I was standing at the checkout at the Britannica Encyclopedia booth at one of the largest homeschool conferences at the time. I had 10 of their K-12 scope and sequence booklets in hand.

The representative wanted to know why I wanted those. They typically came with the purchase of a set of encyclopedias, but they were priced at a dollar each for independent sale.

These were brilliant little gems of condensed research. The company had gathered research on what subjects and concepts were typically taught in each state by grade. They curated the data to arrive at concise lists of concepts per subject based on what the average student learned across the country for each grade. The lists were brief enough to grasp easily, yet specific enough to give an accurate picture of what a child typically mastered at each grade level.

I gushed to the representative about how much these booklets helped me plan my curriculum for the year. She pressed me on why I wanted more than one. I explained they were so helpful, I passed them out to others in our homeschool group.

She wasn’t happy; in fact, I had to argue with her to get her to sell them to me. Her reason? “They might be used for ‘other than intended purposes.’” Seriously?

I was baffled, wondering, “Really? Knowledge like this is so dangerous, I as a parent am not to be entrusted with it?”

Then, I realized, even though she’d been sent as a representative to sell encyclopedias, in her mind, teaching wasn’t to be trusted to parents. She wasn’t the only one.

You see, when I started homeschooling, it was still illegal in two states – one of which my family was living in at the time.

In my first years, one of the largest curriculum providers withheld teacher’s guides to textbooks. I guess we couldn’t be trusted with such privileged responsibility. (I won’t name them, but they are religious-based and still in the top for sales; even then, they were making money hand-over-fist from homeschoolers mostly because they were early to market.)

It was the ‘90s and while we had the internet, Google didn’t exist yet. We had our wonderful, saintly librarians and a handful—very small handful compared to today—of curriculum available for purchase. All-in-one curriculum wasn’t even a thing. The closest was to sign up with some religious school under their umbrella.

So, I did what a lot of us did at the time, pieced everything together. I bought Sing, Spell, Read, and Write phonics for learning to read and Mortenson Math as my foundation. I found elementary history and science textbooks so trying to please everyone that they practically said nothing, so we created our own curriculum with lots of Usborne and one-off resources. We used Mad Libs for language skills, science games like ElementO, Discovery Toys products, and math games that only needed a simple deck of cards to play.

Our librarians curated historical fiction, science experiment books, videos, and other resources on any topic I requested.

I learned how to start with the end goal and work backward. I learned how to organize content into digestible segments. I aligned content with smaller goals that needed to be reached to achieve the end goal. I matched to grade-level concepts. Finally, I learned to document it well for our required annual licensed-teacher review and ultimately for applications to college.

As my sons entered college, I earned my education master’s degree in Instructional Design, learning that the process I had used is called casually “backward design” because you start at the end and work back. It comes from research by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins and published as Understanding by Design.

I entered the corporate world as a Lead Instructional Designer, designing programs for colleges and universities using backward design.

When I realized that backward design could be distilled down to 5 easy-to-follow steps, I created the Summit-First Framework. I now teach the framework to help homeschoolers and entrepreneurs create quality courses.

I wonder what that Britannica representative would say today if she knew I was putting a framework into the hands of homeschoolers and entrepreneurs for free.