With more and more apps and courses delivered in multiple formats, addressing multiple purposes, deciding on the right set of curriculum tools to use in blended learning can be a daunting task. To help manage the job, I always encourage teams to dive deep into a few select lessons. Note that these are usually not the lessons that the vendor provides or demonstrates. Look first at the instructional objective. Decipher the cognitive level and then do the initial review looking only for answers to “How well does the lesson address the objective?” Be sure to review all of the quizzes and interactions as they hold important clues to the quality of the content. If for example, you’re inspecting a lesson on the main idea. You go through all of the introductory material, the learning interactions, and all looks good. But, when you get to the assessments there are no questions or activities that determine whether the student has learned about the main idea. The questions address comprehension, but not the main idea.

After passing the initial review, move into deeper instructional review. Leveraging the Understanding by Design (UbD) work of Jay McTighe, Grant Wiggins, and Elliott Seif, we come up with a set of eight guiding questions to assist in this in-depth process.

• What are the “big ideas” and “essential questions” for the semester/unit/lesson series? Remember, blended learning requires engagement and application beyond rote practice and regurgitation. But, too many big ideas and the learner feels lost. Lack of applicability and focus of essential questions muddy instruction and confuse concepts.
• How well does the individual lesson/activity relate the big idea and the essential questions? Here, I often look to the lessons before and after the review lesson. Do all lessons contribute to the students understanding of the big idea, the top-level learning goal?
• In what ways does the material encourage students to think and reflect through the six facets—explain, interpret, apply, give perspectives, empathize, and explore their personal self-knowledge?
• How many valid assessment options are included? The key here is twofold: Valid and options. If all assessments are valid, but only delivered in one type, then we are only assessing instruction on one level. Alternately, if the curriculum includes multiple types of assessments but doesn’t assess the goals of the materials, then it the results are not valid for that instructional objective.
• How will learners today respond to the curriculum? Will they perceive it as boring, interesting, engaging, challenging, and current? Regardless of how well the curriculum matches other requirements, if it doesn’t engage the students, they won’t stay focused or retain their learning.
• Is the curriculum developmentally appropriate? This seems so fundamental, yet many programs forget that vendors often repurpose lessons across multiple grade ranges in order to decrease costs. Check lessons that specifically deal with key concepts. Did the vendor repurpose a lower-level lesson into a more advanced course? Or, is the lesson designed specifically to address one skill-level and then build from there?
• What interdisciplinary connections, diverse interests, abilities, and needs are addressed? Since blended learning requires us to change our approach from teacher to coach/mentor, using curriculum and tools that embed differentiated options, choices, and connections to multiple disciplines helps us support learners on-the-spot and connect instructional activities to the student as an individual learner.

Regardless of our chosen blended learning model, we must remember that while great educators can use whatever curriculum they are given, we make their important work much more enjoyable and fruitful by providing them with the best resources possible.