Working in higher education, you will often be asked to contribute to new degree program creation or revision. To be able to understand this process, you have started with learning about how to communicate and collaborate in higher education, and you have also learned the roles of the people involved in the curricular and programmatic development process. Now, you will take that knowledge and begin to construct parts of a mini degree program of your own. Part 1: Domains and Competencies First, you will need to choose a content area that has learning standards and a specialized professional association. The content area will be for higher education – Reading Your next step will be to locate the most current standards for initial licensure programs. Those standards cover the content of an entire degree program in that area. You are only being asked to develop a portion of a degree for this course, so please choose one standard. Your standard may have several competencies underneath it. This is typical. Take the standard you have chosen and write one domain for your program. Review the sample domains and competencies in the Resource folder as a guide. Once you have finished writing the domain, develop three to five competencies that students must master in order to achieve the goal of that domain. In further topics, you will develop activities, assessments, lesson plans, and syllabi to go with this domain and its competencies. Part 2: Reflection In 150-250 words, reflect on the domain that you chose and how you decided on the competencies aligned with it. Why did you chose the particular standard from which to build? How are you going to use this in your future professional practice? Part 3: our goal with this activity is to further develop the mini-program you have been working on. Now that you have a domain with some competencies that you derived from your SPA standards, go back and take a look at the standards document as a whole. List the standards that are met next to the domain and competencies. For example, if you met the International Literacy Association (ILA) Standard 2, competency 4 with a specific competency you’ve written, you’d write (ILA 2.4) next to the competency. Often, you will find that the competencies you developed meet more than one standard/competency in the overall standards document. Please list all of the standards you have met and refine the language of your domain/competency document from Topic 3. You may find that if you change a word or two, you will be able to cover more standards/competencies. Once you have your domain and competencies aligned, describe three to four activities a faculty member could facilitate that would help students be able to master those competencies. Make sure that at least one competency is covered with each activity. You can cover a competency more than one time. At this point, you are only describing the activities. Handouts, templates, presentations, etc. are needed
