DOPE MATH® x NACD · Math Curriculum Developer Pathway, Course 1
Think Like a Subject Matter Expert™: From Standards to Scope
Building a math curriculum backbone.
- 15 instructional hours
- 1 college credit (TCSJ)
- Self-paced
- 7 modules
- Deliverable: scope and sequence
Go beyond inches. Make waves.
NACD is the professional network for curriculum design, so the skills you build in this course carry straight into your next project. Your members connection puts you beside the people hiring, reviewing and publishing the work everyone else studies.
Why this course exists
Great teaching and subject matter expertise are different skills. Educators are routinely promoted into curriculum writing, coaching and leadership roles because they were strong teachers, then discover nobody ever taught them to analyze standards, evaluate rigor, or design a scope and sequence.
Most curriculum work also happens as a pile of disconnected documents. A scope and sequence gives every document one shared backbone, built inside a Design Hub: one hyperlinked folder that holds every template and asset the course produces.
What you will be able to do
- Tell great teaching apart from subject matter expertise using the DOPE MATH® Educator Framework, and diagnose your own tier.
- Audit your existing curriculum materials before building anything new.
- Classify standards as Major, Supporting or Additional and name the Aspect of Rigor each one emphasizes.
- Use coherence analysis, not intuition, to decide where a concept belongs in a sequence.
- Run the full 6-step Standards to Curriculum process on your own set of standards.
- Build a defensible scope and sequence housed in a Design Hub other writers and teachers can navigate.
Course outline
- 0
Welcome and Your Entry Audit
Subject Matter Expert Self-Assessment™ Sections 1 and 2: your baseline score, tier, and Next Focus Area.
- 1
Reading Standards Like a Curriculum Writer
The 3 Key Shifts (Focus, Coherence, Rigor), Major, Supporting and Additional clusters, the Aspects of Rigor, and paired-standard coherence analysis.
- 2
What Curriculum Actually Is + Your Design Hub
The gap between great teaching and subject matter expertise, the cost of fragmented documents, and setting up your Design Hub.
- 3
Self-Diagnosis Before You Build
Inventory your scope and sequences, unit plans, pacing guides and assessments. Decide what stays, what goes, and which standards drive the course.
- 4
Standards to Curriculum: The 6-Step Process
Unpack, group, sequence, write objectives, align assessments and activities, and find or design resources using calendar and coverage data.
- 5
Building the Scope and Sequence
Turn real calendars into instructional days, then build your Year-at-a-Glance and scope and sequence from an annotated exemplar.
- 6
Living Document + Growth Check
Version control and revision norms, a board-approval quality check, and a Self-Assessment retake to compare against your baseline.
Who it is for
Classroom teachers, instructional coaches, specialists and curriculum supervisors new to writing curriculum, plus anyone designing curriculum for afterschool, intervention or other non-core settings.
What you leave with
A complete scope and sequence for a math course, housed in your Design Hub, plus a scored, dated Self-Assessment showing your growth.
Your instructor
Jaliyla Fraser (Ms. J), founder of DOPE MATH®, is a nationally recognized math educator and curriculum leader. She built this course from her daily work with teachers and districts, turning strong classroom teachers into subject matter experts who design curriculum their colleagues can use.
Course details
- Format
- Self-paced, online
- Length
- 15 instructional hours, 7 modules
- Credit
- 1 college credit (TCSJ)
- Instructor
- Jaliyla Fraser, DOPE MATH founder
Credit-bearing courses certified by Teachers College of San Joaquin. Earn college credit or CEUs for completed NACD courses.
Join the field
Go beyond inches. Make waves.
Curriculum design shapes what every student learns, yet the people doing it have been scattered across classrooms, publishers, edtech, and nonprofits. The National Association of Curriculum Design brings the industry together around one shared craft: open knowledge, shared standards, and real career pathways for everyone who designs what students learn. Your enrollment makes you part of that work.
See membership options