Stephanie has been a Curriculum Specialist at NoRedInk since June 2016. Before joining the company, she created literacy curriculum and assessments for a charter network in New York City. Previously, she taught middle school English in Madrid. At NoRedInk, she feels lucky to spend all day thinking deeply about how to leverage technology to support students’ development as writers.
8:45 a.m. - I arrive at the office! It’s pretty quiet at this time—a few of us like to get in early, while others may opt to work from home or to commute in mid-morning. I grab some cereal from our snack room and spend some time skimming the EdSurge newsletter. I always enjoy reading about the challenges and successes that other edtech products experience—there are often lessons we can learn vicariously!
9:15 a.m. - I sit right behind two of our designers, so I often get sneak peeks of new features they’re working on. For the past few months, our designer Becca has been gathering input from teachers and exploring some potential changes to the site’s assignment creation form. Today, she shows me and another one of our colleagues a recent mock-up of the new form. We discuss how our curriculum can be presented most helpfully so that teachers can easily determine what exercises to prioritize and locate topics that align with their state standards.

10:00 a.m. - My colleague Nellie and I meet in a room named “The Arena.” (All of our rooms are named after settings from the top student interests on the site—in this case, The Hunger Games.) We’re in the midst of designing a new “taxonomy,” our name for the scope and sequence of exercises that aims to help students master a larger skill. In this case, we’re focusing on transition words and phrases. Previously, our team researched the topic and established high-level objectives for the pathway. We also drafted sample exercises that we thought could help students achieve these objectives. Now, we’re going to take a close look at our draft and consider which topics we might want to add, cut, or alter.
On the whiteboard in The Arena, Nellie and I sketch exercises and discuss the interfaces that we think would best teach the concept. We note any new technical or design needs to share with our Product and Engineering teams.

12:00 p.m. - Every day, our Curriculum team holds “standup,” a quick, 20-minute meeting where we address issues, ask questions, and make announcements that are relevant to the whole team. One of our team members is based out of Boston, so we log into a Google Hangout so that he can join us on the monitor. Today, one topic of discussion is our upcoming classroom observation. We’ll be testing a couple of new exercises and lessons in a local school to see how helpful they are to students. Observations provide us with crucial data in our curriculum development process. For now, we check in to ensure that we’re all clear on our plan!
12:25 p.m. - It’s Thursday, so it’s a food truck day! Every Tuesday and Thursday, a different selection of food trucks park themselves right in front of our office. We pop downstairs to see what the offerings are.
1:00 p.m. - It’s time for our Support team meeting! I love answering customer support tickets because the process helps me to put myself in teachers’ and students’ shoes. Our Support team is made up of members of the Curriculum and Customer Success teams; most of us are former teachers ourselves. Every Thursday, we gather to discuss any important updates or bugs that have cropped up during the week. This week, we’re also spending some time recording teacher feedback in our “Feature Requests Log.” Whenever a teacher or student makes a suggestion, we record it so that we can identify trends and provide helpful context to our Product team as they consider improvements to the site. Today, we’re logging teacher feedback that we collected during live professional development sessions. We’re happy when we notice that we already have projects in the works to address many of teachers’ concerns, but we also spot some great new suggestions.
2:00 p.m.- We’ve enlisted the help of our user researcher, Christa, to dig into the data on a learning pathway that we released a couple months ago: Topic Sentences. We’re eager to determine which topics in the pathway students have found easiest and most challenging, and whether these results align with our expectations. We’ll use the data to identify any outliers and make adjustments accordingly.
2:30 p.m. - I love pairing with team members on projects, but to build curriculum, independent work time is also essential. Today, I’m working on “approvals” for our Claims, Evidence, and Reasoning learning pathway. This means that I’ll review all the questions our team has written before they go live on the site. I’ll consider: Are there any typos? Is the writing high quality? Does each question teach the objective we set for this topic? Are the questions fair? Is the subject matter engaging? I grab The Chicago Manual of Style to look up a rule about using hyphens, and I leaf through The Book Thief to double-check a quote.

4:00 p.m. - Next, our team begins a final “Content QA.” We each log in and explore the pathway from a student’s perspective, answering questions correctly and incorrectly. We evaluate whether the flow of topics makes sense and whether the lessons are helpful. Seeing the questions live on the site is also a great way to spot any bigger-picture gaps we may have overlooked earlier in the process when we were focusing intensely on the details.
5:30 p.m. - I grab my jacket and join the group of NoRedInkers gathering by the door. Every five weeks, we hold a book club. These meetings usually include pizza, laughter, and thoughtful discussion. It’s always a pleasure to hear others’ perspectives and spend non-work time together. I can’t wait to discuss this month’s pick!


Stephanie Wye
Curriculum Specialist at NoRedInk
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