Curriculum Developer

Although there’s no stage, no curtains, no spotlights, and no set, a classroom in many ways resembles the theater. After all, Teachers in front of their students are, in a manner of speaking, performing a script in front of an audience. They’ve got props — textbooks, chalkboards, and visual aids — and they’ve got a plot: the lesson they need to teach.

Really, though, the Teachers are just the Actors. The Playwright — the person who creates the story and writes the dialogue — is the Curriculum Developer.

Curriculum Developers (also called a Curriculum Specialist or Instructional Coordinator) are the people who decide and design what Teachers teach. Usually, that means working for schools and collaborating with school boards, School Administrators, and Educators. Sometimes, however, it means working for governments, nonprofits, or private enterprises that want to teach adult learners and train adult workers.

Either way, your job as a Curriculum Developer is to evaluate students’ educational needs, then develop a plan for fulfilling them. Typically, that plan includes what will be taught — you’ll decide what eighth graders need to know about American history, for example, or what your company’s employees need to know about a new piece of technology — as well as how it will be taught. You’re responsible for reviewing and recommending texts, videos, educational software, websites, and other teaching aids, and for training Teachers to use them.

Essentially, your job is to give schools and workplaces learning makeovers: You look at what’s educationally ugly, then you set to work making it pretty, the results of which are more beautiful brains!