How do you begin to gather the scope of a curriculum from top to bottom for a district? Can you believe the test scores knowing that not all students really take the test seriously? How do you assess the what is really affective practice verse what is a dead lesson that teacher's don't want to let go? I keep coming up with questions without many answers on how to make this a reality. I know that all curriculum is a work in progress and that the minute you fix one piece you have to adjust the pieces you knocked loose. The biggest part is finding teachers who are willing to admit that there are parts of their subject areas that are not working for their students.
I think the place to start is with a curriculum map for each core subject K-8 and then each individual subject 9-12. By building these curriculum maps we can look for holes in each subject area. Seeing these maps allow for a curriculum coordinator to gather an idea of what the short falls of the current curriculum and begin to develop one that works. Allowing teachers to build these maps and coordinate with their K-12 counter parts gives a sense of ownership and pride in what they are teaching, or at least that is the overall goal.
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Your first paragraph above really defines the "where do we start" issue that is so important in curriculum. Because, as you indicated, everything is connected to everything else. Like sitting on a big balloon and every time you lean one way, it expands out the other side!
ReplyDeleteBut, I have a suggestion. Usually we run into problems when we simply add on to the curriculum without taking out the part that doesn't work. We need to start from scratch and re-build from the ground up...but that doesn't mean we throw out everything...we obviously keep the good stuff...but we move everything off the table when we start building curr.
Curr mapping is an excellent place to start. It sounds like you have been a part of that kind of work. Could you describe it in another post (or two)—what it does, how you do it, what you learn from it? Thanks!
Hi Kelley, I think your ideas are solid. I like how mention that teachers need to work with their counterparts in creating and organizing a curriculum. I spoke about this in our GoogleDoc this week and how our most recent staff meetings revolved around looking at our own reading curriculum and comparing the thoughts of what each grade level expected their students to know at the end. We got to see what parts were not being taught, what parts were, and overall how we were doing. I think this was valuable work and gave us all a more directed path to follow in our instruction. We all have more ownership of it as well. I think this kind of collaborative work is often missed and forgotten in education today.
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