emsenn

SKILL

3 min read

Writing Curricula

What you will be able to do

  • Write a lesson that teaches a single core idea through concrete-before-abstract ordering, with a worked example and self-check exercises.
  • Sequence multiple lessons into a curriculum with explicit prerequisites and forward-links.
  • Apply the vault’s citation standards to educational content: cite the sources each lesson draws on, cite the original treatment of concepts being taught.
  • Recognize when a lesson is acting as a reference document (depositing information) rather than a teaching document (building understanding), and restructure it.
  • Write in Plain Technical General American English (PTGAE) as specified in the Style Guide, adapted for a teaching context.

Prerequisites

  • learn-lesson-design — backward design, concrete-before-abstract ordering, scaffolding, exercise design
  • learn-decolonial-pedagogy — the banking model (what to avoid) and problem-posing education (what to aim for)
  • Familiarity with the Style Guide — the PTGAE rules apply to lessons; this skill extends them for pedagogical contexts

Reference documents

  • Designing Effective Lessons — the canonical lesson structure
  • Designing Curricula — how to sequence lessons into a curriculum
  • Style Guide — the PTGAE style rules, including the lesson content-type section
  • The write-lesson agent skill (.claude/skills/write-lesson/SKILL.md) — the operational checklist for creating lessons

Conventions specific to curricula

Voice in lessons

Lessons use PTGAE with two modifications:

  • Second person is acceptable: “you” can address the learner directly. This is the one context where the vault’s usual third-person default relaxes.
  • Imperatives are acceptable: “Consider a poset with three elements” is fine in a lesson context.

Citation in lessons

Lessons cite their sources, but the citations serve the learner, not just the scholar. When citing a source, note what the learner can find there: “For a full treatment, see [@lattice-theory, ch. 3]” is more useful than a bare citation.

Exercises

Self-check exercises test application, not recall. “Define X” is a bad exercise. “Given Y, determine whether X applies and explain why” is a good one. Include answers in a collapsible details block.

Prerequisites

State what the learner needs from each prerequisite — not “familiarity with partial orders” but “the definition of a partial order and the ability to draw a Hasse diagram.”

Scope

This skill covers writing educational content for this vault. It doesn’t cover:

  • Subject-specific pedagogy (how to teach mathematics vs. how to teach philosophy — that’s the subject discipline’s concern)
  • Assessment design for institutional contexts (this vault’s lessons are self-directed)
  • The general style rules (covered by the Style Guide)

Verification

You have this skill if you can: (1) take a topic and produce a lesson that opens with a worked example before any formal definition, (2) write exercises that test application rather than recall, (3) cite the sources the lesson draws on in a way that’s useful to the learner, and (4) identify where a draft lesson is depositing information rather than building understanding.

Graph View