The Stile quality bar

The best teachers are like swans. They appear to glide effortlessly across the education waters, all the while furiously paddling away beneath the surface. At Stile, we understand this experience. Many of us have lived it ourselves. That's why we take great pride in sharing the load of that paddling. We know that teachers are the single most important part of a student's education. We want to help teachers perform at their best – to do more gliding and less paddling – and we believe that starts with high-quality instructional materials.

Our team has a relentless commitment to quality. We are constantly striving to make Stile better. But what makes quality? A little peek under the hood of our curriculum resource development process might provide a clue.

The planning stage

When writing new units or refreshing existing ones, we always start with the same question: what would make teachers delighted to teach this and students pumped to learn it? This question is born from one of our key product principles: products we make aim to exceed teacher expectations. 

Teachers have many boxes to tick. They need to keep their students engaged and challenged, pushing them along through their zone of proximal development. That's why, during our planning stage, we develop compelling storylines that tie together real-world phenomena and relevant social issues that students can slowly unpack, understand and explain across a unit. 

Teachers need to meet the many and varied government curriculum standards. That's why we carefully determine all of the relevant strands and elaborations in the curriculum standards that our unit plans must accommodate—we do that so teachers don't have to! We also know teachers need to understand where their students are located at any point in the learning journey and report on it. That's why we bake in rich and varied formative and summative assessment tasks supported by model answers throughout. 

Quality doesn't come without significant planning. That's why our unit plans are vetted and road-tested by our team of writers and external expert advisors before we write a single lesson. Our approach to planning ties nicely into another of our overarching product principles: we think it’s our job to solve the problems, not the teachers’.

The writing stage

Of course, once the unit plan is ready to roll, we get down to the nitty-gritty of writing classroom lessons, practical activities, open-ended investigations, engineering challenges, and so much more. We begin with the "skeleton" stage, the bare bones of a lesson communicating how all the requirements will be met. And there are many! From curriculum elements to critical thinking opportunities, learning goals, key questions and more – this is a highly collaborative stage where egos are checked at the door, and creative ideas need to survive a high level of scrutiny. We know how important this stage is. If the skeleton of a lesson is not right, it just creates compounding problems down the road. 

From there, we continue to iterate, adding more meat to the bones. Each step in a lesson's life cycle is an opportunity for review and feedback from our team and our collection of subject matter experts. All of this work adds up. We estimate around 50 hours of our time goes into each "in-class” hour spent teaching our lessons. That's time we know teachers don't have, and it links to another of our product principles: we ensure teachers have more time for stuff that matters.

Designing for communication

We are keenly aware that the look and feel of a curriculum resource are critical components of its usability. We are certainly not interested in design for design’s sake. Every decision about design is in service of communication. Our design and engineering teams work hand-in-glove to ensure working within Stile feels efficient, predictable and intuitive. 

Instead of cutting corners and using freely available (yet often poor-quality) resources from the Internet, our fabulous design and engineering teams create custom-made images, videos, and simulations to ensure that students consistently receive high-quality, age-appropriate content in every lesson. 

We value the representation of diverse peoples and cultures in our curriculum materials and are committed to continually working towards a more equal representation of cultural backgrounds.

Checklists, checklists, checklists!

As you can see, there are many moving parts in play when you commit to quality. That’s why checklists are our friends. We use them at every stage of development, from unit planning to lesson writing to editing and release and many steps in between. 

Our checklists are numerous and detailed – too detailed to include here, but examples of things on our checklists include:

• Does the unit appropriately scaffold the curriculum requirements to get students from first exposure to mastery?
• Are students going to be pushed to think critically, no matter whether they are working above or below grade level expectations?
• Is the science and associated datasets recent and likely interesting to students?
• Are the people represented in our unit from diverse backgrounds?
• Have we catered for the common misconceptions for this unit?
• Are there multiple opportunities for student discussion and collaboration?
• Is every question clear, purposeful and one that will either build or test student understanding?
• Does the unit have the support a new teacher would need to deliver a great lesson?
• Is the unit written such that an experienced teacher would have the flexibility they want?
• Is the use of classroom technology highly leveraged and effective?
• Are there ample opportunities to get students off their devices and working hands-on?

As we improve and refine our process and approach to quality, our checklists change.

Testing and even more testing!

Testing what we build as we go is essential to our quality assurance plan. It starts within our teams when we first formulate our ideas. It's not uncommon to find our writers down on their hands and knees in a hallway, road-testing a new practical activity or gathered around a board working through a proof of concept. We run internal "Let’s be students" sessions across different teams in Stile to put our assumptions and lesson timing under the microscope. Recently, we conducted an exhaustive sweep of the many activities, practicals, labs, investigations, and engineering challenges in our collection to be sure they worked as described on the box. 

But we also know that if you really want to test something to see if it will break, put it in the hands of students! For this reason, we regularly invite students to test our labs, participate in engineering challenges, and explore our simulations.  

Importantly, we also enlist the expertise of subject matter experts and teachers as a part of our development and testing approach. Together, All of these steps are informed by another of our principles: that every lesson is thoroughly tested in the classroom before release, and teachers and practising scientists review it for accuracy and quality.

The Stile Quality Swan

We like to think of our approach to quality in terms of the swan analogy too. What you see and what you experience when using Stile should appear effortless, purposeful and thoughtful. We, like teachers, are the swan gliding across the surface. But, now hopefully you can appreciate, just how much furious paddling is going on beneath the surface!