. The framework should be explicit about how skills and concepts interweave within individual units, across a year, and over a span of years. Without this purposeful interconnection, the curriculum program cannot be coherent. To illustrate, in science students too often read about a rigid "scientific method" at the beginning of the school year, then they read science content for the rest of the year without ever having the opportunity to experience how science concepts are derived from investigations.

In mathematics, a parallel experience often occurs, when algorithmic procedures are taught as though they were important in and of themselves, rather than as tools for solving real-world problems. In such cases, the understanding that is essential to the eventual application of the algorithms is often omitted. Equally efficient procedures that are better understood — or that have been created by students — may be equally as acceptable and never considered. Even when efforts are made to address standards, concepts and skills often are separated.

Students may study independent units on graphing, metric measurement, and microscope use or on plant classification, plant structure, and plant distribution, without ever seeing the connections among the concepts and skills in those units. The following questions can guide the development of a framework that supports a logical and sequential building of student understanding:.

What prior knowledge is needed for each concept? Is it addressed in an earlier unit? Can it be presented in the current unit?

Is a logical or developmental sequence of concepts presented within each grade level? How will we assist students who have missed important prior knowledge and experiences?

How does the framework convey the importance of interconnected skills and concepts? The design phase of software development deals with transforming the customer requirements as described in the SRS documents into a form implementable using a programming language.

The software design process can be divided into the following three levels of phases of design: Interface Design Architectural Design Detailed Design Interface Design: Interface design is the specification of the interaction between a system and its environment. Attention is focused on the dialogue between the target system and the users, devices, and other systems with which it interacts. The design problem statement produced during the problem analysis step should identify the people, other systems, and devices which are collectively called agents.

Interface design should include the following details: Precise description of events in the environment, or messages from agents to which the system must respond. Precise description of the events or messages that the system must produce.

Specification on the data, and the formats of the data coming into and going out of the system. Notify me of new comments via email.

Notify me of new posts via email. Skip to content. What is a program? What is program design? Program design is both a verb and a noun. What is program evaluation? Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading March 21, at pm. Brenda Vazquz.

July 17, at am. John Gargani. Truly answers to questions frequently asked of me. Glad you found them helpful. August 6, at pm.