I’ve moved to a new position at work recently, going from a Curriculum Developer to a Curriculum Project Manager. My main role is no longer creating products that will directly go off to students (although I’ll still be doing a bit of that). Instead, my job is to create the processes and structures for my fellow curriculum developers to make sure they have clear goals in a project, and a set of tasks that allows them to effectively get their work done. The entire goal is to remove the planning and scheduling cruft that our team was doing (poorly) on our own, since we could each only give a little bit of time to thinking about it.
It’s an interesting change in personal focus. I still love creating things directly for students, and I love sharing my passion for math. That will never change, and I’ll still pull to do that a bit at work, as well as on my own. Yet it’s exciting to get this adjustment to my perspective. It provides me with a chance to handle larger responsibility, and lets me build whatever I would like as a curriculum developer to help make projects run more smoothly. I’m still finding my bearings and determining the boundaries of this position, but it’s an exciting time. I hope it gives me more bandwidth to do some of the more creative work in my free time as well.