Next Generation Scholars: A Curriculum Handoff

After more than a year of writing, my role in the Next Generation Scholars curriculum development is complete.

Next Generation Scholars, an established after-school and summer program for first-generation college students, asked me to help them codify what their teachers were already doing in the classroom, to make it standard enough that when new teachers came in, they could see how it worked.

The Project

We designed the curriculum around a community problem or challenge, and around a set of six skills students develop from sixth through twelfth grade. The program runs after school and through the summer for first-generation college students, and the six-skills framework became the structural anchor for everything I wrote. My job was to map what happens in 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th grade, respond to teacher feedback, and shape the materials so families, teachers, and program leaders could each use them.

Consistency across levels was one of the harder parts of this build. A base lesson has to level up gradually, so the seventh-grade version is a little more sophisticated than the sixth, and so on up the grades. A sixth-grade lesson sets the foundation; the seventh-grade version takes the same skill and pushes it further; by the time students hit the upper grades, the same thread has matured into something substantially more demanding.

Working with AI

What made this project different for me as a curriculum developer is that it was the first time I really leaned into AI as a support tool from start to finish. It was a hidden part of the architecture, more for me than for the students. People would tell me what they wanted, and I’d use AI as a support to work across all the documents.

I learned what I needed to write myself, what inputs I needed to put into AI, and how to optimize the AI over time so it could produce more and I could edit less. It also helped me communicate with a variety of audiences. I could distill a stack of material into a chart for curriculum leaders in a fraction of the time it would normally take. And when part of the program needed to reach families who only speak Spanish, I could rebuild the materials for that audience without starting from scratch. There were things I could do very quickly that would normally take a lot of time.

The Handoff

What I’m proud of is that the project leaves them something sustainable. Along with the curriculum, I gave the AI itself to the program, so they can do their edits in the future without meeting me and paying me to do it.

For a nonprofit, that’s a much more sustainable model. It’s not like it expires. It’s going to be constantly useful to them.

NGS shouldn’t be paying a consultant forever to sustain their curriculum. The idea is that they can do it themselves. I’m taking the knowledge and skills I used to build this and putting them on a path to use it in perpetuity, without having to pay a consultant. The curriculum becomes theirs, instead of being the thing that I’m writing on their behalf.

Wrapping Up

Closing out Next Generation Scholars feels less like an ending and more like a handoff. The program has the curriculum, the materials, and the tooling to keep editing it as they grow. That’s what I wanted this project to be.

If you’re working in curriculum design or nonprofit capacity-building, I’d love to connect.