When I first began teaching I thought to myself that making a syllabus and planning my class would be easy because I could just use my curriculum. Then the ugly truth of education came to light...curriculum is not a plan and the plan actually comes from within. Ok, so some of you are going "no kidding!!" But for a person who had never stepped foot in a classroom until I was entrusted with teaching 100 students what I know about science this was a scary revelation.
What did I do? I ran to the nearest friendly face and asked for help. Luckily for me there were several willing teachers who gave me books, old syllabus, and a flow chart of their classes. Of course the part that nobody told me what exactly the curriculum was for my subject.
Then I went home panicked about what I was going to teach in just a few days and began the hard part of outlining my course. It was not until months later that someone told me that the curriculum was just the MLRs and to follow them. Which did not make sense to me...how can that be the curriculum.
It was not until my second teaching job that I sat through my first curriculum planning meeting. It was really interesting to talk to others about what they thought should be in the curriculum. More importantly it was the first time I saw it relate to what I was teaching. I finally saw my class laid out from start to finish and how it applied to the goals we were trying to achieve. It was amazing to discuss this with other professionals and actually see what I was teaching was reaching the objectives.
I still don't know how to engage everyone but these are the insights I received from that exercise:
1. Every year you should sit down and see if what you do for each unit achieves your curriculum goals.
2. Let others review your projects, papers, and lessons. It will amaze you at how the new ideas freshen your activities.
3. Always stay up to date on new methods of presenting ideas. If you get stagnant then your class will lose the engagement of yourself and others.
If you have any ideas or insights I am always searching for more ideas on how to stay relevant and connect what I am doing to the big picture...
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Your insights are really good and I especially like the second one; I shared a debate essay last summer with a group of teachers and we used a critical friends group protocol to allow me to present the piece, and the 'dilemma' then to guide the feedback from my colleagues. It was powerful and useful! I reexamined the piece from the perspective of the work that lead up to it, and also came away from the session thinking that I may have been asking too much from that particular student. So I have done some different thinking about teaching that aspect of teaching writing, and I hope this year's debate essays are of a higher quality as a result. I also got a lot from seeing other teachers' work in the same collaborative way - one math teacher shared a written response to a NECAP-like question, and a language arts teacher shared several students' poetry as part of a response to literature they were reading in class. It was a very useful use of time.
ReplyDeleteKelley, I too appreciated your story about what you learned about curriculum planning. Interesting that as important as the curriculum is...its like money, we just don't talk about it because it is too personal. To #3, I would also add up-to-date on the content/concepts/themes too. What do we want kids to learn, be able to do, and what habits of mind do we want them to have? That is a key to curriculum.
ReplyDeleteWe can't depend on textbooks to "define" the curriculum for us...nor even the MLRs. We have to know what is important to include (and exclude) in our curricula.
Liz...thanks for highlighting a process we don't use enough—protocols with critical friends groups. As you indicated...very powerful. How do we get these started?