149: Mini Series: Teach What You Know Part 3 - Creating a Curriculum

Hey there.

Welcome back to another episode of the Professional Creative Podcast. Today I have a new episode that is going along with our teach what you know series. And I think that one of the things that comes to mind when we decide that we want to teach what we know and be a part of the knowledge industry is okay, now what? Like, if I've decided on my topic, which we've already covered, and I've decided that I want to teach, which we've also already covered, I will link all of the episodes in the teach what you know series over on the show. Notes for today's episode, that's@PropriationalCreative.com I think that the next thing is how do I go about crafting my curriculum? How do I develop a curriculum? And so we're going to focus on that kind of crucial aspect today. I think there is an art to developing a curriculum that really, really, really pulls students through a experience and provides them a transformation. And this is for, you know, whether you're face to face in a teaching scenario or if you're online, whether it's one to one or one to many. I hope that it's going to give you so many ideas on how you can begin crafting the perfect curriculum for your topic.

Are you ready to dive in?

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life.

But when I first set out to

become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

When I think about really formulating a class or a curriculum, I love to start with the end goal and then work backwards from there. The end goal is what is going to give you clarity as you move through all of the moving bits and pieces that you want to develop in order to get the end result. Otherwise, we're building something with an unknown ending. So you've got to get really clear on the ending first. And I'll have you Go back to the episode if you missed it, on how to really decide what you want to teach. Because there's so many different levels to this. You could teach your entire process from start to finish and everything in between, or you could pull out a very small, singular part of what you do that is a problem that people are up against all the time looking to correct. One of my favorite, favorite examples of this is from Laurie Ann Gonzalez. Now, Laurie Ann is a fine artist. She has an incredible business. She makes beautiful original artwork, and she sells originals. She sells art prints. But one thing that she realized is that fine artists are always having a problem or always not quite understanding how to go from fine art to print. And so she developed this class on how to. It's called Art to Print. How to take your fine art, photograph it or scan it. I'm not going to tell you since. Since I'm not a fine artist, but how to go from a fine piece of artwork into the whole development of the final print. And so it is a beautiful course. It's really successful. And it's just one moving part of her business. She didn't take everything and teach you how to do fine art and everything from A to Z. She took one part of her. And so I just love that as a working example that you can, you can decide what it is that you want to teach, but you have to get really clear on the end result before you begin making the curriculum itself. Once you have the end goal, I want you to think about really the transformation. So when they leave your class or course or workshop or whatever it is, what is the tangible takeaway? What is the actual transformation that they're leaving with? What do they know now that they didn't know when they came in then? I think it's really important to sit with your ideal learner, really think and understand who they are. This is a bit of ideal customer avatar work. We call that ICA work. But if you want to think about it as your ideal learner, well, where do they come from? What do they already know? Or what do they need to know? What do they need to learn? This understanding is just going to help you tailor your content to fit them specifically where they're at. And I'd like you to identify really one ideal learner and think about them and their needs, knowing that, of course you'll have people that are kind of not exactly, you know, that exact same learner, but it will all work for them as well. Then you'll spend some time establishing the scope and thinking about the sequencing of the curriculum. You've got to decide on the breadth and the depth. So how wide are you going and then how deep are you going? And you can do this as you introduce concepts. And you don't always have to go deep and wide. You could go wide on some and deep on others. For instance, in my course, Surface Design Immersion, I do a little bit of both. Well, I go wide and deep on surface design. So we cover everything that you could potentially need to know in the surface design industry. We also go really deep. You come out with a fundamental understanding of Adobe Illustrator and collections and portfolios and licensing. But towards the end of the course, we kind of go with breadth, meaning I'll have a lesson on manufacturing and a lesson on wholesale and a lesson on showcasing at, let's say, a handmade market. Now that's just one lesson, though, and that's more to cover the breadth of possibility, meaning there could be an entire course on wholesale, entire course on manufacturing. And so for those topics, we just want to cover what's possible so that, you know, and then the thing that we really, really want to drive home is the depth, the transformation that we want to give. So once you've had a think about those few different areas, I think it's time to structure the actual curriculum. And so my favorite way to do this, if it's a course, is to go module by module, lesson by lesson. But all I'm at this point is developing the module name and listing the lessons for each module. And I'm playing with the sequencing. I really, really want the kind of learner flow to feel just right. I want it to feel like it went in the correct order. I want it to feel achievable. I want them to have big wins along the way. I want it to flow in a way that it builds on itself as well. And so there's a lot of ideation here and also editing. So if you are a analog kind of person, I would suggest having a big space, like a big whiteboard or maybe even sticky notes where you could move things around. And if you like to work digitally, I would say big space, maybe a Google Doc or something like Miro. Have you tried Miro? Miro is a big, like kind of mind mapping app where you can just have as much space as you want on your computer to. To think and mind map things out. If you haven't tried it, you'll love it. And then you just want the ability to kind of arrange and rearrange. And this is the most important part it's also the most difficult part. But my goodness, when you get these all ironed out and layered in a sequence that feels really, really solid, you're going to have so much focus and clarity as you move forward to build everything else. So to be clear, we're not actually writing lessons or recording less lessons, were just kind of top level naming the lessons in what order they would go, what order they would make sense. So of course that makes the most sense for a course. If you're teaching something else, like maybe a membership or something like a workshop, you'll condense that right. Like a workshop wouldn't necessarily have modules and lessons, but it would have segments and things that you want to cover and flow throughout. And if it's a membership, you may be doing this like a module, may be. You might be thinking about it like a month or something like that. So just make it work for whatever kind of flow you're working with. Okay, picture this.

Have you ever spent hours scouring through your video or maybe your podcast content trying to find that one place that you said that one thing? Or if you've forgotten or never found it and you had to re record everything. I've been there and it's so frustrating and honestly a huge waste of time. But it hasn't happened to me ever since I started using Searchie. Searchie is the software that I use for all of my videos and all of my podcast content because it not only transcribes it, but it makes it searchable by key word. And so for you to see this in action, I have an example set up for you over on bonniecristine.com resources again, that's bonniecristine.com forward/resources. And you can actually play with Searchie

and see how it looks on one

of our videos, because once you understand what it does, it's a game changer. I also host all of my workshop and my class, my membership and course material through Searchie as well. So students can search for any question that they have and go to the exact time in place where I talked about that one. And just imagine this. If I ever do a Q and A and they want to know if I answered their question, all they have to do is search for their name and see if I did or not. It's literally like having your very own personal search engine for your content. So no more wasting time scrubbing through your video or audio to find that one golden nugget. With Searchie, you can easily find what you're looking for in seconds. Just to just type in a keyword or phrase and Searchie will pull up all the relevant content. It's a game changer for anyone who creates audio or video content. But honestly, that's not all. Searchy's new AI powered transcription and captioning tool makes it easy to create accessible content that everyone can get access to. And with their customizable player, you can embed your videos and your podcasts on your website or social media channels in a way that looks and feels so professional. So if you are ready to take your video or your podcast content to the next level, head on over to BonnieCristine.com resources and just give Searchie a try. It's incredible. I think you're going to love it and I can't wait to see how it revolutionizes the way you create content

then. The next thing I like to really think about are all the different types of learning styles. We have to know that some people are readers, they love to read, some people love to listen. They want an audio version of what it is that they're consuming. Some people love videos, they want to be able to watch the video alongside. Some people really like interactive elements or a take action like, go practice this and come back and show us what you did. And so we try to incorporate as many different kind of learning modalities as we can. Now, not every single lesson can have all of those things, but most lessons have a video and, you know, closed captioning on that video with a transcript that you can follow along with and then also a written lesson and oftentimes a supporting either exercise or material that goes along with it. So we're trying to make sure that we're just adapting to all the different types of learning styles that there are in the world so that no matter how you prefer to learn, you can come and really take away a lot of material. Now, as you work through your modules and lessons, I want you to also think about including as many real world examples as you can. There is something just so magical about taking a lesson and then saying like, okay, now that you know what it is, let me show you an example of a real world application. It allows the student to just really absorb what it is that you're teaching, what it is that you're showing, it kind of bridges that gap between theory and practice. And so as much as you can bring in those real world examples, case studies if you need to, your own experience if you need to as well. So once you have the curriculum, it's time to write the lesson or record the lesson. And so I generally work off of a pretty heavily scripted lesson. And I like to script my lessons because it does a couple of things for me. Number one, it makes sure that I cover everything that I want to cover. Meaning if I relied on my own memory, I would typically forget to include something and then I would remember it in the middle of the night and have to go back. So I like to work off of a script and then the other thing it does is it really helps me stay on track that way I'm not really kind of taking the lesson in a direction I didn't intend to or going down different rabbit holes. And so this kind of depends on the flow. So if it is a face to camera, meaning it's my head talking on a video, I'll be heavily scripted, meaning sometimes I'm even using a teleprompter. That's maybe another episode in and of itself. And then if it's something like a screen recording, if I'm teaching Adobe Illustrator pattern design, well then it's just more of an outline. I know which tools and sequences I have to show and explain. So I think that that's just really important. And that's where the bulk of the work will come in. So if you're going to record, you should come in ready to hit record, meaning all of the scripting has been done. It's a different energy output. The scripting is kind of hair in a bun, head down, quiet, really heavily thinking work. And then when you get to video recording, it's very outward facing, it's very energetic. You have to make sure that you're keeping your energy level and you don't want to get there and try to figure out a whole bunch of stuff and then have to do your hair and makeup. If, if you're gonna do that or, or pick out your outfits. Like the day that you begin to record, you want to make sure that you're ready to walk in and get rolling. Otherwise you'll spend the whole day figuring it out and you'll be kind of, you know, glazed over by the time it's ready to actually record. But back to the curriculum, all of that scripting is going to be really the heaviest kind of load to work through. And then you'll have so much clarity when you get to recording. The last thing I'd love to say on scripting is that it's so important to test your material and get feedback on it. And so this can be in any number of different scenarios. You could test it on A small group of people. You could have someone look over your scripts. You could go ahead and teach the class and get feedback. You could publish it and get feedback as you go. So, for example, something that we do now with the Surface Design Immersion course is, well, it goes to rerecord every couple of years. And so we keep a running list of all the most frequently asked questions on each and every lesson. And so I've got that when I sit down the next time to record that lesson, I've got the most frequently asked questions from the previous time that I recorded that lesson. So I can try to, you know, loop those in and actually answer them in the lesson itself. Not to say that I don't open a whole new can of worms with new questions that are going to be asked, but at least I took care of the ones from the previous recordings. So I love that feedback loop. It's so important to really listen, survey your audience, survey your students and see what they need next, my friends, that's how I do it. It's not that difficult. It is just something that you have to do. You have to be committed to doing, really working it from the end result backwards from modules to lessons and then into scripting and then into trial and feedback and such a beautiful thing. I hope that you have some ideas on how you can begin writing out your curriculum. My friends, I can't wait to see what you do. Create the beauty that you want to see. Come alive in the world and remember, there's room for you.